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Kingreaper comments on Expecting Short Inferential Distances - Less Wrong
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The young seem especially vulnerable to accepting whatever they are told. Santa Claus and all that, but also any nonsense fed to them by their schools. Schools for the young are particularly effective instruments for indoctrinating a population. In contrast, the old tend to be quite a bit more resistant to new claims - for better and for worse.
An evolutionary explanation for this is fairly easy to come up with, I think. Children have a survival need to learn as much as they can as quickly as they can, and adults have a vital role as their teachers. In their respective roles, it is best for adults to be unreceptive to new claims, so that their store of knowledge remains a reliable archive of lessons from the past, and it is best for the young to accept whatever they are told without wasting a lot of time questioning it.
It is too easy to come up with a just so story like this. How would you rephrase it to make it testable?
Here is a counterstory:
Children have a survival need to learn only well-tested knowledge; they cannot afford to waste their precious developmental years believing wrong ideas. Adults, however, have already survived their juvenile years, and so they are presumably more fit. Furthermore, once an adult successfully reproduces, natural selection no longer cares about them; neither senescence nor gullibility affect an adult's fitness. Therefore, we should expect children to be skeptical and adults to be gullible.
This counterstory doesn't function.
A child's development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn't harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant's story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don't see what would be expected given the relevant facts.