Research » Argument Complexity
Explanations are an essential tool for a child to learn about the world. We study the effects of expertise and the quality of an explanation on who a child believes is a trustworthy source. In this study, children are shown a video of two girls, of whom one is dressed up as a scientist. They provide either circular/bad or non-circular/good explanations about several scientific phenomena and later on they say the names of some novel objects that the child has never seen before. We look at whether children trust the scientist more simply because she is a scientist, or whether they trust the informant providing the good explanations more. This study takes about 10 minutes.
