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Cited by 318

The DOI matches its OpenAlex record; 19 of the 19 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Young Children's Differentiation of Hypothetical Beliefs from Evidence

Beate Sodian, Deborah Zaitchik, Susan E. Carey·1991·Child Development
DOI 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01567.x
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Abstract

The claim that preadolescent children fail to differentiate between hypothetical beliefs and evidence is investigated in 2 studies. First-and second-grade children were presented with 2 conflicting hypotheses and asked to choose an empirical test to decide between them. In Study 1, the majority of first graders and almost all second graders correctly chose a conclusive test. They elaborated the logic of such a test and distinguished it from an inconclusive test. There was no evidence that children of this age misinterpret the task of hypothesis testing as one of generating a desirable effect. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings; in a task that posed a genuine scientific problem, first and second graders spontaneously generated empirical procedures for gathering indirect evidence to decide between alternative hypotheses. Our results indicate that young elementary school children distinguish between the notions of “hypothetical belief” and “evidence.” These findings are discussed in light of their failure on other scientific thinking tasks.

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OpenAlex · 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01567.x

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Metadata

Authors
Sodian, B., Zaitchik, D., & Carey, S. E.
Venue
Child Development
Publisher
Wiley
Published
1991-08-01
Volume
62
Issue
4
Pages
753-753
ISSN
0009-3920 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01567.x
OpenAlex
W1982506274
Cited by
318
References
19
FWCI
30.20
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Young Children's Differentiation of Hypothetical Beliefs from Evidence. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01567.x
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Sodian, B., Zaitchik, D., & Carey, S. E. (1991). Young Children's Differentiation of Hypothetical Beliefs from Evidence. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01567.x

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.