The Role Of Face Trustworthiness In Children’s Trust Behavior: Evidence From The Trust Game

Young children’s safety problem has always been the focus of the society and family. It is very important for children’s healthy growth if they can judge the trustworthiness of others and do the right trust behavior when they contact with strangers. Researches about children’s trust behavior in the process of communication with strangers were less than trust beliefs. It is an effective way to explore the relationship between the face trustworthiness and children’s trust behavior. Trust Game, an economic game, gives participants the chance to make investments with other people who may repay their trust with large returns or not which can be used to study trust behavior of children.The current study investigated whether, like adults, children are more likely to place their trust in people who looked trustworthy than those who looked untrustworthy in experiment 1, 2.In experiment 1, 4 to 6 years old children were showed the faces of eight strangers and asked to use six tokens to play TG to examine the role of face trustworthiness cues in children’s trust behavior and the difference between age. Results indicated that, there were significant group differences in the impact of face cues on behavior across the three age groups. 4 years old children’s trust behavior had no sifnificant difference between trusted face and untrusted face. 5 and 6 years old children selectively placed their trust in those people who they perceived as trustworthy during the trust game.This finding indicateds that that the ability about children taking strangers face trustworthiness to guide trust behavior was constantly improving with age.In experiment 2, 4 to 5 years old children played TG as well as the experiment 1 but with virtual faces which had a larger difference about the face trustworthiness. We observed a similar profile of trust behavior in 4 to 5 yesrs old children that they sent more tokens to the people they perceived as trustworthy. The results indicated that, 4 and 5 years old children all had the ability to take the face trustworthiness to guide their trust behavior.Together, these findings indicated that 4 to 6 years old children were able to use the face cues to guide their trust behavior.