GOOD TO KNOW: Five-year-olds can see through your bravado (that is, if they know you’ve been wrong before).

The bluster strategy has a weakness. If you’ve lied or been inaccurate in the past, then your bravado is likely to be ineffective. The child, especially if aged 5 and upwards, will see through your confident facade and focus instead on your reputation for being wrong. . . .

The four-year-olds were often swayed by the woman who had bravado, even though they’d just seen her get her facts wrong . . . With each extra month of wisdom, however, there was a clear developmental trajectory in the sample, so that the older children were far more likely to trust the hesitant woman with a history of being right, than the confident woman with a record for being wrong.

This isn’t the first time that researchers have investigated children’s sensitivity to the confidence and past accuracy of speakers. But it’s actually only the second study ever to look at what happens when these cues collide. “Around the time of their fifth birthday children appropriately grant greater weight to someone’s prior reliability over that person’s current level of confidence,” the researchers said. “This form of emerging skepticism will serve them well as they navigate through a world selecting ‘better’ from ‘worse’ sources of information.”