Checking our sources: the origins of trust in testimony, Paul L. Harris
Paul L. Harris, Checking our sources: the origins of trust in testimony,’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), p. 315-333
p. 317 - The attractiveness of the psychological view on cognitive development:
‘The image of the naive—and stubborn—thinker that emerges in both of these research endeavours has various attractive features for the conduct of psychological research. First, with respect to the study of cognitive development, it invites a universal research programme. After all, if cognitive development is primarily constrained by: (i) autonomous theorising on the part of the cognising child and (ii) encounters with various regular and easily observed physical, mental and biological phenomena, then it is likely that children everywhere arrive at—and in due course revise—the same fundamental convictions, whatever the particular cultural and historical period in which they are growing up. By implication, the study of cognitive development can move beyond a mere catalogue or taxonomy of local belief systems. It can instead chart a universal set of assumptions that constrain human cognition at all times and in all places.’
p. 318 - ‘Suppose that young children readily acquire information but do not monitor how and when they acquire it. Such disregard for the way in which a piece of knowledge is acquired would imply that young children should be equally willing—or equally unwilling—to incorporate new information, irrespective of its source.’
p. 319 - Presents the results of an experiment that seems to show that children are insenstive to how or even when they acquired knowledge. It seems to show that, at least for a child, it is beneficial to believe you have known recently acquired information for quite awhile.
p. 321 - ‘Insofar as the perceptual channel antedates the verbal channel both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it would not be surprising if greater trust or weight were placed on the perceptual channel. However, the fact that young children are poor at discriminating between the two sources of information undermines that assumption.’
p. 322 - Suggests we don’t ‘encode’ perceptual vs. testimonial information in a significantly different fashion.
p. 323-4 - Suggests that we do not have significant differences when it comes to the recall of a situation irrespective of the ‘inputs.’
p. 326 - ‘A plausible interpretation of this pattern of findings is that when participants answered the questions, they retrieved a situation model based on their earlier viewing of the visual material. Thus, in deciding whether or not the man was anxious, they visualised his opening the door, and incorporated into that representation the item implied by the question, namely the wristwatch. By contrast, participants who only read the narrative—and answered no questions—could construct a situation model without reference to their memory for the visual material. By implication, the chances of intertwining material from the two sources and of confusing one source with another are increased whenever a common situation model is deployed for processing information from the two sources.’
‘Rather than emphasising the deficits of the human memory system when confronting legal practice, we may ask what features of its design lead to such errors, and whether those features confer any advantages in everyday life. A plausible answer is that the design of the human memory system gives priority to the integration rather than the separation of information from different sources. In particular, it permits us to integrate information gathered on the basis of first-hand observation with information gathered on the basis of testimony.’
p. 328 - A child’s strange notion of trust:
‘A large body of evidence now shows that up until the age of approximately four years, children do not appear to realise that beliefs—including their own—may be false (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Suppose, for example, that children are shown a pencil case, and they duly say that it contains pencils. If they then open it up to discover that there are marbles rather than pencils inside, they will claim that they knew all along that there were marbles inside—failing to acknowledge their initial mistaken belief. More generally, children of this age find it difficult to appreciate that the accuracy of their beliefs critically depends on access to veridical information. They do not appear to grasp that if they are presented with limited, deceptive or false information, they will be misled. The implication of these findings is not so much that children are trusting. If anything their predicament is more profound—having no conception that they might be wrong, the very question of whether to trust or mistrust a given source of information should never arise in their mind.’
