Four-year young people respond to misinformation by exercising the muscles of skepticism
Children aged four to seven show the skills of natural facts when they are placed on a test of zebre and foreign space

Social scientists have long learned whether the children develop the feeling of trust in others and how they judge the truth. Fewer attention has been offered to find children with their social media that judges true or false.
This has changed the online world as the usual leg environment of children’s life. Nine years old, the third of the American children has contacted at least one of the social networking platform. In the years of adolescent, social media have become the main news about the world around young people. A immediate challenge in front of these neophytes is true and false. AI-based Chatbots fighting to exacerbate unattagging currents.
It is a clear solution to isolate a child from such lied and distortions, but proved to a safe refuge. YouTube Kids Channel deal with their parents anger In 2017, inappropriately sexual, lewd and violent content formed after the filters of the platform, respect for children. (YouTube kids responded Increasing parental controls.) Another possible view involves “prevention”: to misinformation to disinformation, knowing what will be false. Similar techniques are used to warn adults about climate change or inserts related to falsity.
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More inventions and perhaps more inventors accept the essentials that children spend time online and reach their verifications. Investigators at the University of California, Berkeley tested such an approach to asking whether children know whether they know disinformation and the ability to develop their facts to develop their fact.
Evan Orticio, Berkeley Psychologist Celeste Kidd team designed a research team to investigate the skills of small facts of young children. The researchers went to park near the campus to go to interview families and hired 122 children with 122 children aged four and seven years for a game verification exercise. “We looked at,” he said, “Children have seen and translated before their level of skepticism depending on the quality of the information, according to what they need to verify new information.”
The children entered the study were presented with a tablet with the contents of an e-book or search engine format. They were shown a series of statements with auxiliary image.
“Highlights swim in the water,” read a statement.
“Hippo swims in outer space,” read another.
For each statement, whether the children thought in the fact, such as Zebras or Hippos were inspected. Any debt suffered his face to reveal the three eyes. Then the children were asked to confirm that “all the debt is three eyes” confirmed, the truth is true. To remove the aliens sunglasses were allowed to touch the number of 20 debt and decide whether the claim was not in the fact.
When asked in the first section of the exercise, the children who suffered more falsity were removed eight more glasses to count the number of eyes. “They were careful to verification claims, so they spent more and more evidence searched before accepting this claim regarding foreigners,” Orticio says. Children who had fewer exposure to false claims were made by small facts: the consequences increased by a computer simulation of the game. A Results of this study were published Nature human behavior Last October.
The consequences of this study, according to Orticio, is to “overcome” the exposure to “overcome” children’s media consumption – that it can be an error. A child can prevent the development of skills that allow distinctiveness between true and false.
Gradually but constantly, the need to teach the need to teach the child identifying disinformation at young people. Finnish public school system, for example, is now included Media Literacy Lessons (Including fake news that starts at preschool).
Judith Danovich, Professor of Psychology and Brain Science at the University of Louisville, who did not participate in the study, is called “fast” methods. The results “is a great starting point for children to inform consumers to solve the puzzle,” he noted. However, more research is needed before adapting the authors’ methods in a practical intervention. As the authors have noted, whether these effects are still considered or extended to some of the last domains. “
A way to achieve this goal, Orticio proposed, would be distributing something similar to researchers’ verification game on social media or even young children’s websites. “It’s a context for children’s skepticism,” says Orticio, therefore, is the key to giving you a safe opportunity to practice critical thinking in the digital world. “