Trusting others: shared reality in testimonial learning

Evaluations of epistemic and practical reasons for belief in a predominantly White U.S. sample of preschoolers

Parents and educators commonly seek to influence children's behavior by providing them with practical incentives, but how should we understand the influence of such incentives on children's beliefs? Are children capable of distinguishing between speech acts that provide practical reasons for believing, such as requests and offers, from speech acts that provide straightforward epistemic reasons, such as simple acts of telling? To investigate these questions, we randomly assigned 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 97) to one of two conditions (Request or Offer) in which two speakers each commented on a series of four exotic animals. In each condition, an agent who stated what an object was called with a simple telling ("This is a tanzer") was contrasted with an agent who made either a doxastic request ("I want you to think that this is a tanzer") or a doxastic offer ("If you think that this is a tanzer, I'll let you play with this new toy"). We then measured children's endorsement of and semantic memory for the claims as well as their knowledge attributions and resource allocation decisions. Our results suggest that children appreciate the epistemic reasons inherent in acts of telling when contrasted with doxastic requests, as evidenced by their general preference to learn from, attribute knowledge to, and share with the teller in the Request condition. When tellings were contrasted with doxastic offers, children were less systematic in their preferences. We discuss various interpretations of this finding and offer suggestions for future research.

Of Kids and Unicorns: How Rational Is Children's Trust in Testimonial Knowledge?

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility-maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality-weighting, threshold, or ordering-is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.

The Effect of Social Perspective-Taking on Interpersonal Trust Under the Cooperative and Competitive Contexts: The Mediating Role of Benevolence

Purpose

Several studies have demonstrated that perspective-taking can foster interpersonal trust. However, few studies have explored the effect of social perspective-taking on interpersonal trust under a specific social context and its internal mechanism. The present study explored the effect of social perspective-taking on interpersonal trust and further examined this interaction under two different social contexts: a cooperative vs a competitive context. We also explored why social perspective-taking fostered interpersonal trust.

Methods

Study 1 (N = 45) was conducted using a within-subjects design in which participants were asked to read the dilemmas of two partners under two conditions (social perspective-taking vs objective focus) and complete the trust game after each reading. In Study 2 (N = 135), we manipulated the social context by a word memorization task to explore the effect of social perspective-taking on interpersonal trust under different contexts (competitive vs cooperative). In Study 3, we examined benevolence as a mediator in the relationship between social perspective-taking and interpersonal trust.

Results

Study 1 showed that interpersonal trust under the social perspective-taking condition was significantly higher than interpersonal trust under the objective focus condition. Study 2 showed that under the cooperative context, participants under the social perspective-taking condition invested more money to another partner than those under the objective focus condition. However, under the competitive context, the results were the opposite. Study 3 demonstrated that benevolence mediated the relationship between social perspective-taking and interpersonal trust in both cooperative and competitive contexts.

Conclusion

Social perspective-taking could improve interpersonal trust under a cooperative context, while the degree of interpersonal trust decreases under a competitive context. Moreover, social perspective-taking could influence the perception of benevolence and thereby enhance or diminish interpersonal trust.

Content counts: A trait and moral reasoning framework for children's selective social learning

We present evidence that evaluative information plays a major role in children's selective social learning. We demonstrate that social learning patterns differ as a function of whether children are exposed to positively or negatively valenced information (e.g., content; informant characteristics) and that these patterns can be understood in the context of children's schemas for social groups, morality, and trait understanding. We highlight that attention must be given to theoretical ties between social learning and children's trait judgments and moral reasoning to strengthen our understanding of selective trust and account for variations in children's sophistication when they judge potential sources of information. Finally, we suggest revisions to current theoretical frameworks and offer suggestions to move the field forward.