Three-year-olds who hear false information from an adult are more likely to believe the lies over and over again than 3-year-olds who get a false visual cue. The findings suggest that while young children can figure out duplicity, they're primed to believe things they're told.
Before the age of 4, children are extremely credulous. They accept adults' word on everything from the existence to Santa Claus to the shape of the Earth. To find out whether kids are trusting in general or whether there is something special about verbal information, University of Virginia developmental psychologist Vikram Jaswal set up two experiments.
In one, an adult showed a child two colored cups and then hid a sticker under one. The adult then told the child that if the child could find the sticker on the first try, he or she would get to keep it. Next, the adult lied to the child, saying that the sticker was under the empty cup.
The other experiment was identical, except that instead of incorrectly telling the child where the sticker was, the adult placed a black arrow on the empty cup. The children had previously played a game in which they learned that the arrow marked a cup with a toy inside.
All of the kids believed the adult on the first try for both experiments, but the kids who saw the arrow quickly caught on that they should look in the other cup. On average, those kids found the sticker about 5 out of 8 times. In contrast, the kids who heard incorrect verbal information found the sticker an average of 1.4 times. Half of them never caught on that the adult was lying to them, even after the adult reminded the kids that she'd been tricky in the past.
1 comments:
WOw that's so cool!
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