Children’s prior experiences of their successes and failures modulate belief alignment

ABSTRACT

An ability to flexibly learn from others while at other times relying upon one’s own judgements is an important adaptive human capacity. The present research investigated how others’ epistemic states and prior experience of their own independent ability in a given task modulate young children’s selective learning. In particular, we asked whether 4-year-old children’s judgement concerning the location of a hidden object is modulated both by an informant’s knowledge states and by the absence/presence of a prior experience with a particular task. We found that the children were more likely to align their judgement according to the informant’s verbal report when the informant was knowledgeable than when she was ignorant – but only when they had explicitly experienced their own incapability to accurately guess an object’s location. The findings suggest that 4-year-old children are able to combine their own experience with others’ input to make their judgement.     

Don’t know,don’t care?

Philosophical Studies - My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is...     

A Person-Centred Perspective on Social Support in the Workplace

This research seeks to identify employees’ profiles characterised by distinct perceptions of three sources of social support at work (i.e., organisation, supervisor, and colleagues), and the extent to which these profiles generalise across two samples of workers (N = 185 and 387). This research also investigates the associations between the profiles and a series of outcomes. Latent profile analysis revealed five identical profiles in both samples: (1) moderately supported; (2) isolated; (3) supervisor supported; (4) weakly supported; and (5) highly supported. The most desirable outcomes (job satisfaction, performance, and affective commitment) were associated with Profile 5 (highly supported), while the highest levels of emotional exhaustion were observed in Profile 2 (isolated).