Biased decision‐making: developing an understanding of how positive and negative relationships may skew judgments
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The current experiment examines if and when children consider the possibility of relationships skewing judgments when evaluating judgments in different contexts. Eighty-seven 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults heard stories about judges who made decisions matching or mismatching possible relationship biases (e.g. a judge choosing a friend or an enemy as the winner) in contests with objective or subjective criteria. While even 6-year-olds distinguished between subjective and objective contests, neither children nor adults focused on the objectivity of the contest criteria when evaluating a judge's claims. Instead, by age 8, if not earlier, children focused on relationships, trusting judgments that mismatched someone's relationship biases and discounting judgments that matched someone's relationship biases. The findings also suggested that children are better at recognizing that a judgment may have been biased than predicting that one will be, and that they may understand that negative relationships may skew judgments before positive ones.
Source: Developmental Science
Authors: Candice M. Mills, Meridith G. Grant
Institution: The University of Texas at Dallas
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Stichting Kinderen Kankervrij
OpenAlex ID: W2070501248