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Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

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  • Susan A J Birch
  • Rachel L Severson
  • Adam Baimel

Abstract

The most readily-observable and influential cue to one’s credibility is their confidence. Although one’s confidence correlates with knowledge, one should not always trust confident sources or disregard hesitant ones. Three experiments (N = 662; 3- to 12-year-olds) examined the developmental trajectory of children’s understanding of ‘calibration’: whether a person’s confidence or hesitancy correlates with their knowledge. Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that children use a person’s history of calibration to guide their learning. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a developmental progression in calibration understanding: Children preferred a well-calibrated over a miscalibrated confident person by around 4 years, whereas even 7- to 8-year-olds were insensitive to calibration in hesitant people. The widespread implications for social learning, impression formation, and social cognition are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Susan A J Birch & Rachel L Severson & Adam Baimel, 2020. "Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(1), pages 1-27, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0227026
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227026
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    2. Thomas, Jonathan P. & McFadyen, Ruth G., 1995. "The confidence heuristic: A game-theoretic analysis," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 97-113, March.
    3. Abigail Barr, 2003. "Trust and expected trustworthiness: experimental evidence from zimbabwean villages," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 113(489), pages 614-630, July.
    4. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve, 2015. "Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i01).
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