Opinion Versus Knowledge: The Influence of Testimony Format on Children’s Judgments in Morally Relevant Contexts

Research Findings: To test children’s use of testimony of others, 3 – 9 years (N = 227) made judgments about a potential peer transgression in which the intentions of the protagonist were ambiguous, after hearing two different forms of testimony. The 2 forms of testimony were (a) opposing opinion-based testimony from an adult authority versus a peer consensus group and (b) knowledge-based testimony (eyewitness testimony) that was counter to the participants’ initial judgments. Findings revealed that when testimony was presented in an opinion-based format, children were likely to side with the opinion that reflected their own interpretation of the peer encounter, regardless of whether the opinion came from a peer consensus or an adult authority. However, when knowledge-based testimony was introduced in support of the opposite of children’s initial interpretation of the ambiguous peer encounter, children most often changed their initial judgment to align with the new testimony. That is, children used knowledge-based testimony but not opinion-based testimony to evaluate a potential transgression. Practice or Policy: These findings demonstrate that the way in which testimony is delivered to children has a direct influence on their decision making about peer interactions and has relevance for teacher–student discourse in the classroom. A number of recent studies have shown that young children are critical consumers of information from others (Chen, Corriveau, & Harris, 2013; Fusaro & Harris, 2008; Jaswal, Carrington Croft, Setia, & Cole, 2010; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004). That is, rather than automatically accepting information from others, children selectively decide whether to accept others’ testimony (Boseovski, 2012; Jaswal & Neely, 2006). For example, young children accept testimony supported by three individuals who form a consensus over one individual dissenter (Chen et al., 2013; Fusaro & Harris, 2008) and prefer to learn new facts from an adult rather than a child (Jaswal & Neely, 2006; VanderBorght & Jaswal, 2009). These studies indicate that from as early as the preschool years, children are aware that some people are more likely to provide accurate testimony than others. What has not been studied, however, is whether children’s critical use of testimony information can be generalized to situations in which children make morally relevant decisions, such as deciding who is the victim and who is the transgressor in a morally relevant social interaction. The majority of previous research on children’s selective learning from others has focused on children’s judgments in more obviously pedagogical contexts, for example, when learning of the names, functions, or characteristics of novel objects or entities (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, 2009; Chen et al., 2013; CONTACT Jee Young Noh [email protected] 3304 Benjamin Building, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742-1131, USA. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/HEED. © 2016 Taylor & Francis EARLY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2016.1197013 D ow nl oa de d by [ L au ra E le nb aa s] a t 1 4: 50 0 7 Ju ly 2 01 6 Einav, 2014; Fusaro & Harris, 2008; Koenig & Harris, 2005). Little is known, however, about how children use testimony information when acquiring knowledge about morally relevant social encounters. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated the role of testimony when children make inferences about peer transgressions and specifically whether testimony format (opinion based vs. knowledge based) influences children’s acceptance of others’ testimony in this context. The Role of Testimony Format: Opinion Versus Knowledge One important but underinvestigated aspect of children’s selective learning from others is how children evaluate different formats of testimony when they decide whether to accept information, particularly when that testimony is provided in less explicitly pedagogical contexts. Previous studies have mostly examined the role of opinion testimony in children’s learning, often by introducing informants who propose beliefs or thoughts (Fusaro & Harris, 2008). For example, the majority of studies on testimony have used opinion information from others, such as “They will show us which they think is . . .” (Corriveau, Kim, Song, & Harris, 2013). Few studies thus far have examined how children weigh opinion testimony versus other types of testimony such as knowledge testimony, through which informants transmit an accurate fact about the given task rather than an opinion. It has been shown, however, that both children and adults differentiate between statements of opinion versus fact. For example, statements of religious belief are judged to be less objective than statements of factual belief (Heiphetz, Spelke, Harris, & Banaji, 2013, 2014). Reflecting such objectiveness in fact-based statements, eyewitness testimony often plays a crucial role in everyday settings, such as the police investigation of crimes, because of its purported high level of accuracy (Kebbell & Milne, 1998; Memon, Gabbert, & Hope, 2004). Thus, it may be that the cues children use to decide whether to accept others’ opinion testimony (e.g., the number of individuals sharing the same opinion, the authority of informants) do not generalize to all social contexts in which children make decisions about what they experience in everyday peer encounters. Rather, in some circumstances children may prefer to rely on testimony that purports to convey more accurate information, such as knowledgebased testimony. Supporting this proposition, previous research has shown that children are sensitive to the accuracy and expertise of others’ testimony when determining from whom to learn. For example, when children learn new words or the rules of games, they selectively rely on informants who have a verified history of having provided accurate information in the past rather than informants with a history of inaccurate past performance (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, 2009; Einav, 2014; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, 2007). Furthermore, previous studies have found that children change their initial perception about an object or image when testimony supporting another interpretation includes elaboration on the counterintuitive nature of the claim (reflecting a more detailed knowledge-based form of testimony) but not when the testimony merely introduces a counterintuitive claim with no further explanation (Lane, Harris, Gelman, & Wellman, 2014). For example, in one study by Lane et al. (2014), children heard counterperceptual claims regarding an object (e.g., calling a bar of soap a “rock”). Half of the children heard testimony emphasizing the distinction between the object’s appearance and reality (e.g., “This looks and feels like a rock. But really and truly it’s not a rock. Really and truly this is soap”), whereas the other half of the children heard a simple explanation of the object with no acknowledgment of the appearance– reality discrepancy (“This is soap”). Children who heard the more factually formatted testimony were more likely to agree with the counterperceptual claim than children who heard a simple explanation of the object, demonstrating one facet of the role of testimony format in children’s acceptance of novel information. Similarly, another study revealed that children were more likely to accept testimony when informants used a statement that emphasized their knowledge when explaining why the label for 2 J. Y. NOH ET AL. D ow nl oa de d by [ L au ra E le nb aa s] a t 1 4: 50 0 7 Ju ly 2 01 6 an object conflicted with children’s initial perception. When children were shown an ambiguous catlike animal with some dog-like qualities and were told that it was in fact a dog, they were more likely to believe their informants’ testimony when it was put in a strongly emphasizing statement (“You’re not going to believe this, but this is actually a dog”) versus a less emphasizing statement (“This is a dog”; Jaswal, 2004). Thus, prior studies have shown that children are more likely to accept testimony that conveys detailed or accurate knowledge. Furthermore, some studies have shown that children’s endorsement of accurate knowledge testimony is linked with their awareness of which informants have expertise in the given area (e.g., Boseovski & Thurman, 2014). For example, Boseovski & Thurman (2014) found that young children relied on a zookeeper rather than their mother when deciding which informant had correct information about a novel animal. These findings illustrate children’s sensitivity to the accuracy of their informants’ knowledge and highlight how, in some contexts, knowledge is perceived to be tied to expertise. Previous studies, however, have commonly introduced two conflicting testimonies at the same time. For instance, previous work has presented two or more informants with opposing opinions and asked children to choose between them (Chen, Corriveau, & Harris, 2013; Fusaro & Harris, 2008; Jaswal, 2004; Koenig et al., 2004; Lane et al., 2014). This approach does not allow for direct tests of whether one type of testimony could be used to override children’s previous decision based on another type of testimony. Furthermore, previous studies have mostly focused on children’s judgments about naming an object or an animal; thus, the role of testimony format in other social contexts, including peer encounters with morally relevant concerns, is not yet known. In order to address these gaps in the literature, the central goals of the current study were to determine whether children would (a) rely on opinion testimony at all when making decisions about whom to blame for a potential moral transgression; and (b) take knowledge-based testimony (a more accurate or verified form of testimony) into account in the same context in order to override their initial judgment, which was made after hearing opinion-based testimony. Opinion Testimony: Authority Versus Peer Consensus Many social cues can be used to infer whose testimony is likely to be more accurate in addition to past evidence attesting to that fact. For example, young children have been shown to perceive adults to be more reliable sources of information than children in some contexts (e.g., learning the meaning of new words), and thus adults are often preferred over children as sources for learning new information (Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Taylor, Cartwright, & Bowden, 1991). Such inferences about accuracy fail, however, when children accept the opinion of several peers who form a social consensus over the opinion of a dissenter, even when the opinion testimony coming from the consensus is clearly misleading (Haun & Tomasello, 2011; Walker & Andrade, 1996). Thus, preference for testimony provided by a group over an individual and preference for testimony provided by an adult over a child are both established components of children’s selective learning from others’ testimony. But whose testimony do children trust when these two sources of information are in conflict? The current study contrasted the opinion of a peer group and the opinion of an adult in order to examine which would be more relevant to children’s decisions when children made judgments in morally relevant situations. In addition to measuring children’s agreement with one source (adult vs. children) over the other, we measured children’s reasoning for their decisions in order to investigate why children chose to agree with one opinion over the other and whether they explicitly acknowledged receiving testimony at all when explaining how they arrived at their decision. EARLY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT 3 D ow nl oa de d by [ L au ra E le nb aa s] a t 1 4: 50 0 7 Ju ly 2 01 6