How Kids Judge What They're Told: A Turkish Study

Kids are like little detectives, always figuring out who to trust. A recent study looked at how Turkish-speaking kids, aged four and six, decide if what they're told is reliable. They used special words in Turkish to see if kids could tell the difference between someone making a guess and someone repeating what they heard. First, the kids had to guess who was more trustworthy: someone who made an educated guess or someone who just repeated a rumor. Both age groups thought the guesser was more reliable, but the six-year-olds were even better at this than the four-year-olds. Next, the kids were introduced to a new object called a "blicket. " They were told it was magnetic, but the way they were told this varied: some heard a guess, some heard a rumor, and others heard a general statement. The researchers wanted to see if the kids would believe and apply this new information based on how it was presented. Here's where it gets interesting: the four-year-olds were more likely to believe and use the information when it was presented as a general statement. But the six-year-olds were pretty much the same in all cases. This shows that as kids grow, they get better at judging who to trust, but their ability to apply that information changes too. It's important to note that even though the kids thought the guesser was more reliable, they didn't necessarily believe the guess more than the rumor. This suggests that understanding reliability and applying it are two different skills that develop at different rates.