"How well adults can detect if children are lying or reporting misinformation is no better than the odds of chance, reports a new Cornell study. The findings have implications for physical and sexual abuse investigations, which often rely heavily on children's eyewitness reports."
Read the rest here: http://www.ecnmag.com/News/Feeds/2011/10/pipes-output-adults-cant-tell-when-kids-are-lying-or-misinforme/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
It does not matter to adults if kids ae lying or not.
If they are accusing, it's cha-ching, and who cares about truth or justice when thar's Gold in them thar kids!
There was a not disimilar article in the Guardian (UK) shortly after Amanda Knox's acquittal ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/amanda-knox-facial-expressions ). People drastically over-estimate their ability to read other people and this means that the whole notion of feminine intuition is a myth. The reason why people over-estimate their ability can be explained quite simply. Let us assume three things:
1. 90% of people are trustworthy.
2. A person actually trusts 50% of the people, deciding which 50% to trust through 'intuition'.
3. Their ability to make a correct decision is no better than chance.
The results will be;
1. They will correctly trust 45% of the people they meet (50% x 90%).
2. They will be let down by 5% (what is known in statistics as a type I error).
3. The will fail to trust 45%, when they could have done (type II error).
4. They will correctly mistrust 5%.
They will perceive that 90% of the people they have trusted are trustworthy. But they will also perceive that they were right about 100% of the people they don't trust, because these people have not had the chance to prove them wrong, giving an overall perceived success rate of 95%%. This has nothing to do with their ability to make correct judgements and everything to do with the proportion of people in society who are trustworthy and their overall wilingness to trust people.
At a recent training course the trainer said that women are hard-wired to be less trusting than men. This makes sense since the decision is based on 'what is the worst that could happen if I trust this person?'. Since you are rarely, if ever, proved wrong about someone you fail to trust, it is hardly surprising if women appear to have better judgement.
If there is a disagreement between a husband and wife on whether to trust someone, it is usually the man who wants to at least give someone a chance and the woman who doesn't, which goes along with the biological theory. The man knows that if he doesn't agree with her, he won't hear the last of it and that the long-term consequence of such disagreements might be the break-up of the marriage, with all that that entails.
Malcolm - it's not true to say 100% of the time you never find out you could have trusted somemone you didn't.
I have on a number of occasions found out I totally mistook, misunderstood or was wrong about my "intuition" to distrust.
It's why I don't trust myself.
My husband IS more inclined to give others the benefit of a doubt, and once in awhile he is right. More often I am right. I'm not a "never let him forget about it" person, but his mistakes are often very costly and I don't have to rub his nose in it.
Post a Comment