Biased decision-making: developing an understanding of how positive and negative relationships may skew judgments.

Full 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.

Author information

Author/s: Mills, Candice M (CM); Grant, Meridith G (MG);

Affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA. candice.mills(-atsign-)utdallas.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Developmental science (Dev Sci), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Sep; vol 12 (issue 5) : pp 784-97

Dates: Created 2009/08/25; Completed 2009/11/02;

PMID: 19702770, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/2/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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