Collaborative Research: Trust across diverse contexts in early childhood

Trust – the belief in the truth, reliability, or ability of another person to do a promised action – is a cornerstone of everyday social interactions and relationships. Trust is also vital to many aspects of children’s development: they must decide who they should trust in order to learn new information (i.e., epistemic trust) and who they can trust for social support, reassurance, or to keep a promise (i.e., social trust).

This project investigates how young children decide whether to trust a person who is unrelated and unfamiliar to them. The project will advance our understanding of how children’s epistemic and social trust judgments differ and yield new insights into how children’s racial backgrounds and experiences, and socioeconomic environments impact the development of trust in early childhood.

The results will also benefit society by providing educators with better tools to work with children in diverse contexts.

This project tests the hypothesis that children consider different factors in their epistemic and social trust decisions. Although children’s epistemic trust judgments have recently received considerable attention, little research has explored children’s social trust judgments or directly tested whether the two types of judgments operate differently.

It is hypothesized that young children’s epistemic trust judgments are based primarily on an individual’s prior accuracy, whereas their social trust judgments will be influenced by social group membership. The project focuses on two social categories, race and socioeconomic status (SES), which have not previously been investigated in young children’s trust judgments.

To address these novel predictions, two age groups, infants and preschoolers, will participate in a series of behavioral experiments that examine the role of accuracy, race, and socioeconomic status in trust judgments. The project will be conducted in three locations in the country with distinct participant samples and contexts. Thus, the findings will have the potential to uncover the underlying mechanisms of environmental influences on young children’s trust in others.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.