When learning about the world, one of the most valuable sources of information is other people.  By learning from what others do, show us, or tell us, we can benefit from others' experience.

A problem with learning from others, though, is that we can get bad information; people can give poor information when they are mistaken, ignorant, or deliberately deceiving us.  To get the most benefit from information given by others, we need to evaluate whether it is likely to be true.

Are children particularly gullible, learning from others even when they shouldn't? If not - if they evaluate whether they should believe a speaker - what do they consider when making the decision to believe (or reject) that speaker?

Research Questions

Will children consider a speaker's history of giving good or bad information when deciding whether to believe her?

Will children consider whether a speaker has the required knowledge (in terms of access to the relevant information) when deciding whether to believe her?

Recent Findings

We have found some interesting conflicting results.

In a procedure typically used to study children's willingness to learn new information from someone who has given bad information in the past, we found that 3- through 7-year-olds did not consider the reason a person gave the bad information.

In this procedure, children watch as two speakers give labels for objects like a ball, or a book. One speaker is consistently incorrect (calling the ball a dog, for example). In our studies, even when the speaker got the wrong answer because she was blindfolded, children did not 'forgive' her - they were still unwilling to learn new information from her when she took the blindfold off (Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009). That is, when the speaker did not have access to the information, children still treated her as an unreliable source.

In a more interactive procedure where children and a puppet or experimenter guess which toy is hidden in a box, children did show sensitivity to a whether a speaker had access to the relevant information.

In this study, children had guess whether, for example, the brown or the white teddy bear was hidden in a box. If the puppet got the wrong answer three times in a row because he didn't have the right access - he felt the toy but did not see it - 3- and 4-year-old children were quite happy to believe him later, when he did have the right access. In contrast, if he got it wrong for not apparent reason - he saw the toy but still got it wrong - children did not believe him in the future (Nurmsoo & Robinson, in press). We find similar results with a puppet who has a false belief about the contents of a series of boxes (Robinson & Nurmsoo, in press).

It is not clear why we see the differences between the two types of procedure. We are currently exploring the possible explanations, as well as investigating whether children are sensitive to a speaker's access to information when deciding whether to ask that speaker a question.

Overall, we see that children are not overly gullible. They do not simply believe what they are told, but evaluate whether the speaker has been reliable in the past, and whether she has access to the relevant information.

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Presentations and Publications

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (2009). Children's Trust in Previously Inaccurate Informants Who Were Well- or Poorly- Informed: When Past Errors Can Be Excused. Child Development, 80, 23-27.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (2009). Identifying unreliable informants: Do children excuse past inaccuracy? Developmental Science, 12, 41-47.

Robinson, E. J. & Nurmsoo, E. (2009). When do children learn from unreliable speakers? Cognitive Development, 24, 16-22.

Robinson, E. J., Haigh, S. N., & Nurmsoo, E. (2008). Children’s working understanding of knowledge sources: Confidence in knowledge gained from testimony. Cognitive Development, 23, 105-118.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (January 2008). Children's inferences about the reliability of informants: When do they excuse past errors? Paper presented at the Experimental Psychology Society London Meeting.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (August 2007). Learning from others: Understanding speaker inaccuracy. Paper presented at the British Psychological Society 2007 Developmental Section Conference.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (July 2007). Learning from others: Children's understanding of speaker inaccuracy. Paper presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Geneva.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (July 2007) Learning from others: Identifying unreliable individuals vs. unreliable assertions. Poster presented at the Experimental Psychology Society Edinburgh Meeting.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E. J. (March 2007). Learning from others: Identifying unreliable individuals vs. unreliable assertions. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development Meeting, Boston, MA

Nurmsoo, E., & Bloom, P. (November 2005). Do preschoolers attend to a speaker's knowledge when learning words? Poster presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, Massachusetts.

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