Despite being perceived as very naive and inexperienced, your toddler might not actually believe your Santa Clause or Tooth Fairy stories, as a recent study has revealed that four-year-olds respond to misinformation instinctively.
As it happens, social science researchers have spent a lot of time studying how children develop a sense of trust in others and how they judge whether what we tell them is the truth, according to a report published by Scientific American on April 1.
Turns out, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that children ages four to seven can recognize misinformation when put to a test with zebras and space aliens and use this innate ability to develop natural fact-checking skills.
Raised or born skeptics?
Specifically, the study, designed by Evan Orticio, a graduate student in the research group of Berkeley psychologist Celeste Kidd, and his colleagues, aimed to investigate the natural fact-checking abilities of young children, so they recruited 122 four- to seven-year-olds for a gamified fact-checking exercise.
As Orticio explained:
“We were looking at whether children can adjust their level of skepticism according to the quality of information they’ve seen before and translate that into a reasonable policy for how much they should fact-check new information.”
The researchers gave the participating kids a tablet with content in the format of either an e-book or a search engine, and showed them a series of statements with accompanying images, one statement reading “Hippos swim in water” and another “Hippos swim in outer space.”
For each statement, the children were to indicate whether they thought it was true while inspecting realistic images of zebras or hippos, for example. Then, they looked at a different page on the tablet showing 20 space aliens called ‘zorpies,’ one of which had its face exposed to reveal it had three eyes.
Then they asked the kids to confirm whether the statement “all zorpies have three eyes” was true. They could also tap on any number of the 20 zorpies to remove the aliens’ sunglasses and count their eyes before deciding whether the statement was true.
Turns out, children exposed to more misinformation when answering the questions about animals in the first part of the exercise, would more often remove the glasses from more zorpies on average to count their eyes. In fact, according to Orticio:
“They were more careful to fact-check claims, so they spent longer and sought out more evidence before just accepting this claim about aliens.”
On the other hand, kids who had less exposure to falsehoods about animals didn’t perform much fact-checking.
Ultimately, the implications from the research suggest that ‘oversanitizing’ children’s media consumption, such as allowing exposure only to sites labeled as ‘kid-friendly’ may not be such a good idea, as it can prevent the development of skills that allow them to fulfill their potential as born skeptics.
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