Children Prefer Diverse Samples for Inductive Reasoning in the Social Domain

Not all samples of evidence are equally conclusive: Diverse evidence is more representative than narrow evidence. Prior research showed that children did not use sample diversity in evidence selection tasks, indiscriminately choosing diverse or narrow sets (tiger–mouse; tiger–lion) to learn about an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2016-07, Vol.87 (4), p.1090-1098
Main Authors: Noyes, Alexander, Christie, Stella
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Biology
Child
Child Behavior - physiology
Child development
Child Development - physiology
Child, Preschool
Children
Cognition & reasoning
EMPIRICAL REPORTS
Evidence
Female
Humans
Inductive reasoning
Learning
Learning - physiology
Logical Thinking
Male
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Preferences
Property
Social Perception
Thinking - physiology
Toys
Young Children
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Summary:Not all samples of evidence are equally conclusive: Diverse evidence is more representative than narrow evidence. Prior research showed that children did not use sample diversity in evidence selection tasks, indiscriminately choosing diverse or narrow sets (tiger–mouse; tiger–lion) to learn about animals. This failure is not due to a general deficit of inductive reasoning, but reflects children's belief about the category and property at test. Five- to 7 year-olds' inductive reasoning (n = 65) was tested in two categories (animal, people) and properties (toy preference, biological property). As stated earlier, children ignored diverse evidence when learning about animals' biological properties. When learning about people's toy preferences, however, children selected the diverse samples, providing the most compelling evidence to date of spontaneous selection of diverse evidence.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/cdev.12522