When testimony causes harm: investigating children’s ealuations of epistemic injustice

Abstract

Learning from other’s testimony is a highly social process that relies on mutual cooperation from both a speaker and listener (Li et al., 2023; Tomasello, 2020). Unfortunately, this shared epistemic responsibility for both parties can make testimonial learning a source of vulnerability, especially for speakers. There are many cases in which a speaker’s testimony is questioned, rejected, or left unheard. One such case is epistemic injustice, which refers to instances that undermine a speaker’s identity as a credible knowledge source (Fricker, 2007). It is currently unknown how young children understand and evaluate cases of epistemic injustice. Across two studies, I assessed children’s sensitivity to the harm that results from third-party cases of epistemic injustice. In Study 1, I explored whether there were age-related differences in children’s evaluations of epistemic injustice, and whether race and gender influence the severity of children’s evaluations. In this online study, 150 4- to 10-year-old children (76 White, 74 BIPOC) watched videos in which a listener believed the testimony of one speaker and rejected the testimony of a second speaker. Depending on the condition, the video characters were either all the same race and gender or varied by either race or gender. Overall, children negatively evaluated cases of epistemic injustice as “bad” actions. With age, children believed that the perpetrator was less deserving of punishment but reported liking the perpetrator less. Additionally, children who reported that the speaker was not believed due to his/her appearance rated the epistemic injustice act as more worthy of punishment than children who believed the speaker was not believed due to the content of his/her testimony. In Study 2, I directly compared children’s evaluations of epistemic injustice to their evaluations of moral and socio-conventional transgressions. In this study, 64 4- to 10-year-old children (33 White, 31 BIPOC) listened to vignettes in which a character either did not believe someone else, morally harmed someone else (e.g., hitting), or did not behave according to social norms (e.g., eating ice cream with a fork). Participants consistently judged acts of epistemic injustice as more similar to socio-conventional transgressions over moral transgressions. Specifically, children evaluated epistemic injustice and socio-conventional transgressions as more permissible (even in different contexts and in the absence of rules or authority figures) and less deserving of punishment than the moral transgressions. Together, these studies provide the first body of empirical evidence that children can successfully detect and negatively evaluate instances of epistemic injustice. However, the severity of children’s judgments depends on the specific circumstances under which the injustice occurs. These results indicate that from a young age, children are likely sensitive to both the advantages of learning and the consequences of not believing someone’s testimony.