Five-year-olds are willing, but 4-year-olds refuse, to trust informants who offer new and unfamiliar labels for parts of the body

Epistemic trust: a comprehensive review of empirical insights and implications for developmental psychopathology

Originally rooted in philosophy and sociology, the concept of epistemic trust has recently transitioned to developmental psychopathology, illuminating social-cognitive processes in psychopathology. This narrative review synthesizes empirical evidence on epistemic trust to inform future research. A literature search highlighted 3 areas: i) the development of selective trust in children; ii) epistemic trust in non-clinical adults; iii) its link to mental health. Young children demonstrate selective learning from reliable sources using epistemic cues. Empirical studies beyond childhood were greatly facilitated in the last 2 years with the introduction of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust and Credulity Questionnaire, a self-report scale measuring epistemic stance. Cross-sectional studies pinpointed dysfunctional epistemic strategies as factors in mental health vulnerability, and some qualitative work offered initial evidence linking restored epistemic trust to effective psychotherapy. For future research, we propose focusing on 3 primary areas. First, empirical investigations in adolescent samples are needed, as adolescence seems to be a pivotal phase in the development of epistemic trust. Second, more experimental research is required to assess dysfunctional and functional epistemic stances and how they relate to vulnerability to mental health disorders. Finally, intervention studies should explore the dynamics of epistemic stances within and between therapy sessions and their impact on therapeutic outcomes.

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.

How Children Learn From Others: An Analysis of Selective Word Learning

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children's selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children's ability to engage in selective word learning appeared to be present in the youngest samples surveyed. Their more metacognitive understanding that epistemic competence indicates reliability or that others are good sources of knowledge has more of a developmental trajectory. We also found that various methodological factors used to assess children influence performance. We conclude with a synthesis of theoretical accounts of how children learn from others.

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children's selective trust: Three meta-analyses

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children's selective trust. Three meta-analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3- to 6-year-old children's selective trust in an informant based on the informant's epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children's selective trust decisions. The first and second meta-analyses found that children displayed medium-to-large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4-year-olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3-year-olds. The third meta-analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3-year-old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4- to 6-year-olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta-analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant's testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children's selective trust are discussed.

Trust and doubt: An examination of children's decision to believe what they are told about food

The domain of food is one that is highly relevant and vital to the everyday lives of children. However, children's reasoning about this domain is poorly understood within the field of developmental psychology. Because children's learning about food, including its evaluative components (e.g., health, taste) is so heavily dependent on information conveyed by other people, a major developmental challenge that children face is determining who to distrust regarding food. In three studies, this investigation examined how 3- and 4-year-olds and adults (N=312) use different cues to determine when to ignore informant information (i.e., distrust what an informant tells them by choosing an alternative) in food- and non-food-specific scenarios. The results of Study 1 indicated that by age 4 years, children are less trusting of inaccurate sources of information compared with sources that have not demonstrated previous inaccuracy. Study 2 revealed that these results are applicable across the domain of objects. The results of Study 3 indicated that by age 4, children trust benevolent sources more often than malevolent ones. Thus, when reasoning about the evaluative components of food, by age 4, children appraise other people's untrustworthiness by paying attention to their inaccuracy and malevolence.

Young children heed advice selectively

A rational strategy to update and revise one's uncertain beliefs is to take advice by other agents who are better informed. Adults routinely engage in such advice taking in systematic and selective ways depending on relevant characteristics such as reliability of advisors. The current study merged research in social and developmental psychology to examine whether children also adjust their initial judgment to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of their advisors. Participants aged 3 to 6 years played a game in which they made initial judgments, received advice, and subsequently made final judgments. They systematically revised their judgments in light of the advice, and they did so selectively as a function of advisor expertise. They made greater adjustments to their initial judgment when advised by an apparently knowledgeable informant. This suggests that the pattern of advice taking studied in social psychology has its roots in early development.