Chapter 17: Children’s Selective Trust in Others: Developments, Practices and Problems

When discussing children’s learning, scenarios that frequently come to mind involve the classroom and the home, situations where children are constantly exploring and being “taught” information by teachers and parents. Traditional views of children’s knowledge acquisition have focused on the role of the child in learning, the “child as miniature scientist” model put forth by Piaget (e.g., Piaget, 1965). According to this perspective, children act in ways that test their internal theories by exploring the world and learning information through direct experience. Indeed, this model of knowledge acquisition, termed “genetic epistemology,” has promoted several important lines of research that examine how children acquire conceptual knowledge of physical, biological and psychological phenomena, and emphasize how children actively explore and evaluate observable evidence. The foundations to these conceptual systems are built at quite early ages, with infants showing rudimentary sensitivity to morality (Hamlin, Bloom, & Wynn, 2007), number (Wynn, 1992), word boundaries (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), and many other types of information at just a few months of age. In later childhood, children demonstrate learning from both direct and indirect experiences across diverse tasks (e.g., direct instruction or mimicry in problem-solving puzzle tasks; Chavajay & Rogoff, 2002).