The Role Of Face Trustworthiness And Behavior In Children’s Trust Judgment

The proper judgment for whom to trust was very important to individuals’ social adaptationand their physical and mental health. Previous research had proved that young children, evenfrom3years old, had already made trust judgment based on others’ face or behavioral characters.But when we made trust judgment during interpersonal interactions, a variety of informationwere available simultaneously, and they were not necessarily congruent. For example, a personlooked very trustworthy but had lied. At this time, how would young children make trustjudgment?In this study, two experiments were designed to explore when face trustworthiness(trustworthy and untrustworthy faces) and behavior (benevolence, competence and integrity)were incongruent, how would3-to5-year-olds (adult as the reference group) make trustjudgment in the situation of keeping the promise and its development. The main results were asfollows:(1) When the behavior’s contrast was positive and negative (one untrustworthy face withpositive behavior and one trustworthy face with negative behavior). The results showed that, justlike adults,3-to5-year-olds would trust the people with untrustworthy face but do the positivebehavior, which meant they would mainly based on other’s behavior to make trust judgment. Butcompared to the3-year-olds,4-to5-year-olds and adult were more inclined to judge on the basisof behavior.(2) After reducing the behaviors’ contrast degree (the communication objects not onlyincluded untrustworthy face-positive behavior and trustworthy face-neutral behavior, but alsountrustworthy face-neutral behavior and trustworthy face-negative behavior), there was a greatindividual difference: some individuals mainly based on other’s behavior to judge, some mainlybased on other’s face. Also, there was a age difference: the number of this two kinds of people in4-year-olds was equal, while the number of former was more than the latter in5-year-olds andadults. These results suggested that with the age increasing, the impact of behavior was growing;and compared to the older individuals, face played a greater role in the younger individuals’ trustjudgment. (3) The effects of different behavior in adult and children’s trust judgment were different:On the one hand, compared to the competence, adult were more inclined to judge according tothe behavior in dimensions of benevolence and integrity. However, there was no difference ofchildren’s trust judgment in the three types of behavior. On the other hand, compared to thepositive behavior, negative behavior had a greater impact on the individuals’ trust judgment. Butthis difference only occurred in the adult, did not show in the children.