Speech Acts in Cultural Context Affect Children's Trust

• In Event: Novel Explorations of Collaboration and Connectedness in Social Contexts

Abstract

Children’s trust of other people is impacted by speech acts that vary in veracity, characterized by the truth-value of utterances, and benevolence, defined as assumed good intentions of the speaker. The current study presented children, five- to eleven years old from individualist and collectivist cultures, four stories in which protagonists utter distinctively different speech acts: kind truths, unkind truths, kind lies, and unkind lies. Older children demonstrated greater trust in protagonists with greater veracity and benevolence than did younger participants. Additionally, children from individualist-scoring families were more sensitive to differences in veracity, while the opposite were more responsive to benevolence differences. These findings benefit educators in appreciating how children construct trust, based on diverse speech acts in cultural context.

Authors

• Shawn Yee
  Presenting Author

• Zexuan Mu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Catherine Ann Cameron, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author