Children and adults differ in their strategies for social learning

Adults and children rely heavily on other people’s testimony. However, domains of knowledge where there is no consensus on the truth are likely to result in conflicting testimonies. Previous research has demonstrated that in these cases, learners look towards the majority opinion to make decisions. However, it remains unclear how learners evaluate social information, given that considering either the overall valence, or the number of testimonies, or both may lead to different conclusions. We therefore formalized several social learning strategies and compared them to the performance of adults and children. We find that children use different strategies than adults. This suggests that the development of social learning may involve the acquisition of cognitive strategies.