Children can understand falsification through evidence as early as age 4

A study in Germany found that, at 4 years of age, approximately half of children demonstrated the ability to provide valid verbal counterarguments. This percentage increased to 70% at 5.5 years old. At 4 years of age, 90% of children were able to select evidence that clearly refutes a false causal claim and proves the correct one. The paper was published in Developmental Psychology.

Scientific argumentation is the process of using evidence and reasoning to support, challenge, or revise explanations about how the world works. Rather than simply stating an opinion, a scientific argument connects a claim to observations or other evidence that can show why the claim should be accepted or rejected.

An important part of this process is being able to distinguish strong evidence from weak or misleading evidence, especially when several possible explanations exist. Scientific argumentation also involves considering alternative explanations and identifying evidence that could disconfirm a favored hypothesis.

These skills are central not only to scientific research but also to everyday decisions in which people must evaluate competing claims. They have become increasingly important in a world where people encounter large amounts of conflicting information through the internet and social media.

Study author Özgün Köksal and colleagues studied early scientific argumentation abilities and their development in preschool children. They focused on the development of these abilities from 4 to 5.5 years of age.

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Study participants were 222 children from an urban area in Germany. The study authors note that participants predominantly came from White middle-class families. After some children dropped out or were excluded for various reasons, the final sample consisted of 191 4-year-olds. 85 of them were girls.

When the children reached 5.5 years of age, 25 more children dropped out and 1 was excluded, resulting in a total of 179 5.5-year-old participants. The children did not have any diagnosed developmental delays or disorders.

At both time points (when the children were 4 and when they were 5.5 years old) the children participated in two research sessions 2 weeks apart. The sessions were video and audio recorded. This study was a part of a larger project in which children completed many different tasks. The authors of this study focused on the children’s performance in the argumentation task.

The argumentation task consisted of two main phases: a learning phase and a test phase. The whole task lasted approximately 15 minutes. The learning phase was focused on children discovering what causes an LED light on a lightbox to switch on. There were 13 paper boxes varying in size and shape, some having a black dot and some not. The study authors set the light to activate when a paper box with that black dot was set on the lightbox, while the size and shape of the paper box were irrelevant.

At the start, the experimenter introduced a child to a puppet by having the child play simple games with the puppet and learning that the puppet can make mistakes. In the next part of this phase, children interacted with the lightbox and paper boxes and explored which boxes activate the light and which do not. They learned that it is the paper boxes with the black dot that activate the light.

In the test phase, the puppet made an incorrect claim about which features activate the light, such as claiming that size is important. The study authors then observed how children provided counterarguments and asked questions to get them to elaborate on their arguments.

In the last part of this phase, children were tasked to refute the puppet’s false claim by choosing an object. They chose between one object that could clearly be used to refute the puppet’s claim and another that was not good evidence. More specifically, the puppet claimed that big objects cause light. The clear evidence object had the black dot, but was small (meaning it was not big). The other object had the black dot, but was also big, and thus did not constitute clear evidence that the size of an object does not matter.

This setup was used when the children were 4 years old. When the children were 5.5 years old, the materials differed. The study authors used thirteen cubes differing in material (wood versus Styrofoam) and color, and having a silver stripe or not, but the principles were the same. The games used during the warm-up were also somewhat different.

The study authors also used the results of assessments of children’s general cognitive abilities and knowledge, executive functions (mental skills that include memory, flexible thinking, and self-control), theory of mind abilities (the ability to recognize mental states of others, and understand what they are thinking, believing, or feeling), and metacognition (the awareness of one’s own psychological processes).

Results showed that, in the learning phase of the argumentation task, 97% of 4-year-olds and 99% of 5.5-year-olds correctly predicted whether the objects they interacted with would trigger the light or not. In the testing phase, when the puppet made a false hypothesis about what triggers the light, 62% of 4-year-olds and 74% of 5.5-year-olds disagreed with it.

Importantly, at 4 years of age, around half of the children demonstrated the ability to provide valid verbal counterarguments. This increased to 70% at 5.5 years of age. At 4 years of age, 90% of children (who all knew the cause of the light) were able to deliberately choose clear disconfirming evidence in response to the puppet’s false claims about what causes light (the object that had a black dot, but was not big). The ability to provide valid arguments was found to be correlated with some aspects of children’s cognitive abilities, but these associations were generally weak.

The study authors concluded that as early as 4 years old, children exhibit a genuine understanding of proving a claim false through evidence. They can distinguish clear, isolated evidence from ambiguous, mixed evidence when confronted with a claim they know to be false. The associations with cognitive abilities suggest that the development in argumentation from 4 to 5.5 years of age primarily revolves around the capacity to use diverse evidence. This is related to children’s ability to understand multiple complex rules and perspectives.

The study contributes to scientific knowledge about human cognitive development. However, the study was conducted on a group of children from predominantly middle-class families in an urban area of Germany, a highly developed country. The study authors report that 74% of mothers of participating children had a university education. Results on children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds might differ.

The paper, “Let Me Show Why You Are Wrong”: The Origins of Scientific Argumentation, Its Development, and Cognitive Predictors, was authored by Özgün Köksal, Andrea Saffran, and Beate Sodian.