Children’s Understanding of Others’ Knowledge and Intentions

Children rely heavily on other individuals for information about the world. Learning from others allows children to gain information quickly, yet can also leave them vulnerable to misinformation and deceit. Thus, it is vital that children learn to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information. The present research examined 120 preschool-age children’s ability to reason about the relative knowledge and honesty of two sources presented together. In order to investigate whether children are selective when deciding whom to trust, children were asked to search for hidden stickers after hearing conflicting advice from two informants who differed in knowledge or honesty. After completing the game, children answered questions about the reliability of each informant, and completed six tasks from the Theory of Mind Scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004). The results showed that three-year-olds trusted reliable and unreliable sources equally often, but four- and five-years-olds trusted reliable sources more often than unreliable sources in both conditions. Children of all ages were able to verbally communicate that one informant was reliable while the other informant was not. Interestingly, this was true of three-year-olds, despite their indiscriminate trust in the search task, indicating a disconnection between children’s understanding of sources’ reliability and their subsequent trust in those sources. Additionally, there was a positive correlation between children’s ability to selectively trust the more reliable informant and performance on the Theory of Mind Scale. These results suggest that children learn to reason about others’ knowledge and intentions along the same developmental timeline, and that this ability is related to a general understanding of mental states.