Developmental Characteristics Of Trust Judgment In Children Aged 4-6 Based On Different Trustworthiness Traits And Situations

Trust plays an important role in children’s learning and daily communication.Existing research on the development of trust judgment is mainly based on the social learning perspective and adopts the dual selection paradigm to investigate the trust judgment characteristics of children when they are confronted with both positive and negative characteristics of their communication objects.However,in our daily life,we encounter a variety of communication situations,and the objects of communication often have a variety of different characteristics.The main purpose of this study is when children begin to selectively believe in people with different characteristics based on the interaction situation.In this study,469 children aged 4-6 years were selected as the subjects and 248 adults as the control group.Situational storytelling was adopted to measure children’s trust judgment characteristics based on different trustworthiness traits by using knowledge acquisition and commitment keeping scenarios.Study I examined the trust judgment characteristics of children aged 4-6 based on competence and benevolence(experiment 1)and incompetence and mean(experiment 2),respectively.The results of experiment 1 showed that in trust judgment of positive titer traits,children from the age of five,are able to choose to believe trust in different situations with different qualities,namely in the knowledge acquisition situation more inclined to believe that who has the qualities of ability,and more inclined to believe in promise scene who has the qualities of benevolence.The results of experiment 2 sho wed that in children’s trust judgment of negative titer traits,the trust judgment of 6-year-old children was context-specific,while that of 4-year-old and 5-year-old children did not have significant trust preference for people with both incapacity and bad faith in knowledge acquisition and commitment keeping situations.Study 2 examined the trust judgment characteristics of children aged 4-6 based on competence and integrity(experiment 3)and incapacity and improbity(experiment 4)in two experiments.Experimental results show that the 3 children in trust judgment of positive titer traits,4 years old,6 years old children can choose to believe in the different situation of trust with people of different qualities,namely in the knowledge acquisition situation more inclined to believe that who has the qualities of ability,and in commitment scenario is more inclined to believe that who has the qualities of integrity,but only 5 years old children in a commitment scenario show trust in the upright preferences.The results of experiment 4 show that in the trust judgment of negative titer traits,children have the situational specificity of trust judgment from the age of 5,while in the knowledge acquisition and commitment keeping situation,children of 4 have no significant trust preference for people who are incompetent or improbity.The results of this study show that the trust judgment ability of children aged 4-6 based on different trustworthiness traits improves with age,the trust judgment ability of children based on positive traits develops earlier than that of children based on negative traits,and there is some difference between children’s trust judgment ability of different trustworthiness traits,scenario plays an important role...