Children Trust Adults over Other Children

A recent scientific study has determined that children tend to rely in authority figures when it comes to learning something new, such as the rules of a game, rather than trusting other children their own age. The work, which was conducted by German researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is detailed in the February 22 online issue of the British scientific Journal of Developmental Psychology, ScienceDaily reports.

Expert Dr Hannes Rakoczy, the leader of the new study, investigated a number of 44 children, all of which were aged three and four. In the experimental setup, the children were exposed to an invented game called “daxing”. In a video, a boy and a man were featured presenting the proper way to dax, with each of them naturally showing different methods. The children were then shown a puppet, which told them that it was time to dax. It then performed the game in a way that was similar to one of the two shown in the original video. As the children were watching, their reactions were recorded.

The scientists were able to determine that children reacted strongly when the puppet performed daxing in a manner similar to the one of the boy in the video. Conversely, the vast majority of children were more likely to recognize the method shown by the older man as the correct one. They were also found to be very likely to intervene when the puppet was daxing incorrectly, hinting at the fact that they tended to regard the man's views as holding preeminence over the ones expressed by the boy.

“The results from our study suggest that children prefer to learn from adults rather than other children when it comes to rule-governed activities like learning a new game. They also expect other people to learn and perform actions in the way that the adults do, demonstrated by the expectation that the puppet would also follow the adult actor's actions and not the boy's. These findings tell us that young children will accept adult's behavior as being right, and that adults behavior should be followed. This could have implications for wider social learning of both good and bad behavior,” the team leader concludes.