Detecting lies through others' eyes: Children use perceptual access cues to evaluate listeners' beliefs about informants' deception.

Children are often third-party observers of conversations between informants and receivers. Although 5- and 6-year-olds can identify and reject informants' false testimony, it remains unclear whether they expect others to do the same. Accurately assessing others' impressions of informants and their testimony in a conversational setting is essential for children's navigation of the social world. Using a novel second-order lie detection task, the current study examined whether 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 74; Mage = 69 months) take receivers' epistemic states into account when predicting whether a receiver would think an informant is truthful or deceptive. We pitted children's firsthand observations of reality against informants' false testimony while manipulating receivers' perceptual access to a sticker-hiding event. Results showed that when the receiver had perceptual access and was knowledgeable, children predicted that the receiver would think the informant is lying. Critically, when the receiver lacked perceptual access and was ignorant, children were significantly more likely to predict that the receiver would think the informant is telling the truth. Second-order theory of mind and executive function strengthened this effect. Findings are interpreted using a dual-process framework and provide new insights into children's understanding of others' selective trust and susceptibility to deception.

Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?

How young children learn from different informants has been widely studied. However, most studies investigate how children learn verbally conveyed information. Furthermore, most studies investigate how children learn from humans. This study sought to investigate how 3-year-old children learn from, and come to trust, a competent robot versus an incompetent human when competency is established using a pointing paradigm. During an induction phase, a robot informant pointed at a toy inside a transparent box, whereas a human pointed at an empty box. During the test phase, both agents pointed at opaque boxes. We found that young children asked the robot for help to locate a hidden toy more than the human (ask questions) and correctly identified the robot to be accurate (judgment questions). However, children equally endorsed the locations pointed at by both the robot and the human (endorse questions). This suggests that 3-year-olds are sensitive to the epistemic characteristics of the informant even when its displayed social properties are minimal.

In the presence and absence of conflicting testimony, children's selective trust in the in-group informant in moral judgment and knowledge access.

In this study, we assessed whether the trust model formed by children in a moral judgment context with an inaccurate in-group informant affected their corresponding trust model in the knowledge access context and whether conditions (the presence of conflicting testimony: an inaccurate in-group informant paired with an accurate out-group informant; the absence of conflicting testimony: only an inaccurate in-group informant) influenced the trust model. Children aged 3 to 6 years (N = 215; 108 girls) in blue T-shirts as in-group members completed selective trust tasks in the moral judgment and knowledge access contexts. Results for moral judgment showed that children under both conditions were more likely to trust informants based on accurate judgments and gave less consideration to group identity. Results for knowledge access showed that in the presence of conflicting testimony, 3- and 4-year-olds trusted the in-group informant at chance, but 5- and 6-year-olds trusted the accurate informant. In the absence of conflicting testimony, 3- and 4-year-olds agreed more with the inaccurate in-group informant, but 5- and 6-year-olds trusted the in-group informant at chance. The results indicated that older children considered the accuracy of the informant's previous moral judgment for selective trust in the context of knowledge access while ignoring group identity, but that younger children were affected by in-group identity. The study found that 3- to 6-year-olds' trust in inaccurate in-group informants was conditional and that their trust choices appeared to be experimentally conditioned, domain specific, and age differentiated.

The roles of group membership and social exclusion in children's testimonial learning.

Here, we used high- and low-stakes testimonial learning tasks to better understand two important types of social influence on children's learning decisions: group membership and social ostracism. Children (4- and 5-year-olds; N = 100) were either included or excluded by in-group or outgroup members in an online ball tossing game. Then, children were asked to selectively learn new information from either an in-group or out-group member. They also received counterintuitive information from an in-group or out-group member that was in conflict with their own intuitions. When learning new information, children who were excluded were more likely to selectively trust information from their in-group member. In contrast, when accepting counterintuitive information, children relied only on group membership regardless of their exclusion status. Together, these findings demonstrate ways in which different forms of testimonial learning are guided not only by epistemic motivations but also by social motivations of affiliation and maintaining relationships with others.

Relations between fantasy and transfer of learning from storybooks.

Prior research presents a mixed picture regarding the circumstances under which children transfer learning of problem solutions from fantastical stories to real-world problems. Two experiments examined 3- to 5-year-old children's transfer of learning from fantastical storybooks that systematically varied in the fantastical abilities of storybook characters. In both experiments, participants heard stories about a character solving physical problems, and then participants attempted to solve analogous real-world problems. In Experiment 1, children heard stories that varied the fantastical abilities and practices of the protagonist; characters either did or did not have the ability to violate physical laws and did or did not use magic to help in solving a problem. Children were more likely to transfer problem solutions from the stories in which characters were presented as having the ability to violate real-world physical laws. In Experiment 2, the fantastical abilities of the characters varied by whether the characters were described as real, as pretend but living in a world where no physical laws could be violated, as pretend and living in a world where some physical laws could be violated, or as pretend and living in a world where many physical laws could be violated. Other than varying the characters' abilities, all characters used realistic solutions to solve the problem. Again, transfer was higher for children who heard about characters with the ability to violate real-world laws. The findings suggest that fantastical stories in which characters have the ability to do impossible things but use realistic solutions to problems can be effective in teaching children how to solve physical problems.

Social cognition and trust: Exploring the role of theory of mind and hostile attribution bias in children's skepticism of inaccurate informants.

A growing body of research has examined the role of individual differences in children's selective trust. The current study was designed to explore how individual differences in theory of mind and hostile attribution bias affect children's trust. Four- and five-year-old children took part in a standard selective trust paradigm in which they had the choice between a previously inaccurate informant and an unfamiliar informant. They were also asked to interpret why the previously inaccurate informant had provided incorrect information in the past. Finally, children completed a hostile attribution bias task and a theory of mind task. Children with better theory of mind ability were more likely to defer to the unfamiliar informant on the selective trust task. Children with greater hostile attribution bias were more likely to interpret previous inaccuracy as a result of "being tricky" rather than having "made a mistake." However, these interpretations did not influence children's choices on the selective trust task. Therefore, although there is reason to believe that establishing selective trust involves both cognitive and social processes, the current study raises questions about the nature of this relationship and how children draw on different sociocognitive skills when establishing epistemic trust.

Unsafe to eat? How familiar cartoon characters affect children's learning about potentially harmful foods.

Young children learn about the properties of foods, such as taste and healthiness, from others. By using selective trust tasks in which a familiar cartoon character and an unfamiliar informant provided different testimony about food safety, this study examined how an informant's familiarity affected 4- to 6-year-old children's selective social learning about food safety. In Experiment 1, when judging the safety of foods from the familiar cartoon character and the unfamiliar character, children across all age groups showed a preference for asking the familiar character for information. For endorse questions, 4- and 5-year-olds did not consistently accept or reject either character's statements, while 6-year-olds endorsed the unfamiliar cartoon character's statements more often than the familiar character's statements. In Experiment 2, when the unfamiliar informant was a real adult instead of a fictional cartoon character, children sought out information from the familiar character more often than from the adult, and they did not differentially endorse statements by either informant. Moreover, children who had less advanced theory of mind skills and who viewed cartoon characters as more real were more likely to ask the cartoon character. These results suggest that although children prefer to obtain information from familiar characters, they accept information about food safety from multiple kinds of sources and their social-cognitive skills play a role in their decisions.

Susceptibility to Being Lured Away by a Stranger: A Real-World Field Test of Selective Trust in Early Childhood.

In this preregistered field study, we examined preschool children's selective trust in a real-life situation. We investigated whether 3- to 6-year-old children (total N = 240) could be lured to a new location within their school grounds by an unfamiliar adult confederate. In a between-subjects manipulation, the confederate established either a high or a low level of personal credibility by providing information that the child knew to be either true or false. In Experiment 1, in which the confederate was female, children showed sensitivity to informational accuracy by being less willing to leave with an uninformed confederate, and this effect increased with age. In Experiment 2, in which the confederate was male, children were reluctant to leave regardless of informational accuracy. These findings point to real-world implications of epistemic-trust research and provide the first evidence regarding the early development of selective trust in a high-stakes naturalistic context.

Knowing who knows: Metacognitive and causal learning abilities guide infants' selective social learning.

Given the widespread interest in the development of children's selective social learning, there is mounting evidence suggesting that infants prefer to learn from competent informants (Poulin-Dubois & Brosseau-Liard, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2016, 25). However, little research has been dedicated to understanding how this selectivity develops. The present study investigated whether causal learning and precursor metacognitive abilities govern discriminant learning in a classic word-learning paradigm. Infants were exposed to a speaker who accurately (reliable condition) or inaccurately (unreliable condition) labeled familiar objects and were subsequently tested on their ability to learn a novel word from the informant. The predictive power of causal learning skills and precursor metacognition (as measured through decision confidence) on infants' word learning was examined across both reliable and unreliable conditions. Results suggest that infants are more inclined to accept an unreliable speaker's testimony on a word learning task when they also lack confidence in their own knowledge on a task measuring their metacognitive ability. Additionally, when uncertain, infants draw on causal learning abilities to better learn the association between a label and a novel toy. This study is the first to shed light on the role of causal learning and precursor metacognitive judgments in infants' abilities to engage in selective trust.

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children's selective trust: Three meta-analyses.

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children's selective trust. Three meta-analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3- to 6-year-old children's selective trust in an informant based on the informant's epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children's selective trust decisions. The first and second meta-analyses found that children displayed medium-to-large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4-year-olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3-year-olds. The third meta-analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3-year-old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4- to 6-year-olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta-analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant's testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children's selective trust are discussed.

In sickness and in filth: Developing a disdain for dirty people.

Cleanliness is universally valued, and people who are dirty are routinely marginalized. In this research, we measured the roots of negative attitudes toward physically unclean individuals and examined the differences that exist in these attitudes between childhood and adulthood. We presented 5- to 9-year-old children and adults (total N = 260) with paired photographs of a dirty person and a clean person, and we measured biases with a selective trust task and an explicit evaluation task. In Study 1, where images of adults were evaluated, both children and adults demonstrated clear biases, but adults were more likely to selectively trust the clean informant. Study 2 instead used images of children and included several additional tasks measuring implicit attitudes (e.g., an implicit association task) and overt behaviors (a resource distribution task) and also manipulated the cause of dirtiness to include illness, enjoyment of filth, and accidental spillage. Children and adults again revealed strong biases regardless of the cause of dirtiness, but only children exhibited a bias on the explicit evaluation task. Study 3 replicated these findings in India, a country that has historically endorsed strong purity norms. Overall, this research indicates that dirty people are targets of discrimination from early in development, that this is not merely a Western phenomenon, and that this pervasive bias is most strongly directed at individuals of similar ages.

An eye-tracking study of selective trust development in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether children with autism display selectivity in social learning. We investigated the processing of word mappings provided by speakers who differed on previously demonstrated accuracy and on potential degree of reliability in three groups of children (children with autism spectrum disorder, children with developmental language disorder, and typically developing children) aged 4-9 years. In Task 1, one speaker consistently misnamed familiar objects and the second speaker consistently gave correct names. In Task 2, both speakers provided correct information but differed on how they could achieve this accuracy. We analyzed how the speakers' profiles influenced children's decisions to rely on them in order to learn novel words. We also examined how children attended to the speakers' testimony by tracking their eye movements and comparing children' gaze distribution across speakers' faces and objects of their choice. Results show that children rely on associative trait attribution heuristics to selectively learn from accurate speakers. In Task 1, children in all groups preferred the novel object selected by accurate speakers and directly avoided information provided by previously inaccurate speakers, as revealed by the eye-tracking data. In Task 2, where more sophisticated reasoning about speakers' reliability was required, only children in the typically developing group performed above chance. Nonverbal intelligence score emerged as a predictor of children's preference for more reliable informational sources. In addition, children with autism exhibited reduced attention to speakers' faces compared with children in the comparison groups.

On the malleability of selective trust.

Although much research has explored the cues that young children use to determine informant credibility, little research has examined whether credibility judgments can change over time as a function of children's language environment. This study explored whether changes in the syntactic complexity of adults' testimony shifts 4- and 5-year-old children's (N = 42) credibility and learning judgments. Children from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds were randomly assigned to hear a high proportion of complex language (the passive voice) or simpler language (the active voice) during 10 days of book-reading interactions with adult experimenters. Before and after the book-reading sessions, children's learning preferences for informants who used passive versus active voice were measured. Exposure to the complex passive voice led children to use syntactic complexity as a cue to make inferences about who to learn from, whereas active voice exposure resulted in no such shift. Implications for the role of the language environment in children's selective trust are discussed.

"Is it worth my time and effort?": How children selectively gather information from experts when faced with different kinds of costs.

Gathering good-quality information is important for effective learning, but children may often need to expend time or energy (i.e., costs) in order to do so. In this study, we examined how 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 91) gather information from others when one source of information comes at a cost. Children were given three types of question cards (doctor-related, mechanic-related, and neutral questions) and could assign each question to either a doctor or car mechanic puppet. One puppet (either the doctor or the car mechanic, counterbalanced) could be accessed immediately, but the other puppet required either waiting 30 s or completing a tedious sorting task first. Children's verbal intelligence and executive function skills were also assessed. Results showed that cost influenced how children sought information from each of the expert puppets; children selected the costly expert for domain-relevant questions at chance levels and otherwise strongly preferred to question the non-costly puppet. In addition, executive function skills (but not verbal intelligence) related to how frequently children were willing to direct questions to the costly puppet. Overall, these results indicate that children are influenced by costs when gathering information from others and that their ability to expend a cost to gather good-quality information may relate to their inhibition skills. Implications for encouraging effective learning are discussed.

The influence of language behavior in social preferences and selective trust of monolingual and bilingual children.

Experiences living in a community where people share more than one language may affect children's strategies to selective learning. Language mixing may be one type of speakers' characteristics that bilingual children, but not monolingual children, use to evaluate speakers. A total of 120 English-speaking monolingual (n = 40) and English-Mandarin bilingual (n = 80) 4- and 5-year-olds heard a pair of speakers each tell a story either with or without language mixing and indicated their preferences for either speaker in friendship, explicit judgment, and novel label endorsement. Bilingual children, but not their monolingual counterparts, preferred the single-language speaker to the language-mix speaker across different test questions. Our findings suggest that social relevance in the larger communicative context may contribute to the development of children's social preferences and selective learning based on certain characteristics of the speakers.

Willingness to revise own testimony: 3- and 4-year-olds' selective trust in unexpected testimony from accurate and inaccurate informants.

Prior work has shown that young children trust single accurate and inaccurate individuals to a similar extent in their endorsement of novel information. However, it remains unknown to what extent children trust a credible or noncredible individual when given information that is pitted against their own beliefs. The current study examined whether children, when given unexpected testimony that contradicted their initial beliefs but was not completely unbelievable, would selectively revise their beliefs depending on the informant's past history of accuracy. The participants (3- and 4-year-olds; N = 100) were familiarized with an informant who labeled a series of common objects either accurately or inaccurately. Following that, all children saw a picture of an ambiguous hybrid artifact that consisted of features of two typical common artifacts and were asked to identify the hybrid object with their own label. Subsequently, children watched the previously accurate or inaccurate informant give the same hybrid object a different but plausible label. Children expressed a greater tendency to override their initial judgments and endorse the unexpected testimony from a previously accurate informant than from someone who had consistently made naming errors. The findings provide novel understandings of the circumstances under which 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers may or may not rely on the informant's prior reliability in their selective learning.

Children's evaluation of verified and unverified claims.

Critical to children's learning is the ability to judiciously select what information to accept-to use as the basis for learning and inference-and what information to reject. This becomes especially difficult in a world increasingly inundated with information, where children must carefully reason about the process by which claims are made in order to acquire accurate knowledge. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 120) understand that factual claims based on verified evidence are more acceptable than claims that have not been sufficiently verified. We found that even at preschool age, children evaluated verified claims as more acceptable than insufficiently verified claims, and that the extent to which they did so was related to their explicit understanding, as evident in their explanations of why those claims were more or less acceptable. These experiments lay the groundwork for an important line of research studying the roots and development of this foundational critical thinking skill.

Consistency between verbal and non-verbal affective cues: a clue to speaker credibility.

Listeners are exposed to inconsistencies in communication; for example, when speakers' words (i.e. verbal) are discrepant with their demonstrated emotions (i.e. non-verbal). Such inconsistencies introduce ambiguity, which may render a speaker to be a less credible source of information. Two experiments examined whether children make credibility discriminations based on the consistency of speakers' affect cues. In Experiment 1, school-age children (7- to 8-year-olds) preferred to solicit information from consistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with negative affect), over novel speakers, to a greater extent than they preferred to solicit information from inconsistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with positive affect) over novel speakers. Preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) did not demonstrate this preference. Experiment 2 showed that school-age children's ratings of speakers were influenced by speakers' affect consistency when the attribute being judged was related to information acquisition (speakers' believability, "weird" speech), but not general characteristics (speakers' friendliness, likeability). Together, findings suggest that school-age children are sensitive to, and use, the congruency of affect cues to determine whether individuals are credible sources of information.

Success inhibits preschoolers' ability to establish selective trust.

A number of studies have shown that preschoolers make inferences about potential informants based on the informants' past behavior, selectively trusting an informant who has been helpful in the past, for example, over one who has been unhelpful. Here we used a hiding game to show that 4- and 5-year-olds' selective trust can also be influenced by inferences they make about their own abilities. Children do not prefer a previously helpful informant over a previously unhelpful one when informant helpfulness is decoupled from children's success in finding hidden objects (Studies 1 and 3). Indeed, children do not seem to track informant helpfulness when their success at finding hidden objects has never depended on it (Study 2). A single failure to find a hidden object when offered information by the unhelpful informant can, however, lead them to selectively trust the previously helpful one later (Study 4). Children's selective trust is based not only on differences between informants but also on their sense of illusory control-their inferences about whether they need assistance from those informants in the first place.

The beautiful and the accurate: Are children's selective trust decisions biased?

Recent findings imply that children rationally appraise potential informants; they weigh an informant's past accuracy more heavily than other informant-based cues such as accent, age, and familiarity. Yet this conclusion contrasts with the more general conclusion that deliberate decision-making processes are heavily influenced by perceptual biases. We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' (N=132) decisions about whether to trust a more versus less attractive informant when (a) both had a similar history of past accuracy or (b) the more attractive informant had been less accurate. Similarly, we investigated their decisions about whether to trust a more versus less accurate informant when (a) both were similarly attractive or (b) the more accurate informant was less attractive. Despite their sensitivity to past accuracy, children's selective trust was clearly biased by the informant's attractiveness. Relationships to previous findings and future implications are discussed.