Running Head: TRUST in PRINT SOURCES

1

Trust in print sources

Running head: TRUST IN PRINT SOURCES

Take it as Read: Origins of Trust in Knowledge Gained from Print

Shiri Einav,1 Elizabeth J. Robinson2, and Amy Fox2

1Oxford BrookesUniversity, Oxford, UK

2University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Corresponding author:

Shiri Einav,
Department of Psychology,
OxfordBrookesUniversity,

Oxford OX3 0BP.
Tel: 01865 483786
E-mail:
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, in press, September 2012

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ursula Richards who prepared the materials, and to the staff and children from Balsall Common Primary School, Warwickshire.

Abstract

The ability to read opens up the possibility of learning about the world indirectly via print sources, providing a powerful new opportunity for children who have for years learned effectively from what people tell them.We compared children’s trust in printed versus oral information. We also examined whether children who showed preferential trust in an informant with print, assumed that informant wasstill reliableabout new information offered without print support. Children (N =89 aged 3-6 years) received conflicting suggestions from two dolls about which picture showed an unfamiliar target. Only one doll’s suggestion referred toa printed label, read aloud. Pre-readers, despite their exposure to print and presumed experience of others treating print sources as authoritative, showed no clear evidence of preferential trust in the suggestions with print support.Early readers, in contrast, consistently preferred the suggestions with print support. Importantly, despite having treated the doll with print as having a history of accuracy, early readers no longer showedtrust in that doll when it subsequently had no print support.Children at the very earliest stages of reading treated the doll with print appropriately as having gained only specific information from the print sources.

Keywords: Testimony; literacy; print; trust; knowledge.

Take it as Read: Origins of Trust in Knowledge Gained from Print

Imagine you are visiting the gardens of a stately home and come across an unfamiliar plant. Your companion says “That’s a cornus,” but you then read the plant’s label, which says “philadelphus.” You are likely to trust the information read from the label over the personal opinion of your companion: The printed source is treated as the more reliable. Now suppose instead of reading the label yourself a second companion had done so, and announced what she had read. Again, you might be more likely to trust the information from this second companion over the view of the first, because you are aware that she has a reliable source.

Literate adults gain much of their knowledge from print.Of course many adults recognize that printed sources can be unreliable, and that, conversely, informants’ personal opinions can be based on special expertise and therefore reliable. In general however, factual guides such as labels, timetables or reference books are likely to be trusted over another person’s personal opinion about such matters of fact.

It is of interest to find out when and how such trust in the reliability of print sources arises. Young children gain much of their knowledge from what others tell them, and by the time they can gain information themselves from print they will have had years of learningabout the world indirectly by this oral route, thereby benefitting from other people’s knowledge and experience. Research involving oral testimony shows that from around the age of two years, children find speech a powerful source of knowledge: Two-year-oldscan give particular weight to oral testimony even when it conflicts with their own experience (Jaswal, 2010; Jaswal & Malone, 2007),and three-year-olds find an adult’s deceptive oral suggestion about an object’s location harder to resist than one based on the adult’s placing of a pictorial symbol such as an arrow to indicate the location (Jaswal, Croft, Setia & Cole, 2010). These results support the conclusion that ‘Three-year-olds have a specific, highly robust bias to trust what people, particularly visible speakers, say.’ (Jaswal et al., 2010, p. 1541).

In UK, it is around this age that children begin to receive formal teaching about words and letter sounds, and in state-financed schools the teaching of reading commences in earnest in the academic year during which the child will turn five. By this age, if not well before, many children in UK have been exposed to people finding out information from print sources including the internet, text messages, newspapers and magazines, if not books. Many have spent considerable time in nursery classrooms whose walls are adorned with printed labels; many have looked at picture books giving factual information such as animal names, and heard read the accompanying text passages. Furthermore, they might have experienced explicit references to print as a source of knowledge, from comments such as “Let’s find out what’s on television” or “Let’s read the instructions” accompanying adults’ attention to print sources. Such experiences might be sufficient for children to treat a speaker who makes use of a text source as having particular expertise over one who has no such text support for a suggestion. To return to the example of the plant name in the opening paragraph, even children who cannot yet read for themselves might treat the informant who has read the label as more likely to be accurate than the one who had no print support for her suggestion.

Research so far is unclear on the extent to which pre-readers place trust in print-based suggestions read aloud. On the one hand, Robinson, Einav and Fox (in press) conclude that mere experience of others using text as a source of knowledge is not sufficient for children to show preferential trust in suggestions with print support over those without. They argue that the ability to decode text for oneself is necessary for print to be treated as having authority over a purely oral source. In their experiment 3, using a procedure analogous to the example in the opening paragraph of this paper, two dolls gave conflicting suggestions about which of a set of pictures showed an unfamiliar target. One doll based its suggestion on printed labels that it read aloud, while the other doll had none. Unlike early readers, pre-readers showed no preference between the dolls’ suggestions. Hence there was no evidence that pre-readers gave print sources authority over oral ones, whereas children at the very earliest stages of learning to read did. Consistent with this conclusion, early readers made the effort to use print to correct their own guess about the identity of an unfamiliar target (Robinson et al., in press, experiment 1), and, unlike pre-readers, they realised that printed names would help a doll who could read, to identify an unfamiliar target (Robinson et al., in press, experiment 2). The results concerning pre-readers suggest that despite their experience with print, they are insensitive to its power as a source of knowledge.

On the other hand, Eyden, Robinson, Einav and Jaswal (submitted) found clear evidence that pre-readers were sensitive to the presence of printed labels. When an implausible label was read aloud and placed on a target picture, e.g. fish for a hybrid creature that looked like a bird although it had some fish like features, pre-readers were just as likely as early readers spontaneously to remove the label and then classify the hybrid creature in line with its appearance. In contrast, when the label was not removable, pre-readers and early readers were much more likely to classify the hybrid in line with the label, with no difference according to reading ability. Had pre-readers been insensitive to the presence of the conflict between the word and the appearance of the creature, they would have seen no reason to remove the word.

These apparently conflicting findings concerning pre-readers’ sensitivity to print as an authority might be explained by the fact that in the study in which they appeared to be insensitive (Robinson et al.,in press) the print was deliberately in small font and positioned so that children could not read it themselves, to avoid giving readers an additional source of information for the print-based suggestion. This might have made the task too abstract for the pre-readers to treat the print-based suggestion as the more reliable. Maybe if pre-readers could see the print for themselves, just as they would be able to in classroom activities focussed on literacy, they would treat the print-based suggestion as the more reliable even though they were unable to confirm for themselves what it said. In the experiment reported here, therefore,we aimed to make it as easy as possible for pre-readers to prefer a print-based suggestion, to establish whether trust in print appears only when children are able to de-code print for themselves.

The second aim of the experiment focussed on children who show consistent preferential trust in suggestions with print support over purely oral suggestions. How do these children construe an informant whose previous accuracy relied on print sources? Elaborating our opening scenario further: Suppose you move on with your companions to a different area of the gardens, and encounter a different unfamiliar plant. Again your companions offer different names, but this time the plant is not labelled and both informants rely on their own knowledge base. Even if you had previously trusted the suggestion from the informant who had read the label, you have no grounds to trust that informant again this time. The label supplied specific information about the name of one type of plant, not broad knowledge about plant names. What of pre-readers and early readers? If they trust an informant whose suggestion came from a print source over one without print support, do they inappropriately treat that informant as generally knowledgeable about related matters when print support is no longer available?

The answer to this question is relevant to our understanding of the development of literacy, but it will also advance our understanding of the bases of children’s ‘epistemic vigilance’ (Sperber et al., 2010), that is their evaluations of the likely reliability of information from other people. As mentioned above, young children treat oral testimony as a particularly powerful source of information. This does not mean, however, that they believe whatever they are told. Even two-year-olds question incorrect labels of familiar items (Koenig & Echols 2003; Koenig & Woodward, 2010) and by the age of four years many children applya range of appropriate criteria for evaluating the likely truth of information from other people.They may no longer believe what another person says when it conflicts with their own experience (Robinson, Mitchell & Nye, 1995; Robinson & Whitcombe, 2003); when faced with a choice of oral informants, they show preferential trust in one who was previously accurate over one who was previously inaccurate (e.g. Birch, Vautier & Bloom,2008; Corriveau & Harris, 2009; Koenig, Clement & Harris, 2004); and they take into account relevant characteristics of informants such as age and expertise (Jaswal &Neely, 2006;Lutz & Keil, 2002). Furthermore, four-year-olds can also take into account reasons for an informant’s prior accuracy or inaccuracy, take into account the extent of prior inaccuracy, and make appropriate predictions about future reliability on the basis of those factors (Einav & Robinson, 2010; Einav & Robinson, 2011; Kondrad & Jaswal, 2012; Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009a; Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig & Harris, 2007; Robinson & Nurmsoo, 2009). In addition, they place more trust in informants who provide good support for their claims (Koenig, 2012). By around four years of age, then, despite still being very ready to learn from what others tell them, children show appropriate ‘epistemic vigilance’ in a wide range of circumstances, albeit with some surprising limitations (e.g.Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009b).

To return to our final research question: How do children treat an informant whose history of accuracy was based on reading? When print support is no longer available, is that informant still treated as reliable? If so, this would suggest children either misunderstand how print sources convey information, or treat the informant as generally knowledgeable simply on the basis of her history of accuracy, or both. On the other hand if the informant is not treated as particularly reliable when print support is no longer available, this would suggest both (i) that children treat print sources appropriately as supplying specific information only and (ii) that they appropriately take into account the route by which the informant managed to be accurate initially, i.e.,via the print source.

In this experiment, the child participant aimed to identify an unfamiliar target from a set of pictures, and was offered conflicting suggestions by two dolls. One doll’s suggestion arose from a printed label read aloud that the child could also see and potentially read, while the other doll’s suggestion had no print support and ostensibly derived from the doll’s own knowledge base. We examined whether or not children showeda preference for the print-based suggestion, and how any such preference related to children’s ability to confirm for themselves what the printed labels said.We fully expected that early readers would place greater trust in the print-based than in the oral suggestions given the salience of the printed labels and previous findings (Robinson et al., in press), but we were interested in whether pre-readers who could not yet decode the print for themselves, nevertheless treated the suggestions with print support as more reliable than those without.

After three trials on which one of the two dolls had consistently had print support for its suggestions about the unfamiliar targets, there was a fourth trial on which that doll no longer had print. That doll’s suggestion conflicted with the suggestion of a newly-introduced third doll with no known history of accuracy or inaccuracy. We were interested in the responses of children who had on the first three trials accepted the suggestions of the doll with print. These children had treated that doll as a reliable informant. Would they prefer the suggestion of that doll over that of the new doll, even when neither doll could draw on the authority of printed labels?

The design of this experiment is crucially different from that of typical studies of children’s trust in testimony (e.g., Birch, Vautier & Bloom, 2008; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009b). In typical studies, the child participant experiences history trials in which one informant labels familiar items accurately and another labels them inaccurately, and then on the test trial each informant offers a different label for an unfamiliar item. The highly replicable finding is that four-year-olds accept the previously accurate informant’s suggestion over that of the previously inaccurate informant. In this experiment, in contrast, the child participant had no independent knowledge of the accuracy of the two informants on the three initial trials, since they identified unfamiliar items. Only if the child trusted the printed word as authoritative did she have a basis for preferring one doll’s suggestion over the other and for treating one doll as having a history of accuracy.

Method

Participants.In total 89 children participated. Twenty nine attended nursery classes (12 girls, 17 boys;Mage = 3;10, age range: 3; 4 - 4; 3); 30 were in their first year of formal schooling (15 girls, 15 boys; Mage,= 4; 8, age range:4; 4 - 5; 3); and 30 in their second year of formal schooling (15 girls, 15 boys; Mage, = 5; 10, age range: 5; 4 - 6; 4). The school was situated in the Midlands of the UK and served predominately white middle class families with English as their first language.

Materials.For the practice,word and no word trialswe usedthree wooden dollsof indeterminate gender, resembling a child aged around 6 to 7 years and wearing either blue, red or yellow clothing; two pointers for the dolls to indicate their choice of target; fivelaminated A4 sheets of paper with 6 printed colour pictures:One sheet for the practice trial: insects; and three for the word trials: fruit, vegetables or flowers, and birds, with one reserve sheet of tools for children who knew the unfamiliar targets on another sheet. Each sheet contained pictures of two familiar (e.g., spider, apple) and four unfamiliar items (e.g., fig, condor), whose familiarity or unfamiliarity had been checked inpilot work with children of the same age groups attending schools with similar catchment areas. On each sheet there was a second familiar item available should any child fail to identify the first. After the first 17 children had been tested, the vegetable sheet was replaced with another sheet containing pictures of flowers, used for the subsequent 72 children. This was because it became clear that a current class project led to some children having atypical knowledge of vegetables after 6 children correctly identified the unfamiliar vegetables themselves (theseparticipants were therefore presented with the flowers reserve sheet instead). There is no reason to suspect that we failed to spot which children knew the vegetables. Of the 11 children who had the vegetable trial, only two children, one a reader and one a pre-reader, performed correctly on this trial alone. The remaining children either performed incorrectly on the vegetable trial (n = 5), or performed correctly across all 3 trials (n = 4) so their correct responses on the vegetable trial were not anomalous.