Are French children more rational than English children? It depends on how you look at the data

Much of what we communicate to children about uncertainty is through verbal descriptions. Yet, to our knowledge, only two studies have examined children’s comprehension of verbal probabilities (Mullet & Rivet, 1991; Watson & Moritz, 2003). Furthermore these studies did not take into account the directionality of verbal probabilities (Teigen & Brun, 1995).
In a first study (Gourdon & Villejoubert, in press), we manipulated the directionality and the likelihood of verbal probabilities, and the framing of the event subject of the uncertainty. We found that 8-year-olds took into account the directionality and the value of the uncertain event when judging verbal probabilities, but not the likelihood. However we also found that the three dimensions were taken into account by children when making decisions.
Aiming to replicate these results with an English speaking sample we used only positive framing of the event and a more realistic context. We found that the English sample was not influenced by the likelihood when decision making, unlike the French children in the first study. Furthermore, the effect of the directionality on probability judgement, expected value judgement and decision making was inconsistent.
However we also found in both studies that decision-making could be predicted by judgements of expected value, i.e. French and English children make consistent decisions, even if English children do not efficiently rely on the information communicated to them.
The two methodologies we used were somewhat different. The first paradigm involved repeated trials with the same context and verbal probabilities were highlighted. In the second study, we used different contexts and integrated the verbal probabilities into the story. This may have increased memory demands. The use of different scenarios gave rise to an unexpected effect in the decision-making task where the consequences of the risky choice could have overridden the effect of the directionality and the numerical value. Future research will investigate the impact of these methodological differences by comparing the two tasks in the same sample.