More than just agreement: Children's developing understanding that the power of consensus stems from independent experiences

Children and adults alike tend to rely on majority opinion to decide what is true. However, in many circumstances we are faced with contradictory explanations for phenomena, each shared by different consensus groups, with little knowledge about how each group's opinion was formed to help guide our decision. When a phenomenon has multiple competing explanations-such as why a species exhibits an unusual behavior or what caused a historical event-we must evaluate not only what different groups believe, but why those groups have come to different conclusions. In such cases, we may need to rely on what we know about the consensus group members themselves, including their social identities and relations with one another. Here we present three studies (N = 288 5- to 9-year-old children, 84 adults) investigating how children use the social composition of consensus groups (homogenous vs. diverse social group membership; distant vs. close proximity) to select which consensus explanation to seek, whether this varies as a function of the type of explanation sought (natural vs. cultural phenomena), and how children reason about these decisions. Our findings suggest increasing sophistication across childhood, with children increasingly coming to understand how social composition indicates more or less independent experiences leading to individuals' shared beliefs. This research provides preliminary insight into how children come to develop an increasing appreciation for the epistemic implications of social relations between consensus members, as reflected both by their choices of whose testimony to seek out and their explicit justification for those choices.