Do Young Children Always Say Yes to Yes–No Questions? A Metadevelopmental Study of the Affirmation Bias
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study investigated whether yes-no questions would lead to a yes bias in young children. Four experiments were conducted in which 2- to 5-year-olds were asked comprehensible and incomprehensible yes-no questions concerning familiar and unfamiliar objects. Consistent findings were obtained: (a) 2-year-olds displayed a consistent yes bias; (b) 4- and 5-year-olds exhibited no response bias toward comprehensible questions and a nay-saying bias toward incomprehensible questions; and (c) 3-year-olds' results were mixed, suggesting that the age of 3 years is a period of developmental transition in response tendency toward yes-no questions. The findings suggest that yes-no questions are suitable for older children, providing they are comprehensible, but may result in biased results when used with younger children and when incomprehensible.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it