Poster #89 - Examining the Influence of Children's Theory of Mind on Selective Trust Decisions

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

Literature on children's selective trust has primarily focused on how children acquire knowledge from other sources while learning from those who possess positive epistemic characteristics, such as reliability, accuracy, and knowledge (Koenig & Harris, 2005; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004), as well as sociomoral characteristics that include benevolence, familiarity, and group membership (Kinzler, Corriveau, &; Harris, 2011). However, we know little about the individual differences that can reveal disparities in trust competencies and the extent to which early selective trust decisions are explained by children’s social understanding.
The current study examined selective trust decisions in a sample of 269 3-year-old children and their mothers (M = 45.6, SD = 2.2). All participants came from low SES households receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and were recruited from the Mt. Hope Family Center at the University of Rochester, NY. Participants' parents completed a 42-item CSUS measure (Tahiroglu et al., 2014), and the children completed a series of 7 items assessing their Theory of mind understanding (Wellman & Liu, 2004). For example, at the child level (ToM), children completed seven tasks assessing Contents False Belief for Self and Other, Explicit False Belief, Diverse Desires, Diverse Beliefs, Appearance-Reality, and Knowledge Access. For CSUS, parents were asked to rate their child on a scale ranging from 1 to 4 across six dimensions of social understanding (i.e., Desires, Beliefs, Intentions, Emotions, Desires, and Perceptions). Additionally, children completed three conditions of a selective trust task that presented 3 different race-matched speaker contrasts : (1) accurate vs. inaccurate, (2) benevolent vs. malevolent, and (3) mom vs. stranger. On Ask trials, children were asked, “Hmmm, I wonder what this is called? Whom would you like to ask?” On Endorse trials, children were told that the two speakers offered conflicting labels and were asked, “What do you think this is called, a tunk or a smope?”
Results show that children’s selective trust decisions revealed a significant effect on Condition. Specifically, children had stronger preferences to ask and endorse information from their mom over a stranger compared to the accurate and benevolent agents (OR = 3.17; 95% CI = [2.75, 3.66]; p < 0.001). However, neither children’s ToM ability nor their overall CSUS was significantly related to (OR =0.04, 95%
CI [-0.06, 0.13], p = 0.441; Std. beta = 0.04) children’s selective trust performance. Though ToM may not be reliably related to children's selective trust (Cossette, Fobert, et al., 2020; Souza et al., 2021), future research should examine other measures of children's trust competencies (i.e., children's deference to conflicting or counterintuitive claims), which can help us better understand children's trust inferences in different contexts.

Authors

• Norwood A Glaspie, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Isaac Bisla, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy

• Annelise Pesch, Temple University

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