تفاوت های سنی در تأثیرات اجتماعی بر روی عملکرد شاهدان عینی کودکان و نظارت فراشناختی خود

The current work investigated the effects of social influence on children’s recall accuracy and metacognitive monitoring. Two studies were conducted in which 8- and 10-year-olds were confronted with postevent information in an interview situation. An interviewer (Study 1) or a confederate (Study 2) provided postevent information with two levels of assertiveness, inducing (a) a variation of conformity pressure and (b) a variation of information credibility. Afterwards, children’s confidence judgments were assessed. The results revealed significant age differences in children’s ability to adequately cope with variations of social influence. Although conformity pressure was especially important for the 8-year-olds, effects of informative social influence were independent of age. However, 10-year-olds were also able to act appropriately on low credibility, thereby demonstrating a more sophisticated consideration of social influence sources. Moreover, varying assertiveness also affected the quality of children’s confidence judgments by improving their metacognitive differentiation skills.

Many cognitive factors mediate differences in children’s eyewitness reports and their suggestibility, including prior knowledge (Ornstein, Shapiro, Clubb, Follmer, & Baker-Ward, 1997) and metacognitive monitoring processes (Roebers, 2002). There is also growing consensus about the importance of social factors in memory accuracy. For example, reports by adult eyewitnesses can be contaminated when participants observe coparticipants being questioned (Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000), observe a confederate being questioned (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2004), or read the written statement of someone they believe to be another participant (Hoffman et al., 2001 and Walther et al., 2002).