Should I believe you, or what you say? Children's belief of children's statements.

Two experiments with 4–11 yr olds examined the determinants of Ss' belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other Ss. The relative age and social dominance of the S transmitting the message were varied against message type and against the age of the S receiving the message. In Exp I, conducted with 320 Ss, messages were solutions to a practical problem and varied only in plausibility; belief was assessed in terms of solution adoption. In Exp II, messages were personal statements about the transmitter, truth/falsity and objectivity/subjectivity of messages were additionally varied, and belief was assessed by requesting a judgment from the S receiving the message. Data show that in the older Ss (7 and 9 yrs), complex inferences from transmitter characteristics to truth were flexibly deployed as a supplement to a greater capacity to discriminate between message types. Differential responses in the 2 studies and on the objectivity/subjectivity dimension are interpreted as supporting Piaget's claim that younger children do not assess statements in terms of the speaker's intentions. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)