Our research was recently published in the journal Cognition!

The paper reports on five studies we conducted over the last few years at MOXI and the Santa Barbara Zoo, so we want to thank all of the families who participated, and let them know a bit more about our findings. 

These projects address the question: How do children think people should respond when there is a disagreement? For example, if you disagree with someone about a particular fact, should you defer to your communication partner or stick to your own belief? We find evidence that children are nuanced in their judgements and that they use expertise to determine which type of behavior is best.

To show this, we presented children with a situation in which one character made a claim (e.g., “Stegosauruses eat raspberries” and another character disagreed (e.g., by saying, “I don’t think that is quite right”).  Some children saw the first character defer, and admitted that they did not really know what Stegosauruses ate. Other children saw the first character stick to their answer (e.g., saying, “Stegosauruses love raspberries!”). Then, we asked all children to rate the first character’s behavior on a scale from really bad to really good. 

We found that children, by the early elementary years, thought that it was better to defer to a teacher. Presumably because they thought the teacher was (more) knowledgeable. However, children did not always positively evaluate deference. Instead, when it was clear that the character making the initial claim had more expertise, they actually thought it was better to stick to the initial answer. For example, if the first character was “a dinosaur” expert, children positively evaluated the character sticking to their initial answer after being corrected by a non-expert peer. These findings weren’t just about dinosaurs! In another set of studies, characters disagreed about the location of a toy, and children again used expertise (in this case, who saw the location) to determine which person should stick to their guns.

Overall, our work shows that children do like people who are willing to be intellectually humble and admit a lack of knowledge. But, children also understand that being broadly humble and deferring is not always the solution. Instead, they also positively evaluate people who stand up for their beliefs when they are pretty sure they are correct.

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation (Grant 63353) and is part of a larger series of studies to examine how children navigate these potential tradeoffs between appearing competent and learning from others.