Click here to read about the CCL's very own Dr. Samuel Ronfard's work in NPR!

Kids Start To Test Surprising Claims By Early Elementary School

by Tania Lombrozo

"... In short, children don't just soak up what they're told: They integrate what they hear with other sources of evidence, and they take into account the reliability and expertise of the informant. But these are abilities that develop over time, and children must learn to coordinate them with other activities, like asking questions and making their own observations. In fact, as children learn and mature, they don't simply become more critical consumers of what others say, they also learn how to seek out the evidence that will allow them to test surprising claims.

That's the core finding from a new paper forthcoming in the journal Developmental Psychology, authored by psychologists Samuel Ronfard, Eve Chen, and Paul Harris. In the paper, Ronfard and colleagues investigated how children respond to a counterintuitive claim — and in particular, whether they would go on to deliberately test a claim from an adult when it conflicted with their prior expectations...."