Why are children more suggestible?

Lens adapted to this topic: Context and limits

A serious qualification is that “children are more suggestible” can overgeneralize findings from particular memory experiments and investigative concerns. Children are not simply naïve believers: they often evaluate claims skeptically, and adults may be more suggestible in some eyewitness tasks. Critics also question how closely highly leading laboratory or interview procedures represent real investigations, while emphasizing the risk of overlooking genuine abuse.

• Children can be skeptical about the reality status of novel entities and events; their difficulty is not simply a blanket tendency to believe others.
• Children are sometimes better eyewitnesses than adults, depending on the task and the kind of memory error being measured.
• Critics argue that suggestibility research may assume highly suggestive interviewing is common in abuse investigations without sufficient empirical support.
• Research should account for the characteristics of actual abuse cases, including the danger that excessive concern about false reports could contribute to missed genuine abuse.
• Individual differences and interviewer behavior complicate broad age-based conclusions about children’s suggestibility.

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