Trust matters: measuring preschoolers’ epistemic and interpersonal trust in teachers

• In Event: Mechanisms underlying imitation, social learning, and social preferences

Abstract

Testimonial exchanges offer a rich opportunity for child learners to acquire new facts, language, as well as social and cultural norms. Abundant experimental work has revealed that children’s learning from testimony is selective, guided by considerations about the epistemic and social qualities of agents (Harris et al., 2018). However, existing accounts of selective social learning appeal to epistemic or evidence-guided bases for trust, leaving out the various interpersonal or social reasons that children have to trust others. Moreover, very little work has generalized children’s lab-based selectivity to applied learning contexts, which has resulted in considerable gaps in our understanding of the role for trust in children’s day-to-day informational exchanges.

The work reported here responds to these gaps in two ways. First, we offer a new way of conceptualizing trust, drawing from approaches across philosophy, economics, and social psychology. We suggest that two distinct trusting dispositions may guide children’s social learning: epistemic trust (responsive to epistemic characteristics of agents) and interpersonal trust (responsive to interpersonal characteristics of agents). To assess this, two novel 10-item assessments were created to measure children’s epistemic trust and interpersonal trust. Second, we investigated the relationship between trust and learning in an applied setting to better understand how basic empirical findings in the lab generalize to real-world learning contexts. Since teachers express a range of epistemic and interpersonal behaviors, some of which have been actively evaluated by preschool-aged children in experimental contexts, preschool classrooms were chosen as a natural setting to investigate the nature of epistemic and interpersonal trust, and the relation between trust and learning.

Study 1 (N = 63 3- and 4-year-olds) experimentally manipulated the behavior of an adult teacher in order to test for predicted differences in epistemic and interpersonal trust as a function of condition. Study 2 (N = 43 3- to 5-year-olds) explored preschoolers’ epistemic and interpersonal trust across four mixed-age preschool classrooms by asking children to report on their trust in their lead teacher twice over the course of an academic year. Across both studies, children’s learning and memory for information taught to them by their teacher was assessed.

We found psychometric support for our trust assessments, suggesting that these evaluations measured anticipated constructs of knowledge and prosociality. In addition, we found that epistemic and interpersonal trust were differentiated in both studies, with epistemic trust more flexibly extended. This aligns with experimental work and suggests that young children attend to epistemic characteristics of adults with whom they interact. Finally, hierarchical linear regression analysis was used to test for associations between trust and learning, controlling for child demographics and cognitive abilities. Neither form of trust was associated with learning, while age and executive function were.

Taken together, these studies offer new directions for exploring children’s trust and the impact that it has on learning and provide an initial step in translating empirical work on children’s selective epistemic trust to more applied contexts. We plan to discuss implications of these findings for future research and offer suggestions for examining trust and learning.

Authors

• Annelise Pesch, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author