Slack:
https://bcccd.slack.com/archives/C02QDUA6KPANina Ni Ye, Xiao Pan DingNational University of Singapore, SingaporeChildren rely on others to acquire knowledge as part of cumulative culture. However, this brings about the risk of trusting false or deceptive information blindly. Previous research suggests that young children can differentiate between honest and deceitful informants when presented with direct evidence of deceit (e.g., Liu et al., 2013; Mascaro & Sperber, 2009; Vanderbilt et al., 2011). The present research investigated 3- to 6-year-old children’s (N = 33) use of indirect information to infer deceptive intent and examined their ability to extend such inference from a near-transfer location context to a far-transfer naming context. Children learned how to play a sticker-finding game then watched videos of four informants play the same game with an opponent. They inferred the informants’ deceptive intent from the opponent’s testimony and the game outcome, presented together to reflect honest (trust-win, distrust-lose) or deceptive intent (trust-lose, distrust-win). We assessed whether children endorsed or rejected an informant’s suggestion about an object’s location (near-transfer context) and name (far-transfer context). Preliminary results showed, in the near-transfer context, children endorsed an informant based on honest-intent information (trust-win, distrust-lose) and rejected another based on deceptive-intent information (trust-lose, distrust-win). However, in the far-transfer context, children endorsed an informant based on either positive testimony (trust) or outcome (win), suggesting an inability to extend their inference of deceptive intent to another context. Our study provides evidence for children’s developing critical reasoning abilities when inferring deceptive intent and point to the perception of deceptive motives as a comment on an informant’s general reliability.
Session 2, Tuesday, 11 Jan, 07:00 - 08:30 (UTC +0)
Session 12, Friday, 14 Jan, 13:00 - 14:30 (UTC +0)
