The Development of Selective Trust: Prospects for a Dual-Process Account

Domain-specific inferences about conspecifics' skills by chimpanzees

Chimpanzees collaborate with conspecifics in their daily life. However, the cognitive processes underlying partner recruitment aren't fully understood. In the current study, chimpanzees needed to recruit a conspecific partner for either a cooperative or competitive experimental task. They spontaneously preferred to recruit cooperation partners who they have seen performing successfully before on a similar task, over partners who had failed. In contrast, the chimpanzees needed to experience the consequences of competing against co-action partners before settling on a preference for the unsuccessful partner. This divergent pattern may be due to increased cognitive demands of competitive compared to cooperative tasks. Despite the observed differences of social information use in our cooperative and competitive experimental tasks, the findings are exciting as they extend our knowledge of chimpanzee's social evaluation abilities by showing that they can draw domain-specific inferences about conspecifics' skills.

Do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Show Selective Trust in Social Robots?

PURPOSE

Previous researches suggest that social robots can facilitate the learning of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by enhancing their interests, engagement, and attention. However, there is limited understanding regarding whether children with ASD can learn directly from the testimony of social robots and whether they can remain vigilant based on the perceived accuracy of these robots. Therefore, the present study was conducted to examine whether children with ASD demonstrated selective trust towards social robots.

METHODS

Twenty-nine children with ASD between ages of 4-7 years, and 38 typically-developing (TD) age and IQ-matched peers participated in classic selective trust tasks. During the tasks, they learned the names of novel objects from either a pair of social robots or a pair of human informants, where one informant had previously been established as accurate and the other inaccurate.

RESULTS

Children with ASD trusted information from an accurate social robot over an inaccurate one, similar to their performance with human informants. However, compared to TD children, children with ASD exhibited lower levels of selective trust regardless of the type of informants they learned from.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study suggests that children with ASD can selectively trust and acquire knowledge from social robots, shedding light on the potential use of social robots in supporting individuals with ASD.

The cognitive underpinnings and early development of children's selective trust

Young children learn selectively from reliable over unreliable sources. However, the cognitive underpinnings of their selectivity (attentional biases or trait ascriptions) and its early ontogeny are unclear. Thus, across three studies (N = 139, monolingual German speakers, 67 female), selective-trust tasks were adapted to test both preschoolers (5-year-olds) and toddlers (24-month-olds), using eye-tracking and interactive measures. These data show that preschoolers' selectivity is not based on attentional biases, but on person-specific trait ascriptions. In contrast, toddlers showed no selective trust, even in the eye-tracking tasks. They succeeded, however, in eye-tracking tasks with the same word-learning demands, if no ascriptions of reliability were required. Thus, these findings suggest that preschoolers, but not toddlers, use trait-like ascriptions of reliability to guide their selective learning.

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.

Does first-hand evidence undermine young children's initial trust in positive gossip? Evidence from 5- to 6-year-old children

What happens when children have formed an impression of a peer based on prior gossip, but later learn from direct observation that the gossip is untrue? We interviewed seventy 5- and 6-year-old children in Zhejiang, China. They first heard conflicting positive and negative gossip about an absent third party, and subsequently learned which piece of gossip was true. Initially, both 5- and 6-year-old children tended to endorse the positive rather than the negative gossip. However, when they learned about the inaccuracy of the positive gossip based on their own direct observation, 6-year-old children subsequently doubted it, whereas 5-year-old children showed no such shift. Taken together, the results show that when children decide what gossip to believe, they are initially swayed by its valence but with age they increasingly weigh gossip in relation to their own direct observation.

Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

Do I know what they know? Linking metacognition, theory of mind, and selective social learning

Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant's competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other's thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) attempt to replicate a reported link between selective social learning and theory of mind. In Experiment 1, no relationship was observed across the measures. In Experiment 2, only selective social learning and belief reasoning were found to be related as well as when both experiments' samples were combined. No links between selective social learning and metacognition were observed in the two experiments. These results suggest that theory of mind is a stronger correlate of selective learning than metacognition in young children. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.

Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight

To differentiate the use of simple associations from use of explicitly reasoned selective social learning, we can look for age-related changes in children’s behaviour that might signify a switch from one social learning strategy to the other. We presented 4- to 8-year-old children visiting a zoo in Scotland (N = 109) with a task in which the perceptual access of two informants was determined by the differing opacity of two screens of similar visual appearance during a hiding event. Initially success could be achieved by forming an association or inferring a rule based on salient visual (but causally irrelevant) cues. However, following a switch in the scenario, success required explicit reasoning about informants’ potential to provide valuable information based on their perceptual access. Following the switch, older children were more likely to select a knowledgeable informant. This suggests that some younger children who succeeded in the pre-switch trials had inferred rules or formed associations based on superficial, yet salient, visual cues, whereas older children made the link between perceptual access and the potential to inform. This late development and apparent cognitive challenge are consistent with proposals that such capacities are linked to the distinctiveness of human cumulative culture.

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.

Of Kids and Unicorns: How Rational Is Children's Trust in Testimonial Knowledge?

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility-maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality-weighting, threshold, or ordering-is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.

Group membership moderates the process of making trust judgments based on facial cues

Trust is a foundation of interpersonal communication. Faces have a significant impact on trust judgments, and separate research demonstrates that group membership also influences trust judgments. However, it remains unclear whether and how group membership moderates the effect of face trustworthiness on trust judgments and investment decisions. In the present research, two experiments were conducted to explore the moderating effect of group membership (i.e., in-group vs. out-group) on perceptions of facial trustworthiness and trust judgments. Results showed that participants invested significantly more money on trials with trustworthy faces than trials with untrustworthy faces. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between group membership and facial trustworthiness; the investment difference between trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces was greater for trials with in-group member faces than out-group member faces. These findings indicate that top-down and bottom-up cues jointly influence behavioral decisions.

Specifying links between infants' theory of mind, associative learning, and selective trust

The psychological mechanisms underlying infants' selective social learning are currently a subject of controversy. The main goal of the present study was to contribute data to this debate by investigating whether domain-specific or domain-general abilities guide infants' selectivity. Eighteen-month-olds observed a reliable and an unreliable speaker, and then completed a forced-choice word learning paradigm, two theory of mind tasks, and an associative learning task. Results revealed that infants showed sensitivity to the verbal competence of the speaker. Additionally, infants with superior knowledge inference abilities were less likely to learn from the unreliable speaker. No link was observed between selective social learning and associative learning skills. These results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that socio-cognitive abilities are linked to infants' selective social learning.

Questions Can Answer Questions About Mechanisms of Preschoolers' Selective Word Learning

This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children's selective word learning. Three- to 4-year-olds (N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants' epistemic competence. Inaccurate labels, however, generate error signals that can lead to weaker encoding of novel information. Preschoolers retained novel labels from both informants but were slower to respond in the Inaccurate Labeler condition. When the test procedure was not sensitive to the strength of information encoding, children performed above chance in both conditions and their response times did not differ. These results suggest that epistemic-level inferences and error generalizations influence preschoolers' selective word learning concurrently.

CONFIANÇA SELETIVA EM CRIANÇAS PRÉ-ESCOLARES: UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA

Embora o campo de estudos sobre confiança seletiva tenha ganhado destaque nos últimos anos, essa linha de pesquisa não é ainda suficientemente divulgada no Brasil. A presente revisão sistemática teve como objetivo avaliar a produção científica sobre confiança seletiva em crianças pré-escolares, bem como sobre possíveis variáveis que influenciam os julgamentos de confiança. A busca foi realizada nas bases de dados PSYCINFO, Scielo Brasil, PEPSIC e LILACS, utilizando-se as palavras-chave selective trust, epistemic trust e seus correspondentes em português ‘confiança seletiva’ e ‘confiança epistêmica’. De um total de 103 trabalhos, foram analisados 45 artigos empíricos, publicados entre 2008 e 2018, seguindo o protocolo PRISMA. Contrariando uma crença predominante em muitas culturas de que as crianças acreditam em tudo o que ouvem, elas não são consumidoras ingênuas de informação. Discutem-se os efeitos de variáveis individuais e contextuais sobre os julgamentos de confiança seletiva que apontam para direções futuras promissoras de pesquisa.

Infants' Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Infants can detect individuals who demonstrate emotions that are incongruent with an event and are less likely to trust them. However, the nature of the mechanisms underlying this selectivity is currently subject to controversy. The objective of this study was to examine whether infants' socio-cognitive and associative learning skills are linked to their selective trust. A total of 102 14-month-olds were exposed to a person who demonstrated congruent or incongruent emotional referencing (e.g., happy when looking inside an empty box), and were tested on their willingness to follow the emoter's gaze. Knowledge inference and associative learning tasks were also administered. It was hypothesized that infants would be less likely to trust the incongruent emoter and that this selectivity would be related to their associative learning skills, and not their socio-cognitive skills. The results revealed that infants were not only able to detect the incongruent emoter, but were subsequently less likely to follow her gaze toward an object invisible to them. More importantly, infants who demonstrated superior performance on the knowledge inference task, but not the associative learning task, were better able to detect the person's emotional incongruency. These findings provide additional support for the rich interpretation of infants' selective trust.

Content counts: A trait and moral reasoning framework for children's selective social learning

We present evidence that evaluative information plays a major role in children's selective social learning. We demonstrate that social learning patterns differ as a function of whether children are exposed to positively or negatively valenced information (e.g., content; informant characteristics) and that these patterns can be understood in the context of children's schemas for social groups, morality, and trait understanding. We highlight that attention must be given to theoretical ties between social learning and children's trait judgments and moral reasoning to strengthen our understanding of selective trust and account for variations in children's sophistication when they judge potential sources of information. Finally, we suggest revisions to current theoretical frameworks and offer suggestions to move the field forward.

Retrospective inferences in selective trust

Young children learn selectively from others based on the speakers' prior accuracy. This indicates that they recognize the models' (in)competence and use it to predict who will provide the most accurate and useful information in the future. Here, we investigated whether 5-year-old children are also able to use speaker reliability retrospectively, once they have more information regarding their competence. They first experienced two previously unknown speakers who provided conflicting information about the referent of a novel label, with each speaker using the same novel label to refer exclusively to a different novel object. Following this, children learned about the speakers' differing labelling accuracy. Subsequently, children selectively endorsed the object-label link initially provided by the speaker who turned out to be reliable significantly above chance. Crucially, more than half of these children justified their object selection with reference to speaker reliability, indicating the ability to explicitly reason about their selective trust in others based on the informants' individual competences. Findings further corroborate the notion that young children are able to use advanced, metacognitive strategies (trait reasoning) to learn selectively. By contrast, since learning preceded reliability exposure and gaze data showed no preferential looking toward the more reliable speaker, findings cannot be accounted for by attentional bias accounts of selective social learning.

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing; and (2) how children’s emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler’s merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers’ levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children’s performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.

Trait or testimony? Children's preferences for positive informants

Research indicates that children often show a positivity bias, or a tendency to favor positive information over negative information, in assessments of informant credibility in social and nonsocial situations. The current study investigated whether young children prioritize positive informant traits (i.e., nice vs. mean informant) as compared with positive speech content (i.e., positive vs. negative evaluation) in conflicting assessments of a work product. A total of 123 4- to 8-year-olds heard stories about a nice informant who gave a negative evaluation of a painting and a mean informant who gave a positive evaluation of the painting. Participants were asked who they would endorse, who they would ask about a future painting, and their friendship preferences. Children endorsed and asked the mean informant who provided positive testimony, but they chose to befriend the nice informant who provided negative testimony. Endorsements of positive testimony increased with age. Findings are considered in the context of the broader literature on selective social learning and trait understanding.

I don't believe what you said before: Preschoolers retrospectively discount information from inaccurate speakers

Children use speakers' past accuracy to make inferences about novel word meanings those individuals provide in the future. An open question is whether children can retrospectively reevaluate information after learning that the source was inaccurate. We addressed this question in two experiments where a speaker first introduced labels for novel objects and then revealed that she is either accurate or inaccurate in naming familiar objects. Experiment 1 showed that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds displayed enhanced performance on a word knowledge test when they had learned novel words from a speaker who then showed herself to be an accurate labeler as opposed to an inaccurate labeler. Experiment 2 replicated this procedure but had a different speaker provide inaccurate label information. This manipulation did not affect learning, suggesting that children discount speakers and are not simply influenced by the demands of processing inaccurate information. Together, these results indicate that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds continue to monitor the speakers' accuracy after learning new words from them, update their beliefs as accuracy data become available, and selectively retain words learned from speakers who they deem to be epistemically competent.

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.

Individual Differences in Children's Preference to Learn From a Confident Informant

Past research has demonstrated that children can use an informant's confidence level to selectively choose from whom to learn. Yet, in any given study, not all children show a preference to learn from the most confident informant. Are individual differences in this preference stable over time and across learning situations? In two studies, we evaluated the stability of preschoolers' performance on selective learning tasks using confidence as a cue. The first study (N = 48) presented children with the same two informants, one confident and one hesitant, and the same four test trials twice with a 1-week delay between administrations. The second study (N = 50) presented two parallel tasks with different pairs of informants and test trials one after the other in the same testing session. Correlations between administrations were moderate in the first study and small in the second study, suggesting that children show some stability in their preference to learn from a confident individual but that their performance is also influenced by important situational factors, measurement error or both. Implications for the study of individual differences in selective social learning are discussed.

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.