Adolescents’ judgements about the evidential basis for complex beliefs

Abstract

Participants aged between 13 and 60 years read vignettes describing conflicting interpretations of limited evidence, explained why the different interpretations arose, and judged the importance of further evidence in resolving the dispute. Our focus was on participants’ views about how minds interpret information: Was their emphasis more on internal, psychological, or on external, information-based, factors in accounting for the existence of different interpretations? Participants of all ages agreed that further evidence would not be sufficient to resolve a value-laden dispute (whether youngsters should learn to drive) and explained the different views in terms of internal factors. However, younger participants discriminated less than older ones between the driving dispute and a dispute about a scientific/medical issue (the cause of a skin disease), and were less inclined to judge that views about the skin disease would be influenced by further evidence. We suggest that among people who accept the possibility of different interpretations of the same information, there are age-related differences in the importance placed on internal psychological processes in the construction of disparate views. Adolescents, compared with people who are older, seem to be particularly prone to assume that idiosyncratic interpretations will persist.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baxter-Magolda

M.B.

(1992). Knowing and reasoning in college: Gender-related patterns in students’ intellectual development San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Carpendale

J.M.

, & Chandler

(1996). On the distinction between false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretive theory of mind. Child Development, 67, 1686–1709.

Chandler

, Boyes

, & Ball

(1990). Relativism and stations of epistemic doubt. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 50, 370–395.

Clinchy

McV., & Mansfield

A.F.

(1999). Integrating objectivity and subjectivity: Epistemological development from 9 to 16 years of age. Poster presentation at Meetings of Society for Research in Child Development, Albuquerque, April 1999.

Driver

, Leach

, Miller

, & Scott

(1996). Young people's images of science. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Harrison

(1980). Readability in the classroom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hofer

B.K.

, & Pintrich

P.R.

(1997). The development of epistemological theories: Beliefs about knowledge and knowing and their relation to learning. Review of Educational Research, 67, 88–140.

King

P.M.

, & Kitchener

K.S.

(1994). Developing reflective judgment Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescence and adults. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Kitchener

K.S.

(1983). Cognition, metacognition and epistemic cognition. Human Development, 26, 222–232.

10.

Klaczynski

P.A.

, & Narasimham

(1998). Development of scientific reasoning biases: Cognitive versus ego-protective explanations. Developmental Psychology, 34, 175–187.

11.

Kuhn

(1991). The skills of argument Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

12.

Kuhn

(2000). Theory of mind, metacognition and reasoning. In Mitchell

, & Riggs

K.J.

(Eds.), Children's reasoning and the mind (pp. 301–302). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

13.

Kuhn

, Amsel

, & O'Loughlin

(1988). The development of scientific reasoning skills. New York: Academic Press.

14.

Leadbeater

(1986). The resolution of relativism in adult thinking: Subjective, objective or conceptual? Human Development, 29, 291–300.

15.

Mansfield

A.F.

, & Clinchy

B. McV.

, (1997). Toward the integration of objectivity and subjectivity: A longitudinal study of epistemological development between the ages of 9 and 13. Poster presentation at Meetings of Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC.

16.

Perry

W.G.

(1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

17.

Pillow

B.H.

, & Henrichon

A.J.

(1996). There's more to the picture than meets the eye: Young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation. Child Development, 67, 803–819.

18.

Pillow

B.H.

, & Weed

S.T.

(1995). Children's understanding of biased interpretation: Generality and limitations. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 347–366.

19.

Robinson

E.J.

, & Apperly

I.A.

(1998). Adolescents’ and adults’ views about the evidential basis for beliefs: relativism and determinism re-examined. Developmental Science, 1, 279–289.

20.

Robinson

E.J.

& Robinson

W.P.

(1983). Children's uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous messages. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 36, 81–96.

21.

Smith

, & Baltes

P.B.

(1990). Wisdom related knowledge: Age/cohort differences in response to life-planning problems. Developmental Psychology, 26, 494–505.

22.

Sodian

, & Thoemer

(2000). Elementary school children's understanding of the nature of science: The notions of testing and explanation Paper presented at the British Psychological Society Developmental Section Meeting, Bristol, UK.

23.

Sodian

, Thoemer

, Schrempp

, & Bullock

(1999). Understanding the nature of scientific knowledge-what develops from early adolescence to adulthood? Poster presentation at IXth European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Spetses, Greece.