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• We used a single informant paradigm to test how internet inaccuracy influences children's trust. • Children accessed online information on their own or it was relayed by an adult. • Children ages 4-8 decreased their trust in a previously inaccurate internet source. • The degree of trust reduction was comparable to that observed in a human informant. This study examined whether an internet source's history of inaccuracy influences children's epistemic trust in online information. Chinese children aged 4 to 8 years (N = 84; 41 girls and 43 boys) accessed information on their own from an image-based website, heard information from the internet that was relayed by an adult, or viewed a person in a video providing information without referring to the internet (in a baseline condition). After the internet source provided three obviously inaccurate statements, children significantly reduced their epistemic trust in the internet source regardless of whether they obtained the information through a direct interaction with the internet or it was relayed by an adult. Moreover, the extent of the reduction in trust was comparable to the baseline video condition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that 4- to 8-year-old children take into account a history of inaccuracy and revise their beliefs in statements from the internet, just as they do when evaluating human informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Epistemic treatment group's precise selection did not increase from pretest to posttest. • Interpersonal treatment group's precise selection significantly increased from pretest to posttest. • Increase of precise selection for interpersonal treatment group was significantly higher than control group. • Reasons revealed that for epistemic trust children preferred personal competence over measurement data. The purpose of the current study was to examine the impact of activities conducted by children's teachers twice a week, which emphasize the importance of measurement and mathematical data for decision making, on children's informant selection and interpersonal trust decisions. In total, 55 children participated in the study for epistemic trust, and 54 children participated for interpersonal trust. Children interacted with two research assistants, one providing precise information and the other providing relative information regarding quantities, length, and weight. The findings revealed that, for epistemic trust, children from both groups preferred the relative informant over the precise informant both before and after the test. Regarding interpersonal trust decisions, the treatment groups showed a significant increase in the selection of the precise informant from the pretest to the posttest, whereas the control group's selection decreased. The difference in the selection of the precise informant between the interpersonal trust decision groups from pretest to posttest was significant, favoring the treatment group. The reasons revealed that children considered competence in their epistemic trust decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Adolescents made social inferences based on systematically manipulated scenarios. • In each scenario, a person chose whether to lie to recommend an unqualified friend. • Lying had more positive implications for interpersonal trust than epistemic trust. When people are asked to recommend individuals they care about, they often grapple with conflicts regarding the level of honesty they should maintain when being truthful could potentially hinder those individuals' chances of receiving beneficial opportunities. In the current study, we examined how adolescents evaluate people based on how they respond to such dilemmas, with a focus on how it affects judgments of interpersonal and epistemic trustworthiness. We tested a sample of high school students in the southwestern United States (N = 78; M age = 16.45 years), who were asked about a moral dilemma in which a story character needed to decide whether to recommend an unqualified friend. We experimentally manipulated whether the friend was very close to the standard (requiring a small exaggeration) or was far from the standard (requiring a large exaggeration) between participants. Across both exaggeration conditions, we observed a dissociation in judgments of epistemic and interpersonal trustworthiness: Lie-tellers were judged to be more interpersonally trustworthy than epistemically trustworthy, whereas truth-tellers were judged to be more epistemically trustworthy than interpersonally trustworthy. These results show that adolescents are capable of using information about an individual's lie-telling versus truth-telling decisions to make highly nuanced social inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Infants used the reliability (i.e., transitivity) of a human agent's object choices to inform their selective trust and imitation of her. • Infants imitated the transitive but not the intransitive agent's head-touch actions to illuminate a light-box. • These results add support that young children's epistemic trust is guided by their conceptual understanding. This study examined how the reliability (i.e., transitivity) of an agent's object choices affects 16-month-old infants' (N = 48) imitation of her unconventional way of turning on a touch light box with her head when her hands were available. When the agent made transitive choices (i.e., she chose Object A over Object B, Object B over Object C, and then A over C), infants imitated her head touch actions. When the agent made intransitive choices (i.e., after choosing A over B and B over C, she chose C over A), infants were more likely to use only their hands to touch the light box. In addition, when it was presumably difficult for infants to judge the transitivity of the agent's choices (i.e., she chose B over C, A over B, and then A over C), they used their hands more. These results demonstrate that infants' understanding informs their decisions to selectively imitate others' specific ways to act on novel artifacts, consistent with young children's selective trust in information provided by other people based on their epistemic reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigated children's evaluations of tellings in comparison to non-telling speech acts. • Children generally endorsed claims for epistemic reasons over practical reasons. • Endorsement of non-tellers' claims was most prevalent when rewards were offered for belief. • Certain practical incentives, like offers, can impact children's testimonial learning. Parents and educators commonly seek to influence children's behavior by providing them with practical incentives, but how should we understand the influence of such incentives on children's beliefs? Are children capable of distinguishing between speech acts that provide practical reasons for believing, such as requests and offers, from speech acts that provide straightforward epistemic reasons, such as simple acts of telling? To investigate these questions, we randomly assigned 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 97) to one of two conditions (Request or Offer) in which two speakers each commented on a series of four exotic animals. In each condition, an agent who stated what an object was called with a simple telling ("This is a tanzer") was contrasted with an agent who made either a doxastic request ("I want you to think that this is a tanzer") or a doxastic offer ("If you think that this is a tanzer, I'll let you play with this new toy"). We then measured children's endorsement of and semantic memory for the claims as well as their knowledge attributions and resource allocation decisions. Our results suggest that children appreciate the epistemic reasons inherent in acts of telling when contrasted with doxastic requests, as evidenced by their general preference to learn from, attribute knowledge to, and share with the teller in the Request condition. When tellings were contrasted with doxastic offers, children were less systematic in their preferences. We discuss various interpretations of this finding and offer suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Examined selective trust in accurate, inaccurate and novel labelers of body parts. [•] Three-year-olds are sensitive to inaccuracy and 4-year-olds favor accuracy. [•] But 3- and 4-year-olds are uncertain about how to construe the novel labeler. [•] Five-year-olds are more trusting of the novel labeler than the inaccurate labeler. [•] But 5-year-olds do not judge the novel labeler as being “better” at labeling. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The goal of this research was to investigate the extent to which young children use the past reliability of another person’s statements to make inferences about the accuracy of that person’s claims about a hidden toy. When children interacted with a previously reliable speaker, both 30- and 36-month-olds searched in the new location of the toy, in line with the speaker’s statement. When children interacted with an unreliable speaker, the 36-month-olds were less likely to rely on her false statement and instead searched either in the original location of the toy or in a neutral location. The 30-month-olds, however, searched in the location indicated by the speaker even when the speaker was unreliable. These results show that by 36 months of age, children begin to use reliability in processing a speaker’s episodic claims and can flexibly update their representations of absent objects depending on the reliability of the speaker. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• We examined children's and adults' trust in and impressions of inaccurate informants. • Children quickly distrusted the informant's claims. Adults' distrust was more gradual. • Children's ratings of the informant were relatively stable and clustered together. • Adult's ratings did not cluster in the same manner and were more malleable. As children and adults interact with new individuals, they make and revise inferences about these individuals' traits and intentions; they build and refine psychological profiles. Here, we examined how this ability develops during early childhood and manifests during adulthood by focusing on the construction of psychological profiles for individuals who have repeatedly provided inaccurate information. Children aged 4–7 years (n = 66) and adults (n = 62) played six rounds of a game in which they needed to find a hidden sticker. In each round, an informant made a claim about the sticker's location, and then participants guessed the sticker's location. In each round, after participants guessed, it was revealed that the informant's claim was incorrect. Across trials, children and adults quickly lost trust in the informant's claims. Children's impressions of the informant's smartness, niceness, and intentions became slightly more negative across trials. In contrast, adults' impressions of the informant's smartness increased, whereas their impressions of the informant's niceness decreased, and adults nearly unanimously judged the informant to be purposely (rather than mistakenly) inaccurate. In sum, children and adults track the accuracy of an informant over time and use this information to update their epistemic trust in the informant. However, based on the same data, children and adults end up with different interpretations of the informant's psychological characteristics—her traits and intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]