Four-Year Olds Respond to Misinformation by Exercising Instinctive Skepticism Muscles

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A different and perhaps more inventive tack entails accepting the inevitability of children spending time online and prodding them to become their own fact-checkers. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, tested such an approach by asking whether children could learn to recognize misinformation—and to use that ability to develop their own fact-checking skills.

Evan Orticio, a graduate student in the research group of Berkeley psychologist Celeste Kidd, and colleagues designed a study to investigate the natural fact-checking abilities of young children. The researchers went to parks near campus to interview families who might be willing to participate and recruited 122 children from four to seven years of age for a gamified fact-checking exercise. “We were looking,” Orticio says, “at whether children can adjust their level of skepticism according to the quality of information they’ve seen before and translate that into a reasonable policy for how much they should fact-check new information.”

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