Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When learning from others, rather than simply following the majority’s opinion, we need to accurately evaluate the quality of the information both the majority and the minority provide, and integrate that information with our own personal experience. This is especially true when the majority’s opinion is based on lower quality information, because they shared the same evidence rather than collecting evidence independently. Previous work demonstrated that adults are sensitive to the quality of the majority’s information, consistent with the predictions of a Bayesian rational model (Whalen, Griffiths, & Buchsbaum, in press). In two behavioural experiments, we investigated how preschoolers combine testimony from a majority that conflicts with a minority or with the child’s own personal evidence. Unlike adults, children over-relied on the majority when given only testimony. However, when also given their own conflicting evidence, children relied significantly less on the majority and over-relied on their own evidence. These findings help explain why children may follow the majority at times, but in others trust their own judgements.