The heating system in our house is not so great. My wife and I knew this when we bought the house, and this summer, we decided that we would do something about it. We've had three heating contractors come to the house. Each said something different. The first wanted to install a heat pump. The second thought a heat pump wouldn't be effective and suggested a particularly kind of boiler to use with our existing radiators. The third suggested ripping out the radiators and replacing them with baseboard heating. Each seemed convinced of his assessment, and talked my wife and I through the advantages and disadvantages, and the price (which were all surprisingly similar).
My wife and I also recently took our daughter for her two month doctor visit. Paulina received her first vaccinations. Before the visit, we had talked with the doctor about what schedule of vaccinations she would be on and what combinations of vaccines were available. We have a friend who's also a pediatrician (with a daughter born on the same day as ours), and we talked about this issue with her. She gave us exactly the same advice our doctor gave us.
Let me start by saying that I'm not an expert in heating, nor am I a medical doctor. That said, the doctors inspired trust; the heating contractors, less so.
There's a lot of research on how children learn to trust the information they learn from others. Paul Harris and Melissa Koenig brought this issue to the field's attention in a set of articles over the past few years. They argued that most information in the world is not directly observable, and that you need other people and social interaction to function. In order to learn the meaning of words, for example, children need to know that other people supply them with information. So, Harris and Koenig argued that a serious question in cognitive development is when do children recognize that some people are more or less reliable sources of information, and do they treat the information generated by these individuals differently?
As an example, Koenig and Harris (2005) introduced preschoolers to two adult confederates. An experimenter showed the child and the two adults a set of familiar objects, one at a time. Each confederate was asked to label the objects. One always generated the reliable label (e.g., she called a shoe a "shoe"). The other always generated an unreliable label (e.g., she called the same shoe a "horse"). After being trained with a few familiar objects, the experimenter brought out a novel object - an object that children would not be able to reliably label. Each confederate referred to this object with a novel label (e.g., one called it a dax, the other called it a wug). Children were then asked what they thought the object was called. They usually went with the reliable individual's label.
I'd be remiss here if I didn't mention the work of my former undergraduate student Kathleen Corriveau. Kathleen, who is now a graduate student working with Harris, just published a paper in Child Development, which I think is particularly important for the interrelation between cognitive development and parenthood. Working with colleagues who study parent-child relationships, she took a group of preschoolers and gave them procedures similar to the set up that Koenig and Harris used. In one of these tasks, children and two confederates saw pictures of animals that were made to be ambiguous - they were altered to appear like 50% of one animal and 50% of another. I attached a link to the paper, which has some examples:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kcorriv/Papers/corriveau%20et%...
Unlike Koenig and Harris's procedure, where the two confederates were strangers, here, one of the confederates was the child's mother (the other confederate was a stranger). Five-year-olds saw these 50-50 pictures, and the experimenter asked the mother and the stranger what they thought this animal was called. The mother generated one interpretation of the picture; the stranger generated the other.
You might think that children would naturally go with the mother's interpretation, and indeed, that's what the majority of children did. However, it depended on the nature of the relationship children had with their mothers. These children were taken from a longitudinal study of attachment - at 15 months old, they had been given the classic "strange situation" task, which measured their attachment style with their mother. Children with secure relations with their mother (i.e., children who were securely attached) endorsed their mother's label about two-thirds of the time. Children whose attachment style was insecure-avoidant were less likely to respond this way (they responded more at chance levels), and children who were insecure-resistant were more likely to respond this way. Corriveau and colleagues cite Mary Ainsworth, who pioneered the study of attachment, as describing avoidant children as children who "typically explore the environment independently and avoid interaction with the caregiver" and resistant children as being "preoccupied with the caregiver to the detriment of independent and collaborative exploration of the environment" (p. 753). Seen in this light, these findings are not surprising - the avoidant children appear to trust their mothers less, and the resistant children are over-reliant on their caregiver.
This study suggests that the relation children have with their parents influences the extent to which they view their parents are reliable sources of information. This is important because children probably rely on their parents as sources of information for more than just the meaning of words (which typically coincide with others' utterances). Any coherent set of beliefs about convention or unobservable events must be acquired from others. For example, children are told to wash our hands to get rid of germs that never actually see. They're also told that they (and everything for that matter) are made of tiny little particles that we theorize (with good reason) are there. But even more than that, one has to wonder what the foundations of political, economic, and religious beliefs are if not our parents.
A degree of skepticism is healthy, and probably worth fostering in children - otherwise, children might never seek out information on their own. But it's also the case that children's belief in the reliability of individuals - particularly the ones supplying them with the most information - is critical.
Also, there's an important lesson for cognitive development researchers here - researchers tend to take a group of children and present their average behavior as what they can do. Corriveau's study suggests that this isn't always the right approach - there are contextual factors that explain (some of) the noise in children's responses, particularly on ambiguous or difficult tasks. Sometimes variance in children's responses is just that - but sometimes it's explained by other cognitive or social factors that influence development. This is worth exploring as part of a mechanism for cognitive development, and is often not given careful consideration.
For the record, we did vaccinate our daughter (there wasn't really any question about our doing this), and we're going with the baseboard guy. The consensus associated with the former was nice (it turns out that Corriveau has also performed studies that suggest consensus is critical for learning from others). Because there wasn't consensus with the heating contractors, I'll just say that baseboard was the option my wife and I had thought about prior to having the contractors visit. But, how we (and children) make decisions based on the interaction between existing beliefs and present data is another topic.
