Development Of Children’s Initial Trust Judgment In Primary School: The Influence Of Trust Propensity And Face Trustworthiness

Initial trust plays an important role in people’s lives and it will affect individual’s socialdecision-making, as well as the trend of an interpersonal relationship. Current researches oninitial trust judgment mainly focus on adult, which only study one aspect of the factors-----trustpropensity or face trustworthiness. There are few developmental researches on initial trustjudgment.In order to investigate the effects of trust propensity and face trustworthiness in primaryschool children’s initial trust judgment, we conducted three experiments in this study. Based on acomprehensive understanding of7,9and11years old children’s trust propensity and facetrustworthiness, we further discussed the development characteristics of trustor’s trust propensityand trustee’s face trustworthiness to children’s initial trust judgment. The main results were:First, at the primary school stage, there was no age difference in children’s facetrustworthiness evaluation. By analysis, we found that children could do stable facetrustworthiness evaluation, they were able to make different trustworthiness evaluation via faces.Second, at the primary school stage, children will exhibit a varying degree of initial trustlevel, in which trust propensity and face trustworthiness play an important role. As to facetrustworthiness, children will give a more positive trust judgment to trustworthy faces thanuntrustworthy faces; as to trust propensity, there was a significantly correlation between trustpropensity and initial trust judgment of trustworthy faces, the higher the trust propensity, thehigher the initial trust judgment of trustworthy faces, the lower the trust propensity, the lower theinitial trust judgment of trustworthy faces; there is no significantly correlation between trustpropensity and initial trust judgment of untrustworthy faces.Third, at the primary school stage, children’s initial trust judgments of unfamiliar faces isstable, face trustworthiness plays a decisive role in children’s initial trust judgment; facetrustworthiness’ effect on initial trust is more than trust propensity; trust propensity can adjust the strength of face trustworthiness’s effect to the initial trust judgment. For different ages, theeffect of face trustworthiness on initial trust judgment reach a significant level, the effect oftrustor’s trust propensity did not, but with the development of age, trust propensity graduallyincreased, there will be a developmental change of the pattern of trust propensity and facetrustworthiness in initial trust judgment, especially for11years old children, their trustpropensity can adjust the strength of face trustworthiness’s effect to the initial trust judgment.