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Introduction
Testimony is essential for human beings to learn many different aspects of the world: our cultural norms and beliefs, historical and scientific concepts, specific skills for solving a wide range of problems, etc. A large part of this knowledge cannot be acquired by direct experience, but only from testimonial sources. However, while in many cases there is agreement among the testimonies provided by different persons about a specific issue (e.g., people usually apply the same labels to the same objects), in other cases, the testimonies may diverge, and the individual may not have enough information to weigh which of the different views is better or the right one. In such a state of uncertainty, the individual will probably be influenced by characteristics of the informants when deciding who is trustworthy. Indeed, trust in the source of information is one of the crucial variables for the acquisition of knowledge via testimony.
In recent years, a number of developmental psychologists have contributed to the study of testimony as a source of learning with fruitful empirical research about the determinants of children’s confidence in the testimony of others (for an overview of the subject, see the book edited by Robinson and Einav 2014; see also Harris 2012; Mills 2013). A common research procedure in this field has been the conflicting claims paradigm (Koenig et al. 2004) in which different informants express different views about a particular situation, and the child is asked to choose one of these views. The general findings indicate that there are two important heuristics in children’s endorsement of testimonial information: the degree of consensus (how many people say the same thing), and the epistemic competence or knowledge attributed to the informants. Thus, from the age of four, children are more inclined to endorse new information (for example, the names of unfamiliar objects) offered by a group in consensus rather than by a lone dissident (Corriveau et al. 2009). By the same age, children also take into account some epistemic aspects of the informants, such as their previous accuracy in the specific domain of the task. For example, when learning new words (Corriveau and Harris 2009; Koenig and Harris 2005) or the functions of new objects (Birch et al. 2008), children prefer the information...