When learning facts, people often assume that confident speakers are knowledgeable, while hesitancy signals a lack of understanding. Children and adults tend to equate confidence with knowledge.
A new study co-authored by Dr. Susan Birch, an associate professor in UBC’s department of psychology, and her research collaborators suggests children begin to think more critically about confidence by age eight, evaluating both the speaker and the context of the information.
Dr. Susan Birch, Dr. Parky Lau, Dr. Rachel Severson, and Dr. Shailee Woodard studied when children start to question whether confident speakers are actually trustworthy.
Their research found that younger children tend to trust confident individuals and prefer to learn facts from a person who is confident – even when that individual lacks knowledge or has been inaccurate in the past. This tendency is part of what researchers call the “confidence heuristic,” in which confident individuals are often perceived as smarter and more likable. Both adults and children confuse poise for expertise. But children start to become more discerning by age eight.
“In this era of misinformation and 'fake news' it is more important than ever to understand how children make sense of subtle social cues and help them become savvy consumers of information.”
Dr. Rachel Severson, the study’s lead author and a developmental psychologist at the university of montana, says, “Older children interpret hesitancy as a sign of careful thought rather than uncertainty when someone is deliberating about a moral dilemma.”
From choosing which friend to believe to deciding whether an adult is reliable, children make judgements about credibility.
The research Confidence in context: Children’s context-dependent interpretations of informants’ confidence and hesitancy was published in Child Development.
A version of this post was originally published on the UM News website.
