Young Children Believe What Adults Tell Them

Here's the background: A team of researchers led by psychologist Vikram Jaswal showed 3-year-olds two cups of different colors and then hid a sticker in one of them. The kids then tried to find the sticker. With one group of kids, an adult put an arrow on the wrong cup, and then watched which cup the child chose to look in. With the other group, the adult lied by telling the kids the sticker was in the wrong cup. With each child, they ran the experiment eight times with different color cups.

What happened? As the researchers write in their paper:

All children searched in the wrong location initially, but those who heard the deceptive testimony continued to be misled, whereas those who saw her mark the incorrect location with an arrow quickly learned to search in the opposite location.

In fact, nine out of 16 children who were told the sticker was in the wrong cup looked there even on the eighth trial—after they had been misled by the adult seven times in a row. As Jaswal explains in a write-up of the study:

Children have developed a specific bias to believe what they’re told. It’s sort of a short cut to keep them from having to evaluate what people say. It’s useful because most of the time parents and caregivers tell children things that they believe to be true.