The Dissenter

#1217 Hanna Schleihauf: Other People's Beliefs, Belief Revision, and Good Reasoning

Feb 19, 2026
Hanna Schleihauf, Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology at Utrecht University who studies how children learn from others. She explores when kids grasp beliefs, the difference between fact-based and value-based beliefs, how children revise beliefs and weigh evidence, what counts as good reasoning, cross-cultural contrasts, and surprising findings about chimpanzees responding to higher-order evidence.
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INSIGHT

Fact-Based vs Value-Based Beliefs

  • People care about beliefs relevant to their safety or social choices.
  • Schleihauf distinguishes fact-based beliefs (facts) from value-based beliefs (core values and preferences).
INSIGHT

Evidence Limits Belief Freedom

  • Evidence constrains how free people seem to be in choosing fact-based beliefs.
  • Both young children and adults perceive strong evidence as making alternative beliefs nearly impossible.
INSIGHT

Morality Restricts Belief Possibilities

  • For value-based beliefs, moral status strongly restricts perceived possibility of alternative beliefs.
  • Younger children view immoral-to-moral switches as rarer, an effect that lessens with age.
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