Preschoolers trust novel members of accurate speakers' groups and judge them favourably.
By age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Two experiments (N=95 children) explored whether preschoolers' judgements about, and trust in, the accuracy of a previously reliable informant extend to other members of the informant's group. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year-olds consistently judged an animated character who was associated with a previously accurate speaker more likely to be correct than a character associated with a previously inaccurate speaker, despite possessing no information about these characters' individual records of reliability. They continued to show this preference one week later. Experiment 2 presented 4- and 5-year-olds with a related task using videos of human actors. Both showed preferences for members of previously accurate speakers' groups on a common measure of epistemic trust. This result suggests that by at least age 4, children's trust in speaker testimony spreads to members of a previously accurate speaker's group.
a Department of Psychology , Wesleyan University , Middletown , CT , USA.
Hilary
H
Barth
Keera
K
Bhandari
Jennifer
J
Garcia
Kyle
K
MacDonald
Elizabeth
E
Chase
D000367:Age Factors; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013060:Speech; D035502:Trust / Q000523:psychology*
Epistemic trust; Social cognition; Testimony