Children’s selective trust across domains, agents, and cultures

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Young children often acquire knowledge from others. However, this may leave them vulnerable to misinformation from unreliable informants. While prior research showed that preschoolers can effectively use a variety of strategies to assess different sources of information, less is known about how they learn from different social and non-social agents and across various domains. This symposium delves into the question of how children assess informants’ reliability based on various social, epistemic and contextual factors in three countries (Canada, USA and Singapore). Paper 1 examined whether 3- to 5-year-old Canadian children learned from a competent humanoid/non-humanoid robot versus an incompetent human agent. Paper 2 explored whether 3- to 5-year-old Singaporean children learned from a human or robot informant with a history of accuracy or inaccuracy. The results of these two papers suggest a developmental shift from children’s reliance on social cues (incompetent human) to epistemic (competent robot) cues. Paper 3 examined 5- to 10-year-old American children’s selective trust in testimony version demonstration across physical and psychological domains in lower- and higher-stakes contexts. Paper 4 examined 3- to 6-year-old Singaporean children’s selective trust based on inferring informants’ intention across episodic and semantic domains. These latter two papers show that children flexibly use different strategies to guide their selective trust in different domains. Overall, this symposium provides a rich yet nuanced picture of the role that social and epistemic cues play in children’s selective trust using different methodologies with populations from different cultural backgrounds.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• W. Quin Yow, Singapore University of Technology and Design

• Xiao Pan Ding, National University of Singapore

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers’ learning from social robots: from social to epistemic trust - Presenting Author: Anna-Elisabeth Baumann, Concordia University; Elizabeth Jessica Goldman, Concordia University; Alexandra Meltzer, Concordia University; Aymée Bray Le Métayer; Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University

• Younger, not older, children have a bias to trust human more than robot informants - Presenting Author: Xiaoqian Li, Singapore University of Technology and Design; W. Quin Yow, Singapore University of Technology and Design

• Is Seeing Believing: Children’s Trust Testimony and Demonstration in Physical and Psychological Contexts - Presenting Author: Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy; Narges Afshordi; Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Preschool Children Use Mentalising Inferences in the Process of Selective Trust - Presenting Author: Nina Ni Ye; Xiao Pan Ding, National University of Singapore