Department of Psychology, Texas State University-San Marcos, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA.
School of Education and Social Policy, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 Dec;188:104670. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104670. Epub 2019 Sep 6.
In this study, we examined how 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children respond when informants who are labeled as experts fail to provide high-quality explanations about phenomena within their realm of expertise. We found that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds discounted their initial trust in an expert who provided low-quality explanations in a task related to the expert's area of expertise. The 5-year-olds' distrust of the expert who provided low-quality explanations also generalized to additional learning tasks. When an expert provided explanations consistent with the expert's labeled expertise, 5-year-olds maintained a similar level of trust in the expert, but 7-year-olds displayed an increased level of trust in the expert within the expert's area of expertise. We did not find consistent preferences in 3-year-olds' judgments. We discuss the implications of these findings for age-based differences in children's relative weighting of trait-based versus real-time epistemic cues when evaluating informant reliability.
在这项研究中，我们考察了 3 岁、4 岁、5 岁和 7 岁儿童在被标记为专家的信息提供者未能提供其专业领域内高质量解释时的反应。我们发现，4 岁、5 岁和 7 岁的儿童会对在与专家专业领域相关的任务中提供低质量解释的专家最初的信任产生怀疑。对提供低质量解释的专家的不信任也扩展到了其他学习任务。当专家提供与专家标签专业知识一致的解释时，5 岁的儿童对专家的信任保持在类似的水平，但 7 岁的儿童在专家的专业领域内对专家的信任程度会有所提高。我们没有在 3 岁儿童的判断中发现一致的偏好。我们讨论了这些发现对儿童在评估信息提供者可靠性时，基于年龄的特质和实时认知线索相对权重差异的影响。
