Tools
Tools
Marshall, DA and Meins, E (2024) Probability errors in children's judgements about the likelihood of social characteristics. Developmental Psychology. ISSN 0012-1649
|
Text
Probability errors in children's judgements about the likelihood of social characteristics.pdf - Accepted Version Download (409kB) | Preview |
Abstract
The studies reported here investigated mechanisms underlying children's tendency to commit the conjunction fallacy (judging that a conjunction of two events is more likely than one of the events in isolation) when judging people's characteristics. Study 1 investigated these errors in 4- and 5-year-olds (<i>N</i> = 58) using a newly developed social judgement task in which children judged whether a conjunction or one of its elements would apply to a protagonist. Children made conjunction fallacy errors at chance level. Study 2 (<i>N</i> = 71) replicated these findings using an adapted version of the task, in which children separately judged the likelihood of the conjunction and each of its events. Study 3 investigated age-related changes in conjunction fallacy errors in a sample of 148 children aged 4 to 11 years old and 130 adults. This study also investigated how providing background information on the protagonist influenced error rate. Unlike younger children, 10- and 11-year-olds committed the conjunction fallacy at chance level in the absence of background information, but providing information consistent with the likely component of the conjunction significantly increased their error rate. Adults' error rate also significantly increased after the introduction of background information. Across all three studies, conjunction fallacy errors were unrelated to cognitive and social-cognitive abilities, such as verbal ability, theory of mind, and inhibitory control (Studies 1 and 2), and prejudice and hindsight bias (Study 3). These findings suggest that it is only in the second decade of life that children use social information to inform their judgements about people and that social decision-making errors are not determined by core aspects of cognitive and social-cognitive development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | ©American Psychological Association, 2024. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001815 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | 1303 Specialist Studies in Education; 1701 Psychology; 1702 Cognitive Sciences; Developmental & Child Psychology |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| Divisions: | Psychology (from Sep 2019) |
| Publisher: | American Psychological Association (APA) |
| SWORD Depositor: | A Symplectic |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2024 14:17 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Sep 2024 14:17 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.1037/dev0001815 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/24149 |
 |
View Item |