What is it about?
Children rely on other people for much of what they know, from everyday facts to ideas about right and wrong. But when do they value figuring things out for ourselves over taking someone else's word for it? In two studies with over 400 children and adults in the United States and China, we examined how people evaluate two reasoners who reach the same conclusion in different ways: one through independent thinking, and one by relying on what someone else told her. When the judgments concerned morality (for example, whether it is wrong to push someone), adults in both countries strongly preferred the independent thinker and judged her as more trustworthy, likable, and knowledgeable. But when the judgments concerned simple facts (such as whether there is a book in a backpack), adults no longer preferred independent thinking — trusting others was seen as perfectly reasonable. Children showed a different pattern. Chinese children as young as four preferred the independent reasoner in both moral and factual contexts, while U.S. children only developed a preference for independent moral reasoning by age six, and showed no clear preference when the claims were factual.
Featured Image
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Knowing when to think for yourself and when to defer to others is an important part of becoming a competent thinker. These findings show that by adulthood, people apply different standards depending on the kind of knowledge at stake: moral beliefs are seen as something we ought to reason through ourselves, whereas facts can reasonably be learned through others. The studies also show that children's ideas about "good thinking" are shaped by cultural environments. This work has practical implications for education and parenting: it highlights that children are not just acquiring knowledge content from the adults around them, but also actively forming views about which ways of knowing are legitimate .
Perspectives
This project grew out of a question that has fascinated me for a long time: how do children balance their own thinking with what others tell them? We often think of young children as sponges who absorb information from the adults around them, but this research suggests that even preschoolers have intuitions about when independent thinking is admirable and when deferring to others is perfectly appropriate. What surprised me most was the cultural pattern in children's responses. Chinese children (as young as four) showed an earlier and more consistent preference for independent reasoners than their U.S. peers. This complicates familiar narratives about East Asian educational cultures as primarily promoting deference, and points instead to a rich set of values around effort, responsibility, and intellectual autonomy that children may pick up from their environments. I hope this work encourages readers to think about the subtle ways that cultures transmit not only knowledge itself, but also beliefs about what counts as good thinking.
Pearl Han Li
University of Wisconsin Madison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Weighing first- and second-hand information: How children and adults evaluate sources of moral and factual knowledge across two cultures., Developmental Psychology, April 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/dev0002174.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
