Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
Dev Psychol. 2017 Dec;53(12):2319-2332. doi: 10.1037/dev0000433. Epub 2017 Oct 30.
Lay theories suggest that people who are overconfident in their knowledge are less likely to revise that knowledge when someone else offers an alternative belief. Similarly, one might assume that people who are willing to revise their beliefs might not be very confident in their knowledge to begin with. Two studies with children ages 4-11 years old and college students call these lay theories into question. We found that young children were simultaneously more overconfident in their knowledge (e.g., believing they knew what chartreuse meant) and more likely to revise their initial beliefs (e.g., choosing another color after seeing a peer choose a different color) than older children and adults. These results bridge the metacognitive and epistemic trust literatures, which have largely progressed independently from each other. We discuss the potential causes and functions of the dissociation between the confidence with which beliefs are held and the revision of those beliefs across development. (PsycINFO Database Record
朴素理论认为，当有人提供另一种信念时，那些对自己知识过于自信的人不太可能修改这些知识。同样，人们可能会认为，那些愿意修改自己信仰的人一开始可能对自己的知识不太有信心。两项针对 4-11 岁儿童和大学生的研究对这些朴素理论提出了质疑。我们发现，年幼的孩子在知识上更加自信（例如，相信他们知道 chartreuse 的意思），并且更有可能修改他们最初的信念（例如，在看到同伴选择不同的颜色后选择另一种颜色），而年龄较大的孩子和成年人则不然。这些结果弥合了元认知和认识信任文献之间的差距，这两个文献在很大程度上是相互独立发展的。我们讨论了在整个发展过程中信念的持有信心与信念的修正之间的这种分离的潜在原因和功能。
