Children’s Reality Status Judgments of Digital Media: Implications for a COVID-19 World and Beyond

Abstract

Even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, one of the children’s most common screen activities was using the video-sharing platform YouTube, with many children preferring YouTube over television. The pandemic has significantly increased the amount of time many children spend on YouTube—watching videos for both entertainment and education. However, it is unclear how children conceptualize the people they see on YouTube. Prior to the pandemic, children 3–8 years old (N = 117) were recruited to participate. Children were told that they would see pictures taken from videos and answer questions about them. Children saw three physical photos with the same image of a man and a bird and were told that the photo was (a) from a video on the experimenter’s phone, (b) from a video on television, or (c) from a video on YouTube. They were asked whether the person in the photo was real or not real, which video would be best for learning, and which video they would prefer to watch. Findings indicated that children were marginally less likely to believe that people on YouTube are real than people in a video on a phone, with no difference between beliefs about people on YouTube and television. Notably, these beliefs were similar across the age range tested here. Across all ages, children preferred to watch YouTube more than phone videos and believed that YouTube possessed greater educational value than both phone and television videos.