Kids Like Learning From Confident Adults — But Only If Their Confidence Is Justified

By Emma Young If you confidently tell a young child a fact, they’re likely to believe you. But you’d better be right — because if they find out that you were wrong, and should have known better, they’ll doubt not only your credibility but your intelligence too. These are the implications of new work in PLOS One, led by Susan Birch at the University of British Columbia. It shows that children prefer to learn from people who are consistently confident, rather than hesitant, about what they say. However, even kids as young as four also keep a track record of a person’s accuracy, and make judgements about them on this basis. “We now know that children are even more savvy at learning from others than we previously thought,” says Birch. “They don’t just prefer to learn from anyone who is confident; they avoid learning from people who have confidently given wrong information in the past.” The vast majority of the information that we learn in life comes from other people, note Birch and her colleagues. But as we all differ in intelligence and areas of expertise — and often offer opinions rather than facts — to learn best, children would benefit from working out whom to trust. Obvious confidence in a statement can certainly be a cue to its credibility. This might be expressed verbally (by introducing a statement with “I know…” rather than “I think…”, for example) and also in body language (nodding versus shrugging, for instance) and gestures. ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Educational Source Type: blogs