Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

The current study investigated preschool-aged children’s understanding of their own free will capacities to choose whether to believe or not believe information from an informant. Specifically, we investigated the potential relationship between children’s intuition of their own free will, and their ability to produce accurate testimony in light of a suggestive interviewer. Forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children participated in the study with two tasks. In the first task, children listened to a scenario, and said whether they had to believe what they were told, or if they could choose to believe that something else might be true. The second task was adapted from the Giles and Gopnik (2002) procedure. The children watched a video followed by suggestive questions regarding what they had just watched. Children’s understanding of choice in regard to belief was highly correlated with their ability to resist suggestion. The results indicated that preschool-aged children are developing an understanding of free will in respect to how they conceptualize belief. Furthermore, children with a more developed conception of their own free will capacities are able to produce more accurate eyewitness testimony, and resist the suggestive nature of biased interviewers.