Poster #241 - Who Do I Believe? Children's Selective Trust in Internet, Teacher, and Peer Informants

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Technology, Media & Child Development

Integrative Statement

In the modern world, children are exposed to technology-based information sources, including the internet, beginning early in life, yet little is known about how children reason about these sources and potentially come to trust them. Prior work has shown that young children can select and evaluate information based on the characteristics of an informant (Bascandziev & Harris, 2016; Enesco et al., 2016; Landrum, Eaves, & Shafto, 2015). The current studies examine how children judge information provided by human sources relative to technology-based sources.
Two experiments examined how Chinese children ages 5 to 8 and adults evaluate information from the internet when it was contrasted with information from a human informant (teacher or peer). In Experiment 1 (N = 90), participants were presented with two trivia statements that varied in one detail (e.g., “people are more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes when they are eating bananas” and “people are more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes when they are eating apples”). Statements came from a wide range of domains. Each statement was attributed to the internet, a teacher, or a peer informant. Informants were paired with each other an equal number of times, and pairings were counterbalanced between participants. The results indicated that when evaluating trivia statements from a variety of domains, adults regarded the internet and a teacher as more trustworthy than a peer (see Table 1). However, younger children did not show differential trust in any of the sources, and older children trusted statements attributed to a teacher over the internet.
The procedure for Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1, except that the statements involved scientific and historical facts only. Participants were also first asked where they would seek out information (e.g., “If you were going to find out how many days Mars takes to finish a single orbit, which would you like to ask, the internet or the teacher?”), before being asked to endorse one of the informants’ statements. Both children and adults (N = 91) indicated that they would prefer to seek out information more often from the internet than a peer, but only adults indicated that they would ask the internet more often than a teacher. Likewise, all age groups showed greater trust in the internet or a teacher than a peer, but only adults trusted the internet more than the teacher (see Table 2). This pattern was also observed for trials where participants were asked to endorse one of the informant’s statements.
Together, these results demonstrate that children can reason flexibly about the reliability of information sources across different categories and that their trust in information from the internet is sensitive to the type of information that is being presented. Importantly, children do not blindly trust in information from the internet, but rather their trust depends on the circumstances. Implications for the use of internet sources in educational settings will be discussed.

Authors

• Fuxing Wang, School of Psychology, Central China Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Yu Tong, Central China Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Judith Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author