Steven D. Levitt Quote

Remember those British schoolchildren who made up answers about Mary’s trip to the seashore? The researchers who ran that experiment did a follow-up study, called Helping Children Correctly Say ‘I Don’t Know’ to Unanswerable Questions. Once again, the children were asked a series of questions; but in this case, they were explicitly told to say I don’t know if a question was unanswerable. The happy news is that the children were wildly successful at saying I don’t know when appropriate, while still getting the other questions right.

Steven D. Levitt

Remember those British schoolchildren who made up answers about Mary’s trip to the seashore? The researchers who ran that experiment did a follow-up study, called Helping Children Correctly Say ‘I Don’t Know’ to Unanswerable Questions. Once again, the children were asked a series of questions; but in this case, they were explicitly told to say I don’t know if a question was unanswerable. The happy news is that the children were wildly successful at saying I don’t know when appropriate, while still getting the other questions right.

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