Going with the flow: Preschoolers monitor for informant consensus

Four experiments were conducted examining 3- and 4-year-olds' sensitivity to whether informants conform to the majority viewpoint. Experiments 1 and 2 explored children's use of informant consensus as a cue to subsequent trustworthiness of a majority informant, as opposed to a lone dissenter. Three- and 4-year-olds were tested for their sensitivity to agreement and disagreement among informants. In pretest trials, they watched as three of four informants (Experiment 1) or two of three informants (Experiment 2) indicated the same referent for an unfamiliar label whereas the remaining informant was a lone dissenter who indicated a different referent. Asked for their own judgment, 3- and 4-year-olds sided with the majority rather than with the dissenter. In subsequent test trials, one member of the majority and the dissenter remained present and continued to provide conflicting information about the names of unfamiliar objects. Children remained mistrustful of the dissenter. Instead, they preferred to seek and endorse information from the informant who had belonged to the majority.;The primary medium of information dissemination in education is testimony. These results have the potential to inform daycare providers and classroom teachers about the extent to which preschoolers are sensitive to informant consensus and subsequently use that knowledge when seeking and endorsing information from one person as compared to another.;Experiments 3 and 4 explored the extent to which children's preference for the majority overrides their own perception. Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of three lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age groups proved to be circumscribed. When asked to solve a practical problem---selecting the longest strip in order to build an adequate bridge---both groups relied on their own perceptual judgment, whether or not they had deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Confirming earlier meta-analytic findings with adults, the rate of deference was greater among Asian-American children as compared to Caucasian-American children.