Preschoolers Trust Novel Members of Accurate Speakers’ Groups and Judge them Favourably

Abstract

By age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Two experiments ( N = 95 children) explored whether preschoolers’ judgements about, and trust in, the accuracy of a previously reliable informant extend to other members of the informant's group. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year-olds consistently judged an animated character who was associated with a previously accurate speaker more likely to be correct than a character associated with a previously inaccurate speaker, despite possessing no information about these characters’ individual records of reliability. They continued to show this preference one week later. Experiment 2 presented 4- and 5-year-olds with a related task using videos of human actors. Both showed preferences for members of previously accurate speakers’ groups on a common measure of epistemic trust. This result suggests that by at least age 4, children's trust in speaker testimony spreads to members of a previously accurate speaker's group.