Selective trust: Children's use of intention and outcome of past testimony.

Abstract

Children's epistemic vigilance was examined for their reasoning about the intentions and outcomes of informants' past testimony. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, 5- and 6-year-olds witnessed informants offering advice based on the intent to help or deceive others about the location of hidden prizes, with the advice leading to positive or negative outcomes. Informants then suggested to the children where to search for hidden prizes. Children trusted informants who had previously tried to help others more than informants who had previously tried to deceive others, regardless of past outcome. In addition, children trusted informants with positive past outcomes more than informants with negative past outcomes, regardless of intention. By varying intention and outcome independently, this study revealed that when children are deciding whether to trust testimony, they take into account the informant's mental states but also give slightly greater weight to the informants' past outputs.

Early Testimonial Learning

“…Older children begin to prioritize speakers' intentions over other information when deciding whom to accept novel information from. Liu, Vanderbilt, and Heyman (2013) demonstrated that 5-and 6-year-olds more often trusted speakers who had previously demonstrated good intentions towards a finder than bad intentions, regardless of the correctness of the information they communicated about the locations of hidden treats, underscoring the importance of moral considerations in older children's learning decisions.…”

Playing by the rules: Self-interest information influences children’s trust and trustworthiness in the absence of feedback

“…Liu et al (2013) recently addressed this question by pitting intent-related (help or trick) against outcome-related (positive or negative) cooperativeness information. Specifically, 5-to 6-year-old children saw a source expressing joy after helping (positive intent, positive outcome), disappointment after helping (negative intent, positive outcome), disappointment after tricking (positive intent, negative outcome) or joy after tricking (negative intent, negative outcome).…”

“…For example, children could conclude that, because the other player always points to the wrong box, they should choose the opposite. Indeed, there is initial evidence that children place more weight on outcome versus intent information: Children continue to trust individuals who have negative intentions but make accurate claims (Liu, Vanderbilt, & Heyman, 2013). Children's marked monitoring of outcomes may be the primary basis for their selectivity in studies that provide them with feedback.…”

Is it the thought that counts? : investigating children's understanding of helpfulness, effort, and utility.

“…(Landrum et al, 2013). Examining the question from a different perspective, Liu, Vanderbilt, and Heyman (2013) found that 5-and 6-year-olds take both informant intent and reliability into account when choosing whom to trust: children tend to prefer informants with benevolent intent regardless of the accuracy of their testimony, but they also tend to prefer informants with previous accurate testimony regardless of inferred intent. This research is consistent with findings indicating that children tend to have a preference for positively-valenced informants, that is, a "halo effect" (e.g., Boseovski, 2012), and that children tend to have an aversion to negatively valenced informants, that is, a "pitchfork effect" (Koenig & Jaswal, 2011).…”

“…Several studies have linked this social dimension with various informant features, such as intention Vanderbilt et al, 2011), niceness or kindness (Landrum et al, 2013;Lane et al, 2013), and helpfulness (e.g., Shafto et al, 2012). Although research has shown that, for example, children prioritize informant niceness over expertise (Landrum et al, 2013) and intention over accuracy (Liu et al, 2013), it is unclear how children are conceptualizing the HELPFULNESS, EFFORT, AND UTILITY 6 social dimension. Are they thinking of it simply in terms of positive affect (e.g., trusting a nice person whether or not he/she is particularly helpful)?…”