Can appearances be deceiving?: the role of informant clothing in the selective trust of young children

• Grant number: 23/03939-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): July 01, 2023
• Effective date (End): February 29, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Human Development Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Débora de Hollanda Souza
• Grantee: Isabella Páfaro Silva
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/50909-8 - INCT 2014: Behavior, Cognition and Teaching (INCT-ECCE): relational learning and symbolic functioning, AP.TEM

Abstract

Children learn about the world, to a great extent, from the testimony of others, but they can be true or false. Recent studies have shown that even preschool aged children prefer to learn from informants who have proved to be reliable in the past, in contrast to unreliable informants. Such competence has been conventionally called selective trust or epistemic trust. However, there is also evidence suggesting that children sometimes base their decisions about whom to trust on non-epistemic bases, such as physical appearance. Following this direction, the goal of the present study is to investigate whether clothing plays a role in the selective trust of Brazilian children when learning something new. Forty-eight 6- to 8-year-old children will participate in this study. An adapted version of the classic selective trust task will be used. Children will be randomly distributed into three conditions. During a familiarization trial, all participants will watch scenes during which one actress asks two potential informants the name of a familiar object. In the first condition (C1), one informant, formally dressed, will always name the objects correctly (e.g., saying "It's a chair!" when seeing a chair) and the second actress, casually dressed, always gets it wrong (e.g., says a chair is a ball). In the second condition (C2), the formally dressed actress always mislabels the objects and the casually dressed actress always labels them correctly. And in the third condition (C3), both informants, one formally dressed and the other casually dressed, labels the objects correctly (e.g., one says "It's a mug" and the other says "It's a cup!"). During the four test trials, the third actress always asks the name of a non-familiar object and each informant provides a novel name for it (e.g., "This is a poqui!"x "This is a tego!". The hypothesis is that children will show a preference for the informant with a better accuracy rate, regardless of their dressing standards; when both informants prove to be reliable (C3), the preference will be for the formally dressed person.