Children begin weighing confidence in others’ opinions by age 8, study suggests

Children tend to form new beliefs by evaluating the confidence of others who disagree with each other, according to a study published in Developmental Science. By around age 8, children not only rely on confident individuals when those individuals disagree, but also appear capable of integrating conflicting information into a novel middle-ground conclusion when both sources seem equally sure of themselves.

This ability to consider and combine competing perspectives based on how strongly they are expressed may represent an important shift in how children learn from others, indicating a move from simply copying information to actively interpreting it.

Social disagreement is common—even in situations that seem straightforward, such as recalling something that was just seen. For children, who tend to rely heavily on others to learn about the world, these moments can pose a challenge. Prior research has shown that children often prefer to trust people who seem confident or knowledgeable. But most past studies forced children to choose between two options, leaving out the possibility that the truth might lie somewhere in between.

The researchers behind the new study were interested in whether children can form new ideas that are not directly offered by either person when confronted with conflicting testimony. In particular, they wanted to know whether children could strategically use differences in confidence to weigh opinions and reach their own conclusions—similar to how adults tend to combine uncertain information to make judgments.

“I’ve always wondered where new ideas come from,” said study author Carolyn Baer, an assistant professor of psychology at Trent University. “Can we create genuinely new ideas? Or are new ideas just new combinations of old ideas? At the same time, I’m interested in how we make sense of ambiguous or conflicting input. Is disagreement necessarily a bad thing, or can we leverage it to generate better decisions?”

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The study included 92 children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. These children were recruited from zoos, museums, and schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. They completed a 15-minute computer task in which they played the role of a detective helping to identify a mischievous “monster criminal.”

Each child saw a lineup of four monsters, each with slightly different visual features such as the number of spots on their stomach. Two “witness monsters” provided testimony about who committed the misdeed. These witnesses either agreed or disagreed, and their statements were delivered with either high or low confidence, expressed through tone, speed, and word choice.

The researchers designed three key conditions:

• In the Same Answer condition, both witnesses pointed to the same suspect.
• In the Different Answer, Same Confidence condition, the witnesses disagreed but were equally confident.
• In the Different Answer, Different Confidence condition, the witnesses disagreed and one was noticeably more confident than the other.

Children were given the option to select any of the four suspects, including one who had not been endorsed by either witness. This middle option was considered a way to test whether children could integrate both perspectives rather than simply choosing one.

Children’s decisions tended to reflect a strategic use of confidence cues. In situations where one witness was more confident than the other, children across all ages in the study were more likely to choose the option endorsed by the more confident individual. This suggests that even the youngest children were sensitive to confidence as a signal of credibility.

But the most notable pattern emerged when both witnesses were equally confident yet offered conflicting answers. In this case, older children—particularly those 8 years and above—were significantly more likely to choose the middle option, indicating that they were combining the two views to reach a new belief that neither person had explicitly offered.

Younger children (ages 5 to 7), by contrast, did not show a strong preference for the midpoint in this condition and appeared to choose randomly or favor one of the provided answers.

When both witnesses agreed, children across all age groups typically selected the agreed-upon suspect, which aligns with earlier studies showing that children tend to follow consensus when there’s no conflict.

The researchers also noted that children were not simply choosing options at random. The pattern of their choices—favoring the midpoint only when it made sense to do so—indicated a more rational decision-making process. The results point to a developmental shift around age 8, when children begin to reliably generate novel conclusions from conflicting information sources based on how confident those sources seem.

“Children are tuned in to how confident others appear, and they use that confidence to help understand what to believe,” Baer told PsyPost. “Children generally trust answers that are presented confidently rather than answers presented hesitantly. But, kids are also very savvy: If two people disagree with equal confidence, children start looking for alternatives in the middle of the two answers. We see this as an essential step in children’s critical thinking – not just as passive learners, but as active creators of knowledge.”

Importantly, the study also reveals that children do not default to averaging opinions unless it seems justified by the situation. When one witness was clearly more confident, children did not simply split the difference—they leaned toward the view that seemed more reliable. This adds weight to the idea that their reasoning is context-sensitive rather than driven by fixed rules or habits.

One of the key limitations of the study is its reliance on a relatively narrow demographic sample, with most participants drawn from upper-middle-class communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. This raises questions about how generalizable the findings may be to children from different backgrounds or cultures.

Another limitation involves the artificial nature of the task. While the monster-themed detective game was designed to be engaging and clear, real-life disagreements often involve more complex information, emotional stakes, or social dynamics. The researchers acknowledge that children’s willingness to integrate information in a controlled setting may not fully reflect how they navigate conflicts in everyday life.

“It’s worth noting that our study always had a reasonable middle ground (6 dots is clearly in the middle of 4 and 8),” Baer noted. “There are lots of disagreements that people have where a middle ground might be a lot more complex! The actual ‘equation’ children’s minds use to figure out the best answer is probably a lot more complicated than what we asked of them in this study. There are times when we know someone has a history of being overconfident, for example, where kids would need to adjust how much trust they put in that person’s confidence.”

Future studies could explore how children weigh other indicators of credibility beyond confidence, such as expertise or past accuracy. The researchers also suggest examining whether different types of “middle ground” ideas—such as additive versus average solutions—are easier for children to grasp.

“We’re aiming to understand how children, and people more broadly, navigate disagreement,” Baer explained. “One next step is to look at how children balance the social aspects of disagreement with the goal to find the best answer. Do we prioritize harmony or truth? Could prompting people to consider social consequences make them more open to compromise?”

“Another is to look at what kinds of middle grounds might be easier to grasp. Perhaps middle grounds that ‘average’ two ideas are really tough, but middle grounds that ‘add’ two ideas are more intuitive. We can think here about orange as an ‘average’ of red and yellow, versus a half red and half yellow object being the ‘addition’ of the two. If we can learn more about what makes middle grounds more appealing for children, then we can learn how to frame disagreements to encourage kids (and adults!) to look for better compromises.”

The study, “Children Use the Relative Confidence of People With Conflicting Perspectives to Form Their Own Beliefs,” was authored by Carolyn Baer, Jan M. Engelmann, and Celeste Kidd.