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

Abstract

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.

(In)Sensitivity to Accuracy? Children’s and Adults’ Decisions About Who to Trust: The Teacher or the Internet

“… Guerrero et al (2017a) found that when a teacher (vs. an unfamiliar informant) proposes a non-conventional but plausible use for a familiar object (e.g., using a toy bucket to serve a salad), the pre-schoolers’ trust in the source remains unaffected. Arguably, as proposed by Lascaux (2020) , the variety of strategies that individuals may use in these tasks does not always yield epistemic benefits, but other type of benefits, either social (e.g., group cohesion when trusting dominant in-group informants) or cognitive (diminishing the inconsistencies between what an individual expects from the informant and what really happens). Unfortunately, the paradigm used here does not allow to know whether or not individuals take an epistemic glance at the task, which is crucial in the study of testimonial learning.…”

Does first‐hand evidence undermine young children's initial trust in positive gossip? Evidence from 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children

“…As children grow older, they adopt more rational processing methods, making rational judgements flexibly based on the available clues (Hermes et al, 2018). Judging the correctness of information content is an important manifestation of individuals making rational decisions (Lascaux, 2020). Thus, when children face multiple trust cues, more reflective Type II processing can lead to a more rational basis for selective trust.…”