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Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others
If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round—never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You’re Told begins by reminding us of a basic Most of what we know we learned from others.
Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.
We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for he only asks for treats.
Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.
We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for he only asks for treats.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 2012
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December 29, 2021
I love the ideas of and questions asked by this book, and it is written very accessibly. Harris points out that we've never made perceptual contact with the majority of what we know (e.g., scientific entities; historical events; facts involving values and abstract concepts). This means we couldn't have learned about these things from firsthand observation at the very beginning; it must rather be through the testimony of others. Already, at the end of age 1, infants are sensitive to the existence of objects that are not currently observable; they begin gaining the capacity to ask about such objects, and thereby receive knowledge through testimony, from that age. Such questioning is the engine for "this expansion of their mental universe."
Harris asks questions such as: At what age and through what developmental processes infants come to be capable of learning through testimony? Do young children blindly obey what they're told, or do they have critical faculties? Do young children keep track of whether an entity, which they learn about through testimony and which is impossible to learn of through observation, is real or fictional? If so, how do they manage to keep tabs on that matter?
I found every chapter rewarding to read, so here's a summary of the ideas found across the chapters. In chapter 2, Harris discusses that it turns out non-human primates can perform better than young children at commands such as retrieving items from a specified location, but non-human primates never ask questions about commands. For apes that've learned symbolic notation, their utterances only express their desires and preferences. Young human children, in contrast, are able to ask questions from the very beginning.
In chapter 3 Harris examines when an adult models to a non-human primate or human child how to accomplish a certain task that results in a reward (e.g., opening a puzzle box to get a treat). The adult will engage in superfluous steps to the process, which are inessential to opening the box. Non-human primates will discard those steps and perform only the essential ones. In contrast, human children will perform all the steps, including the superfluous ones. This doesn't indicate that human children are more dumb than apes. It turns out they understand that these steps aren't necessary to accomplishing the task; they will discard those steps when asked to perform the task alone. This reflects that humans are sensitive to social norm and conventions, in a way that apes are not. Human have a range of cares beyond the instrumental with respect to biological survival; they also care about belonging to their communities and inheriting cultural knowledge.
In chapters 4 and 5 Harris discusses in exactly what way children are critically minded, when learning from testimony. If testimony conflicts their currently existing categories or their firsthand observation, they might either defer or be dubious of the speaker. There are a couple of features of the speaker that correspond with the child's being more likely to defer to the speaker (and the absence of these features correspond with the child's being more likely to be dubious and refuse to revise their beliefs). Children are more likely to trust the speaker if they are a caretaker or familiar, rather than a stranger. When the child goes past age 3, children are more likely to trust the speaker if they are regarded as a reliable informant by the community, rather than a deviant.
Moreover, the child's attachment-style will have an impact on the power of these features. If the child has an avoidant attachment-style, they will display no difference between tendency to defer v. reject the testimony of their caretaker and that of strangers. If the child has an ambivalent style, they will more likely to blindly defer to their caretakers. Children with secure styles will more likely be able to be skeptical of their caretakers when they say things that contradict their already standing knowledge.
In chapter 7, Harris discusses what he calls "independent vegetarians": children from purely meat-eating families who decide to become vegetarians. He argues that this is possible due to the child's having heard about facts that are relevant to one's decision to become vegetarian (e.g., the meat on the table is a dead non-human animal; animals all suffer), and they are able to reason from these facts learned through testimony on their own. There are various reasons why these children become vegetarians and not others who hear the same facts (e.g., perhaps they are less capable to turn a blind eye to suffering when facing a meal that would otherwise be yummy). Moreover, curiously, these independent vegetarians don't condemn other people for eating meat. It turns out they will only condemn others if these others have already made a commitment to vegetarianism and backslide on it. A potential explanation for this fact is that meat eating is so prevalent in society. So they've 'learned' through testimony many, many times that eating meat is good. This makes for this idea to be readily accessible and vivid in the child's mind. So it may allow for them to believe in the truth of this idea in some complicated way, which allows for them to have double standards regarding the ethics of meat eating.
In chapter 8, Harris discusses how children can keep tabs on whether entities learned through testimony are real v. fictional. When adults talk about an entity in such a way as to indicate that this entity is embedded in the causal network of reality (so could potentially have causal consequences that are observable or felt), children are sensitive to this. This means children likely think about invisible scientific and supernatural entities in the same way, if the adults around them are religious and endorse the latter. Interestingly, however, children across many kinds of communities (pre-industrialized and religious communities included) are likely to express more confidence in scientific claims than religious ones. Harris runs through a series of hypotheses to explain this fact, and endorses the hypothesis that children are sensitive to patterns of testimony distributed throughout society regarding some type of invisible entity. Because science is trusted and predominant across the world in general, children pick up on this fact through their interactions with their community members.
In chapter 9 Harris discusses that a robust finding across societies is that children start off having biologically valid beliefs about death, and only later (around age 6) start to have religious or supernatural beliefs about death. Harris explains this by that biologically valid beliefs are backed by firsthand observation (e.g., seeing a dead bug and that it does not come back to life), whereas religious beliefs presuppose abstractions which take time to learn through testimony.
In chapter 10, Harris examines empirical evidence that points to that around ages 5-6 children become able to explain why they take something to be real rather than fictional. So around this age, they become able to distinguish between the real and fictional in a principled, rather than piecemeal fashion. For example, around that age children are able to explain that a protagonist of a story is fictional because the story involves magical or impossible event. In contrast, children younger than that might only be able to take the protagonist to be fictional if the adult talks about them in a manner that indicates the protagonist isn't embedded in the causal web of reality.
In chapter 11, Harris returns to big-picture questions, using the conclusions he's secured throughout the previous chapters. He explains the immense difference between humans and non-human primates in terms of our capacity to be sensitive to social norms and conventions -- it's not just out pro-social behaviors, which non-human primates also have. We have an innate interest and capacity to learn about the socially-determined categories and functions of things (and the existence of non-perceptually present things), and we learn these critically, so may question and innovate. Harrris's previous work has focused on the imagination: he argued that what is distinctive of humans is that we have a fortuitous confluence of two capacities. First is to use language to communicate. Second is to imagine non-perceptually-available things. The power of what this can do for us comes out in our examination of learning through testimony.
Here are some of my thoughts in response to Harris's ideas. First, I wish Harris talked more about how we learn about things that seem to consist in abstract concepts, like values, gender, power, institution, and other things that lack concrete, singular embodiment but are taken to be very real in our social worlds. The studies conducted all have to do with testing children's relationships to non-observable entities that would have a concrete, singular embodiment (e.g., germs and vitamins, characters from fictional stories, God). Such "abstract" entities, like gender, are integral to our perception of everyday, physical objects and events -- we encounter everyday objects in terms of those abstract entities, so that they really aren't abstract but perhaps are taken to be more real and commonplace than even scientific entities. I wonder whether such "abstract" entities possess all the same features in the context of the development of children's imagination as the non-observable, particular entities dealt with in these psychological experiments. Do we learn about and deal with gender and revenge (qua concept) in the same way as we do with quarks and ancient Greece? Or, are there significant differences as to how we learn about the two categories of non-observable things, given that the former is "observable" insofar as it is constantly embodied by observable particulars?
Second, a related thought is that perhaps non-observable, particular entities could become "embodied" in or imbue physical particular things just as abstract concepts can. For example, germs are invisible, particular entities (relative to the everyday observer). But when we become sick, particular entities like a running nose can show up to us as explainable by the invisible particular of germs. (This relation between observable entity and non-observable particular might be thought of in terms of symbolism or association, but these characterizations probably don't do full justice to the matter). This thought can be applied as an objection to one of Harris's key concepts. Harris explains the commonplace phenomenon that children fail to cite testimony as the source of their knowledge, when asked about the source, in terms of "source confusion": they've forgotten where they learned it, or confused its originating point. I don't think there is any "confusion" at all: if my thought stands, children may legitimately have firsthand observations of something learned through testimony, when that thing comes to imbue their perceptual world. So they really do learn from experience and aren't wrong to not cite the testimony as the source.
Third, I think it's worthwhile to emphasize Harris's point that many invisible entities could slide back and forth between the status of existing or being fictional for a given society. We may note that germs, at the beginning, were taken to be mere fictions by many people. When people heard about germs through a scientists's testimony back then, they'd take them to be make-believe, in the category of Santa Claus. Now we all believe in them. This reflects that if we lack firsthand observation of something, it is possible for us to take it as make believe. Then once something without a physical embodiment is taken up by everyone, we explain our firsthand observations as caused by those 'invisible' things. Our explanations become so ingrained perhaps that those invisible things become 'visible': it seems that we encounter them first-hand, in the embodiment of these observable objects and events. Once this shift happens, it becomes impossible for us to take it as make-believe.
I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how the U.S could be so politically divided, how it seems that different communities live in totally different worlds, and how people could believe in conspiracy theories. It also has much relevance to questions about the relation or comparison between science and pseudo-science. More generally, readers interested in the role of language in the evolution of humanity would find this book enriching.
Harris asks questions such as: At what age and through what developmental processes infants come to be capable of learning through testimony? Do young children blindly obey what they're told, or do they have critical faculties? Do young children keep track of whether an entity, which they learn about through testimony and which is impossible to learn of through observation, is real or fictional? If so, how do they manage to keep tabs on that matter?
I found every chapter rewarding to read, so here's a summary of the ideas found across the chapters. In chapter 2, Harris discusses that it turns out non-human primates can perform better than young children at commands such as retrieving items from a specified location, but non-human primates never ask questions about commands. For apes that've learned symbolic notation, their utterances only express their desires and preferences. Young human children, in contrast, are able to ask questions from the very beginning.
In chapter 3 Harris examines when an adult models to a non-human primate or human child how to accomplish a certain task that results in a reward (e.g., opening a puzzle box to get a treat). The adult will engage in superfluous steps to the process, which are inessential to opening the box. Non-human primates will discard those steps and perform only the essential ones. In contrast, human children will perform all the steps, including the superfluous ones. This doesn't indicate that human children are more dumb than apes. It turns out they understand that these steps aren't necessary to accomplishing the task; they will discard those steps when asked to perform the task alone. This reflects that humans are sensitive to social norm and conventions, in a way that apes are not. Human have a range of cares beyond the instrumental with respect to biological survival; they also care about belonging to their communities and inheriting cultural knowledge.
In chapters 4 and 5 Harris discusses in exactly what way children are critically minded, when learning from testimony. If testimony conflicts their currently existing categories or their firsthand observation, they might either defer or be dubious of the speaker. There are a couple of features of the speaker that correspond with the child's being more likely to defer to the speaker (and the absence of these features correspond with the child's being more likely to be dubious and refuse to revise their beliefs). Children are more likely to trust the speaker if they are a caretaker or familiar, rather than a stranger. When the child goes past age 3, children are more likely to trust the speaker if they are regarded as a reliable informant by the community, rather than a deviant.
Moreover, the child's attachment-style will have an impact on the power of these features. If the child has an avoidant attachment-style, they will display no difference between tendency to defer v. reject the testimony of their caretaker and that of strangers. If the child has an ambivalent style, they will more likely to blindly defer to their caretakers. Children with secure styles will more likely be able to be skeptical of their caretakers when they say things that contradict their already standing knowledge.
In chapter 7, Harris discusses what he calls "independent vegetarians": children from purely meat-eating families who decide to become vegetarians. He argues that this is possible due to the child's having heard about facts that are relevant to one's decision to become vegetarian (e.g., the meat on the table is a dead non-human animal; animals all suffer), and they are able to reason from these facts learned through testimony on their own. There are various reasons why these children become vegetarians and not others who hear the same facts (e.g., perhaps they are less capable to turn a blind eye to suffering when facing a meal that would otherwise be yummy). Moreover, curiously, these independent vegetarians don't condemn other people for eating meat. It turns out they will only condemn others if these others have already made a commitment to vegetarianism and backslide on it. A potential explanation for this fact is that meat eating is so prevalent in society. So they've 'learned' through testimony many, many times that eating meat is good. This makes for this idea to be readily accessible and vivid in the child's mind. So it may allow for them to believe in the truth of this idea in some complicated way, which allows for them to have double standards regarding the ethics of meat eating.
In chapter 8, Harris discusses how children can keep tabs on whether entities learned through testimony are real v. fictional. When adults talk about an entity in such a way as to indicate that this entity is embedded in the causal network of reality (so could potentially have causal consequences that are observable or felt), children are sensitive to this. This means children likely think about invisible scientific and supernatural entities in the same way, if the adults around them are religious and endorse the latter. Interestingly, however, children across many kinds of communities (pre-industrialized and religious communities included) are likely to express more confidence in scientific claims than religious ones. Harris runs through a series of hypotheses to explain this fact, and endorses the hypothesis that children are sensitive to patterns of testimony distributed throughout society regarding some type of invisible entity. Because science is trusted and predominant across the world in general, children pick up on this fact through their interactions with their community members.
In chapter 9 Harris discusses that a robust finding across societies is that children start off having biologically valid beliefs about death, and only later (around age 6) start to have religious or supernatural beliefs about death. Harris explains this by that biologically valid beliefs are backed by firsthand observation (e.g., seeing a dead bug and that it does not come back to life), whereas religious beliefs presuppose abstractions which take time to learn through testimony.
In chapter 10, Harris examines empirical evidence that points to that around ages 5-6 children become able to explain why they take something to be real rather than fictional. So around this age, they become able to distinguish between the real and fictional in a principled, rather than piecemeal fashion. For example, around that age children are able to explain that a protagonist of a story is fictional because the story involves magical or impossible event. In contrast, children younger than that might only be able to take the protagonist to be fictional if the adult talks about them in a manner that indicates the protagonist isn't embedded in the causal web of reality.
In chapter 11, Harris returns to big-picture questions, using the conclusions he's secured throughout the previous chapters. He explains the immense difference between humans and non-human primates in terms of our capacity to be sensitive to social norms and conventions -- it's not just out pro-social behaviors, which non-human primates also have. We have an innate interest and capacity to learn about the socially-determined categories and functions of things (and the existence of non-perceptually present things), and we learn these critically, so may question and innovate. Harrris's previous work has focused on the imagination: he argued that what is distinctive of humans is that we have a fortuitous confluence of two capacities. First is to use language to communicate. Second is to imagine non-perceptually-available things. The power of what this can do for us comes out in our examination of learning through testimony.
Here are some of my thoughts in response to Harris's ideas. First, I wish Harris talked more about how we learn about things that seem to consist in abstract concepts, like values, gender, power, institution, and other things that lack concrete, singular embodiment but are taken to be very real in our social worlds. The studies conducted all have to do with testing children's relationships to non-observable entities that would have a concrete, singular embodiment (e.g., germs and vitamins, characters from fictional stories, God). Such "abstract" entities, like gender, are integral to our perception of everyday, physical objects and events -- we encounter everyday objects in terms of those abstract entities, so that they really aren't abstract but perhaps are taken to be more real and commonplace than even scientific entities. I wonder whether such "abstract" entities possess all the same features in the context of the development of children's imagination as the non-observable, particular entities dealt with in these psychological experiments. Do we learn about and deal with gender and revenge (qua concept) in the same way as we do with quarks and ancient Greece? Or, are there significant differences as to how we learn about the two categories of non-observable things, given that the former is "observable" insofar as it is constantly embodied by observable particulars?
Second, a related thought is that perhaps non-observable, particular entities could become "embodied" in or imbue physical particular things just as abstract concepts can. For example, germs are invisible, particular entities (relative to the everyday observer). But when we become sick, particular entities like a running nose can show up to us as explainable by the invisible particular of germs. (This relation between observable entity and non-observable particular might be thought of in terms of symbolism or association, but these characterizations probably don't do full justice to the matter). This thought can be applied as an objection to one of Harris's key concepts. Harris explains the commonplace phenomenon that children fail to cite testimony as the source of their knowledge, when asked about the source, in terms of "source confusion": they've forgotten where they learned it, or confused its originating point. I don't think there is any "confusion" at all: if my thought stands, children may legitimately have firsthand observations of something learned through testimony, when that thing comes to imbue their perceptual world. So they really do learn from experience and aren't wrong to not cite the testimony as the source.
Third, I think it's worthwhile to emphasize Harris's point that many invisible entities could slide back and forth between the status of existing or being fictional for a given society. We may note that germs, at the beginning, were taken to be mere fictions by many people. When people heard about germs through a scientists's testimony back then, they'd take them to be make-believe, in the category of Santa Claus. Now we all believe in them. This reflects that if we lack firsthand observation of something, it is possible for us to take it as make believe. Then once something without a physical embodiment is taken up by everyone, we explain our firsthand observations as caused by those 'invisible' things. Our explanations become so ingrained perhaps that those invisible things become 'visible': it seems that we encounter them first-hand, in the embodiment of these observable objects and events. Once this shift happens, it becomes impossible for us to take it as make-believe.
I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how the U.S could be so politically divided, how it seems that different communities live in totally different worlds, and how people could believe in conspiracy theories. It also has much relevance to questions about the relation or comparison between science and pseudo-science. More generally, readers interested in the role of language in the evolution of humanity would find this book enriching.
October 16, 2012
This book is well written, and in my not very educated opinion well researched. It was interesting to learn about both the experiments they used and the conclusions that can be drawn about how children learn. I enjoyed it because I spend my whole day with little ones, and in fact I was hoping it would shed a little bit more light on how I could become more credible to them, and it did. I have to say though that it was a bit wordy and went in to really too much detail for a non-academic person like me, just an average mom with 3 kids. So to someone who is a counselor or a teacher all that detail might be more helpful, but it some cases it just seemed to go on and on. I could probably use a shorter little handbook, maybe 60 pages or so with less detail on the experiments and more on the conclusions drawn from the experiment. I hate to be unfair to this book as it is clearly about the research, and I read it from a parenting point of view. It was definitely interesting, gave me a lot to think about and I feel a lot smarter for just the number of new words (i.e., ontological) this book added to my vocabulary.
September 8, 2016
Large compilation of studies, very useful for considering the topics of: children's perceptions of others' accounts of the world. When they believe us, why they believe us, etc. Great research inside.
Want to read
June 25, 2012Main BF318 .H363 2012
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