About this session

Friday, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Belief Updating Across Development: The Effects of Belief Strength, Disagreement, and Testimony

Rational belief updating is essential for reducing polarization and misinformation, as it promotes openness to new evidence and fosters constructive, evidence-based dialogue. How do children understand belief change in themselves and others when they encounter new information? This symposium brings together a diverse, cross-disciplinary group of researchers to present on how children think about the role of new evidence in belief updating.

Paper 1 explores the role of prior belief strength in children’s intuitive theories of belief updating, revealing that for 4-8-year-olds, the strength of an initial belief affects both their predictions of how difficult belief change will be and how they predict an agent to respond to disagreement from a group of peers. Paper 2 examines how 4- to 8-year-old children and adults determine whether someone should consult a person who agrees or disagrees with them when learning something new, and finds that age and belief domain influences participants’ reasoning about disagreement. Paper 3 investigates actual belief updating in adults and 4- to 9-year-olds, finding that children calibrate their beliefs based on evidence strengths when they encounter disagreement, and suspend judgments increasingly with age. Paper 4 compares the influence of direct and indirect parental testimony, finding that 4- to 7-year-old children who received direct parental testimony were more likely to endorse, transmit, and retain negative beliefs about novel social group members. Collectively, these four papers offer new insights into the developmental trajectory of children’s understanding of belief updating, emphasizing the critical role of social evidence in shaping this process.

Paper #1
Title	How Children Incorporate Belief Strength into Intuitive Theories of Belief Change
Presenting author	Pearl Han Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Paper #2
Title	Children’s and adults’ beliefs about the benefits of talking to someone with a different belief
Presenting author	Dr. Kirsten H. Blakey, University of Toronto, Canada

Paper #3
Title	Children's developing ability to adjust their beliefs reasonably in light of disagreement
Presenting author	Antonia Frederike Langenhoff, Stanford University, United States

Paper #4
Title	How Parents' Testimony affects Children’s Formation of Negative Bias about Social Groups
Presenting author	Ms. Yeon Ju Suh, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Pearl Han Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States; Laura Soter, Ph.D., , United States

⇦ Back to schedule