Children show reduced trust in confident advisors who are partially informed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Young children trust confident informants over cautious ones, and this tendency can lead them to heed the claims of informants whose confidence is unjustified. The ability to recognize overconfidence, and not be swayed by it, is therefore important for children to obtain accurate information and to make better decisions. In two experiments (total N = 232), we show that 4- to 6-year-olds use information about whether speakers are fully or only partially informed to judge whether confident claims should be heeded. In each experiment, children were shown scenarios in which a confident speaker and a cautious one gave conflicting claims. When both speakers were completely informed, children expressed more trust in the confident speaker’s claim. However, when both speakers only had partial information, children did not believe the confident speaker over the more cautious one. These effects did not vary with age. The present findings are the first to suggest that children as young as 4 understand when confidence is unwarranted, and they may indicate that reminders that a speaker is only partially informed could help children recognize when confidence is unjustified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".