The Effects Of Informant’ S Intention And Outcome Of Past Testimony On Selective Trust Of 4- To 6-year-Old Children

Selective trust refers that children use multiple cues to infer one informant’s reliability, and then determine whether to trust the informant’s past testimony or not.The development of selective trust is conducive to the development of children’s critical thinking, and also plays an important role on children’s social development.Recent researches found that this selective trust has been demonstrated among3-year-olds. There are many factors affecting the ability of children’s selective trust.Most researches on this issue have examined the effect of the epistemic state of informants to children, some studies start to focus on communicators’ intention. The most serious limitation among past researches about how intention and outcome affect selective trust is: children are not sure if the informant knows where the stick is,meanwhile, they must attribute the informant’s intention from its affective response to outcome, which causes that children can’t identify the intention clearly, and the affective response may confuse the influence of the intention on selective trust.Study 1 uses classic research paradigm and improves the experimental design in order to make children understand informant’s intention explicitly. In a 3(Age: 4 to 6years old)*2(Intention: help versus deceive)*2(Outcome: finding versus not finding)between-subjects factorial design, 4-to-6-year-old children observed informants providing advice based on intenting to help or deceive two finders, with the advice leading to find candies or not. Informants then suggested to the children where to search for hidden candy. We found that 4-year-old children show a credulous deviation, and it is not until 5 years old that children can selectively trust correctly.However, only when informant’s intention matches outcome of past testimony, can 5-and 6-year-old children make appropriate trust judgment: trust helpful pointer and not trust deceitful one.However, we are unable to distinguish that it’s because children really trust the informant or just because the outcomes of past testimony are positive: the finders can find candies every time. They also want to get they the candies, so they take the informant’s advice. If finders couldn’t always find candies when they followed the informant’s advice, will children trust the informant again?Study 2 adds neutral outcome——the outcomes of two past testimony are inconformity——to explore the developmental mechanism of 5- and 6-year-olds’ selective trust. We could get some conclusions:(1)It is easier for young children to identify deceitful intention than to identify helpful one.(2)Although 5-year-old children can correctly identify informant’s intention in the experimental condition:deceitful intention-finding candy only once, they still can’t make a correct trust judgment, that is to say, the development of cognition is not equal to the development of behavior.