Young children use and evaluate others’ arguments when forming and revising beliefs

What do young children understand about arguments? In particular, do they evaluate arguments critically when deciding whom to learn from? To address this question, the present study investigated children at age 4 to 5, a period in which capacities for basic selective social learning have been documented. In Studies 1a/b, children were asked to make an initial perceptual judgment regarding the location of an object under varying perceptual circumstances; then received advice by another informant who had either better or worse perceptual access than they themselves; and were then allowed to make their final judgment. The advice given by the other informant was sometimes accompanied by utterances of the form “I am certain … because I have seen it”. These utterances thus constituted good arguments in some conditions, but not in others. Results showed that children engaged in more belief-revision when the informant gave this argument only when her perceptual condition was high, and thus her argument, was good. In Study 2, children were asked to find out about different properties (color vs. texture) of an object, and received conflicting testimony from two informants who supported their claims by utterances of the form “because I have seen it” (good argument regarding color; poor regarding texture) or “because I have felt it” (vice versa). Again, children engaged in context-relative evaluation of argument quality. Taken together, these finding reveal that children from age 4 understand argument quality in sophisticated, context-relative ways, and use this understanding for selective learning and belief-revision.