The evolutionary explanation for our extended childhood is that children are designed to learn from the previous generation. The new research shows that children are, in fact, remarkably quick to take in information that they hear from other people. They’re sponges, as people often say, but they aren’t indiscriminate sponges—from a very early age they make judgments about whether other people are credible and reliable. And as they come to understand other people better and better, they learn to calibrate just how credulous or skeptical they ought to be.
