Children presume confident informants will be accurate (until proven otherwise)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Past research has demonstrated that children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. It is frequently assumed that they do so because they believe confidence to predict a person's knowledge and future accuracy; however, this assumption has not previously been tested. The present investigation therefore explored how 3‐ to 8‐year‐old children interpret informant confidence. Study 1 ( N = 84) aimed to address whether informant confidence is interpreted as an indicator of knowledge. Study 2 ( N = 87) explored how children's interpretation changes with conflicting informant credibility cues. Findings demonstrate that school‐aged children, but not preschoolers, expect correct statements from confident individuals and incorrect statements from hesitant informants. Additionally, school‐age children attribute word knowledge to a previously confident informant. When accuracy conflicts with confidence, accuracy drives 3‐ to 8‐year‐old children's knowledge attributions. This investigation builds on previous research and suggests that, by age 5 or 6, children do make individual epistemic inferences based on informant confidence.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".