Sources of Information about People

If you were interested in gaining information about someone's personality (e.g., their honesty, or the extent to which they are outgoing) you would have many potential sources of available information. For example, you might simply ask the how honest they are or you might spend time observing them. You might also ask someone who knows the individual in question. In study that recently appeared in Developmental Psychology (Heyman & Legare, 2005), we asked children to evaluate different strategies such as these. The research which included 6- to 7-year-olds and 10- to 11-year-olds across four studies (with a total of 274 participants) demonstrated that children in the younger group viewed tended to view self-report in a very favorable light. In other words, they thought that asking someone about their personality characteristics is a really good way to learn about them. Older children also saw value in using a self-report strategy, but only for some kinds of traits or preferences. For example, they judged self-report as a good way to learn about how outgoing someone is or about their color preferences, but not as a good way to learn about highly evaluative characteristics like "honest" or "nice." For these highly evaluative characteristics, older children instead endorsed the power of their own observation.

Why might young children and older children show different patterns of reasoning about highly evaluative traits? Our results suggest that this is because older children like younger children are aware that these are the kinds of characteristics in which people are likely be motivated by a desire to present themselves in a favorable light rather than accurately reporting what they know. These age differences are also evident in children's explanations for why they thought that asking someone how honest they are is a good idea. For example, one young child responded that "if they are telling the truth and if you ask them to tell the truth then they better tell the truth otherwise it would be a lie." Another said that self-report is useful because "they'll tell the truth." In contrast, older children were likely to refer to the potential for distorting information. As one explained, a person "could be lying about being honest if they weren't honest." Another commented that "you can't always trust people by what they say because sometimes people make up what they talk about."

This research builds on our previous findings published in Psychological Science (Giles, Gopnik, & Heyman, 2002) suggesting that young children might benefit from instruction concerning potential problems with different sources of information, and how to evaluate discrepancies among sources of information.