Confidence and Domain: Children’s trust in people for factual information and moral decisions

Confidence is a salient factor when determining an individual’s depth and breadth of knowledge. However, confidence alone can be an unreliable predictor of someone’s knowledge, and does not always indicate accuracy. For my project, I will analyze a study investigating whether children prefer to learn from a confident or hesitant individual, and if their preference differs when the information is factual or moral in nature. Participants (N=128) aged 5-8 were recruited through the UM Living Lab, with half assigned to a moral condition and the other half to a factual condition. Participants were presented with stimuli videos portraying two human models (one confident, one hesitant), followed by a series of questions related to the videos. A training phase familiarized participants with the two models and assessed children’s ability to differentiate between confidence and hesitancy. After the training phase, a test phase consisting of four trials using a forced-choice design assessed children’s learning preference for the confident or hesitant model. In addition, participants rated the models’ confidence, likability, and smartness. Based on previous research, we predict that in the factual domain, children will prefer to learn from the confident model, rating them higher in confidence, likability, and smartness than the hesitant model. However, in the moral domain, we predict that children’s ratings and preference to learn from the confident model will decrease. The question remains up to chance regarding whether children will prefer to learn from the hesitant model over the confident model in the moral domain.