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Despite superstitions, new research shows that children don't believe everything they're told

2022-10-15 18:25:20Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Despite superstitions, new research shows that children don't believe
Children do not believe everything they are told

Children learn on their own through observation and experimentation. Also, they learn from what other people tell them, especially adults and authority figures like their parents and teachers. When children learn something surprising to them, they seek additional information by asking questions or testing the claims they hear for themselves.

Previous studies have shown that whether children explore surprising claims made by adults varies by age. Children over 6 years of age are more likely to ask for additional information than 4- and 5-year-olds. However, there is still limited research about why children seek information in response to what they are told by adults.

A new study published in "Child Development" by researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard University aimed to answer this question. "Research shows that as they get older, children become more distrustful of what adults tell them. This also explains why older children are more likely to try to verify claims, and are more intentional about their exploration of objects," says Samantha Kotrell, researcher at the Childhood Learning and Development (CiLD) laboratory. at the University of Toronto.

In two different studies, researchers tried to explain why children seek additional information about things that surprise them when they hear them. In the first study, which was conducted between September 2019 and March 2020, 109 children aged 4-6 were recruited from the Toronto region, Canada.

Due to the Covid -19 pandemic, the laboratory was closed in March 2020, which resulted in less testing than originally planned. The parents of 108 of the 109 children reported their child's ethnicity: 49 percent described their child as white, 21 percent as mixed ethnicity or race, and 19 percent as Southeast Asian.

Almost all parents answered the questions about their educational background. 18 percent of children had parents who had not attended university. 34 percent had only one parent with higher education, and 48 percent had both parents with university degrees.

Children were presented with three familiar objects: a piece of rock, a piece of sponge-like material, and a ball of cloth. One of the researchers started asking the children: "Do you think this rock is hard or soft?". All the children declared that the rock was solid.

Next, some children were randomly selected to be told something that contradicted their beliefs about the world (“Actually, this rock is soft, not hard”) or were told something that confirmed their intuition ( "That's right, this rock is solid").

After these statements, all the children were asked again: "Then, do you think this rock is hard or soft?". Almost all children who heard claims that matched their beliefs continued to make the same judgment as before: that the rock was solid. Meanwhile, few of the children who were told that the rock was soft continued to make the same judgment as before. The researcher told the children that he had to leave the room for a moment to make a phone call, and let the children explore the object on their own. The children's behavior was recorded on video. The study found that most children, regardless of age, engaged in testing surprising claims.

Previously, experts hypothesized that previously reported age differences in children's exploration of surprising claims might reflect developments in children's ability to use exploration to test more complex claims.

But it may happen that with age, the motivation behind children's exploration changes. So younger children explore because they believed what they were told, and wanted to see the surprising object, while older children explored because they were skeptical of what they were told.

The results of the second study, which was conducted between September and December 2020, with 154 children aged 4–7 years, also showed that older children (6 and 7 years old) were more likely than younger ones to have a strategy exploration, adapting to what they heard.


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