About this session

Friday, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

The Development of Information-seeking and Reasoning Biases Across the Lifespan

When we believe something, we tend to seek out and evaluate evidence supporting what we believe while discounting evidence against our belief, e.g., confirmation/myside bias. Although this bias sometimes prevents us from obtaining a more accurate understanding of the world, it serves other functions, like convincing others (Mercier & Sperber, 2011) and maintaining one’s ingroup status (Stanovich, 2021). Yet, even young children can revise their beliefs when presented with strong counter-evidence (Schleihauf et al., 2022). Given these results, what situational factors determine whether information-seeking and belief revision are biased? Across three papers, this symposium demonstrates that the presence and degree of biased information-seeking and belief revision depends on age as well as on the social and epistemic context.

Paper 1 examines 5- to 55-year-olds’ information-seeking by manipulating its aim, showing that starting at five years old, we engage in biased information-seeking when we need to convince another person that our belief is correct, but not when we need to learn if our belief is correct, and that this tendency increases with age. Paper 2 shows that 4- to 6-year-old children are biased toward supporting ingroup beliefs: they seek less information and revise their beliefs less when they are part of a group than when they are not part of a group. Paper 3 shows that being asked to explain one’s beliefs during information search reduces myside thinking and supports belief revision in young adolescents. An expert will discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Paper #1
Title	The Lifespan Development of Biased Information-Seeking: Myside Bias
Presenting author	F. Ece Özkan, University of Toronto, Canada

Paper #2
Title	Group Membership Biases Children’s Evaluation of Evidence
Presenting author	Joshua Allan Confer, University of California, Berkeley, United States

Paper #3
Title	Explaining Outdoes Evidence in Supporting Belief Revision
Presenting author	Anahid S. Modrek, CSUSB, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
F. Ece Özkan, University of Toronto, Canada

Discussant
Lucas Payne Butler, Ph.D., University of Maryland, United States

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