Checking out the unexplained: With age, children become increasingly skeptical of surprising claims.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When presented with surprising claims, older children investigate such claims more often than younger children. The present study tests whether older children (6-7-year-olds) are more skeptical than younger children (4-5-year-olds) about surprising claims that lack supporting evidence because they expect informants to provide evidence for them. To test this hypothesis, we presented 140 4-7-year-old children (47-96 months, 46.4% girls, 53.6% boys, 86.4% with at least one parent who completed a BA degree, 50% parents with income above median) with a series of vignettes. In each vignette, the protagonist wanted to accomplish a task and needed to select the most appropriate object for that task. Before deciding which object to use, the protagonist heard a surprising claim about one of the object's properties, presented with or without supporting evidence. For example, in the supporting explanation condition, the informant stated that the smallest object was the heaviest and that they knew because they had lifted the objects. Children were then asked whether the protagonist knew which object to use and why. Contrary to expectation, children across all ages typically indicated that the protagonist had sufficient knowledge, regardless of whether an informant provided supporting evidence or not. However, with increasing age, children became more skeptical of both supported and unsupported surprising claims and increasingly stated that the protagonist should not select the object suggested by the informant. Finally, when asked to justify this judgment, older children were more likely than younger to express skepticism toward the claims, especially when presented without supporting evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".