Title
Trusting What You're Told : How Children Learn from Others / Paul L. Harris.
ISBN
9780674065192
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2012]
Copyright
©2012
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (266 p.) : 3 halftones, 3 line illustrations, 19 graphs
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/harvard.9780674065192 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
155.4/1315
Summary
If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round-never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You're Told begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others. Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You're Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler's ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old's nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)
Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. Early Learning from Testimony
CHAPTER 2. Children's Questions
CHAPTER 3. Learning from a Demonstration
CHAPTER 4. Moroccan Birds and Twisted Tubes
CHAPTER 5. Trusting Those You Know?
CHAPTER 6. Consensus and Dissent
CHAPTER 7. Moral Judgment and Testimony
CHAPTER 8. Knowing What Is Real
CHAPTER 9. Death and the Afterlife
CHAPTER 10. Magic and Miracles
CHAPTER 11. Going Native
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index
