The purpose of this study was to better understand how middle school students consider the source of information when processing videos with conflicting information. To this end, we exposed a sample of seventh-graders to a series of videos in which two interviewees expressed divergent positions on a socioscientific issue ('Will organic farming be…

The present research examines how the usefulness of source information to explain conflicting scientific claims affects laypersons' processing of this information as they seek possible explanations for the conflicting scientific claims in the sources and during resolution of the conflict. In an eye-tracking experiment, we presented 76 participants…

Conflict has been hypothesized to play a key role in recruiting deliberative processing in reasoning and judgment tasks. This claim suggests that changing the task so as to add incorrect heuristic responses that conflict with existing heuristic responses can make individuals less likely to respond heuristically and can increase response accuracy.…

This study examines the process of judging complex real-life events in Israel: the disengagement from Gush Katif, Rabin's assassination and the Second Lebanon War. The process of judging is based on Weiner's attribution model, (Weiner, 2000, 2006); however, due to the complexity of the events studied, variables were added to characterize the…

In our study, we tested the hypothesis that feature-based and rule-based generalization involve different types of processes that may affect each other producing different results depending on time constraints and on how generalization is measured. For this purpose, participants in our experiments learned cue-outcome relationships that followed…

Two studies examined developmental differences in how children weigh capability and objectivity when evaluating potential judges. In Study 1, 84 6- to 12-year-olds and adults were told stories about pairs of judges that varied in capability (i.e., perceptual capacity) and objectivity (i.e., the relationship to a contestant) and were asked to…

This study used think-aloud methodology to investigate 51 Norwegian undergraduates' topic-specific epistemic cognition while working with six documents presenting conflicting views on the issue of cell phones and potential health risks. Results showed that students' epistemic cognition was represented by one dimension concerning the certainty and…

Examined the consequences of peer conflict on performance of a preference task and on relationships of 36 children of 8-11 years. Children evaluated their preferences more negatively after disagreeing with a friend than after disagreeing with a nonfriend, and were more likely to change, often to a more mature way of thinking. (RJC)

Studied 8- and 11-year-olds as evaluators of peer group entry and limited resources. Found older children evaluated peers more positively than did younger for limited resources conflicts. Found all children evaluated the focal peer's intentions during group entry more negatively than intentions during limited resources and evaluated peer responses…