证词自信度和自主探索综合影响5岁儿童的因果推理

The influence of testimony's confidence and exploration on 5-year-old children's causal inference

开展两个实验探讨证词的自信度和儿童的自主探索对5岁儿童因果推理的综合影响。84名儿童(平均年龄63.7月,男50)参与实验1,探究成人证词和儿童自主探索获得的(与证词矛盾的)证据对儿童因果推理的影响;54名儿童(平均年龄63.9月,男28)参与实验2,探究更多与证词矛盾的证据是否减轻儿童对成人证词的依赖。结果显示:与探索获得2次与证词矛盾的证据相比,更多5岁儿童在探索获得4次与证词矛盾的证据后依据自主探索结果推断因果关系;证词的自信度差异并不影响儿童的因果推理表现。研究结果支持理性观点及其预测:儿童受证词影响的程度依赖于儿童观察到矛盾证据的机会。

The knowledge of statistical information, experimental results and informant’s testimonies can provide important help for children to understand science world. In the past decade, the psychological mechanism of the interaction of the three kinds of information in children’s scientific thinking has not been elucidated. In this study, research paradigm from Bridgers et al.（2016） had been used to explore the interaction of independent exploration and informant testimony on physical causal reasoning of 5-year-old children. Moreover, children’s perception of testimony’s reliability and informant’s self-awareness had been analyzed simultaneously. The proposed approach is supported by two experiments which can be summarized as follows. Experiment 1 adopted a 2×2 completely randomized design. The independent variable is the confidence of testimony（two levels： self-confidence, not-confidence） and the number of children’s independent exploration（two levels： no-exploration, nine-exploration）. The dependent variable is the frequency of children’s choice of candidate cause. Informant’s testimony（such as A is more likely to cause an effect than B） was given by an adult female in a laptop, and children played with a music box to get evidences contradicting testimony（B is more likely to cause an effect than A）. In this paper, 84 preschool children（50 boys and 34 girls, mean age 63.7 months） took part in experiment 1. The results show that there are more children choose cause contradicting testimony in nine-exploration level than in no-exploration level, but the difference between treatments was not statistically significant. Moreover, children are not sensitive to the testimony’s reliability and informant’s self-awareness. Experiment 1 found that the evidences support cause B did not significantly improved child’s choice of cause B, in condition that testimony support cause A. The possible reason is the amount of evidence that support cause B is too small. To test this hypothesis, Experiment 2 used a big amount of evidence that support cause B to explore the interaction of independent exploration and informant’s testimony. A single factor completely random experimental design was adopted in experiment 2, and the independent variable is the confidence of testimony（two levels： self-confidence, not-confidence）. Experimental procedure is the same as the nine-exploration level in experiment 1. There were 54 preschool children（28 boys and 26 girls, mean age 63.9 months） took part in experiment 2, and each child independently played with a music box eighteen times. The results show that children are more likely to choose cause contradicting testimony in the eighteen-exploration level than in no-exploration level（experiment 1）. Once again, children are not sensitive to testimony’s reliability and informant’s self-awareness.The results of two experiments indicate that 5-year-old children can integrate the evidence from independent exploration and the testimony from informant to infer causality relationship. The number of children who choose cause contradicting testimony is increased by the increase in the number of evidence contradicting testimony. The follow-up research should focus on the interaction effect between the exploration of preschool child, the results of adult’s experiment and the testimony from informants, and focus on how to motivate children to evaluate adult’s self-awareness and credibility.