[Source: Medical News Today]
To learn about the world around them, young children depend on information provided by others. But that’s not always the best strategy: kids will sometimes take everything grown-ups say at face value, even if they’re unreliable.
New research shows that children are not as gullible as we might think — and that’s especially true for those who have a good understanding of what’s going on inside someone else’s head.
In a paper recently published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers from Concordia University and the University of Ottawa show that even young children can be selective in whom they prefer to learn from.
“We already know that some preschoolers are more likely to learn from individuals with a history of making accurate claims over individuals who have been inaccurate or ignorant,” says the study’s senior author Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor with Concordia’s Department of Psychology and researcher with the Centre for Research in Human Development.
“Kids have also been shown to prefer learning from nicer, more confident or more attractive individuals — attributes that don’t have anything to do with intelligence. We speculated that certain social-cognitive abilities might explain some of these learning differences,” she says.
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