Melissa Koenig
Director of the Early Language and Experience Lab
Professor, Institute of Child Development
University of Minnesota / Human Development in Psychology
Melissa Koenig is the Director of the Early Language and Experience Lab and a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. She specializes in early language development and theory of mind. Her recent research focuses on children’s evaluation of testimony, the bases upon which they credit knowledge to others, and the epistemic significance of doubt. She also explores the importance of credible and accurate advertising to young children, and the ways in which adults can expand children’s critical thinking abilities.
Videos by Melissa Koenig
How Children Gauge Trustworthiness: Key Findings
Research
Contributor / Melissa Koenig
Melissa Koenig
Human Development in Psychology
Trust Formation,Reciprocity,Swift Trust
Historically in the field of developmental psychology, there’s long-standing agreement on the importance of trust and the importance of trusting relationships for children’s development and their well-being.
So, what’s new in the field? In the last 15 years or so, there’s a new interest in understanding the different forms that trust can take in children’s cognitive lives, in their learning decisions and in their practical decisions.
Bumper: How Children Develop “Epistemic Trust”—Is the Person Telling the Truth?
In development, we think epistemic judgments to trust are early emerging, that they're made spontaneously, and that children might not even need extensive evidence about you to make these judgments.
To see this, one of the first experiments that looked at children’s epistemic trust presented three- and four-year-old children with two speakers—one who consistently named a set of familiar objects accurately (say, a cup, a ball, and a shoe), and the other speaker consistently labeled those same objects inaccurately.
And after three pieces of evidence about these two speakers’ accuracy, children later preferred to learn new information from the previously accurate speaker.
Since that work on early accuracy monitoring, researchers like Kathleen Corriveau and Paul Harris have gone on to show that, A, children remember that accuracy information about individuals over time, and secondly, that they don’t only monitor an individual’s track record of accuracy, but they monitor agreement or rates of disagreement across several individuals.
So, when you think about children’s growing beliefs about religion or God, or their growing scientific beliefs about the body or the shape of the earth, we know that children need to reconcile the different claims that people are presenting about these things.
So, when people’s statements are treated as evidence, you can think of children needing to put together the different pieces of evidence they receive from other people.
To the extent that a child is surrounded by people who agree or disagree about God or dinosaurs or climate change, children can monitor people’s agreement or rates of disagreement, much like a young sociologist who samples public opinion.
So, this work on epistemic trust suggests that children are making these judgments quite flexibly.
Bumper: What Marshmallows Tell Us about Interpersonal Trust
When we’re interested in children’s interpersonal trust, it makes sense to study some of the practical decisions they make about us.
We know that children frequently face the need to wait for things that they might like right away—they have to, for example, wait for dessert until after dinner, or they have to wait to watch television until their homework is finished.
And researchers have found that children’s ability to wait for a larger reward later relates to how trustworthy or reliable the people around them prove to be.
In research by Celeste Kidd and colleagues, or Laura Michaelson and Yuko Munakata, and Annelise Pesch in my own lab have all presented children with people who make promises or commitments concerning a new and exciting art project.
Some of the people in these experiments came through on their commitments and delivered exciting art supplies, and others did not.
Later on, after the art project was put away and children were told that if they resisted a single marshmallow now in exchange for two or three marshmallows later, children were much more willing to wait for a larger reward when those claims came from people who kept their promises regarding the art supplies than when those claims came from people who made empty promises.
In research by Emily Cogsdill and colleagues, children were presented with pairs of computer-generated faces that adults had previously rated as highly trustworthy or as not very trustworthy.
And children showed great agreement, or consensus, in their own ratings and judged the faces deemed more trustworthy as nice and the faces deemed untrustworthy as mean.
So, they showed these same faces to children who were three to four years of age, five to six, and seven to ten years of age, and they found that children across all of these age groups showed great consensus, or agreement, and rated the faces that were deemed as highly trustworthy as nice and the faces that were deemed untrustworthy as mean.
So, this research shows that judgments about how trustworthy someone is does not require having evidence about someone.
Children can make first impressions about how trustworthy you are based on how you appear.
So, what’s new in the field? In the last 15 years or so, there’s a new interest in understanding the different forms that trust can take in children’s cognitive lives, in their learning decisions and in their practical decisions.
Bumper: How Children Develop “Epistemic Trust”—Is the Person Telling the Truth?
In development, we think epistemic judgments to trust are early emerging, that they're made spontaneously, and that children might not even need extensive evidence about you to make these judgments.
To see this, one of the first experiments that looked at children’s epistemic trust presented three- and four-year-old children with two speakers—one who consistently named a set of familiar objects accurately (say, a cup, a ball, and a shoe), and the other speaker consistently labeled those same objects inaccurately.
And after three pieces of evidence about these two speakers’ accuracy, children later preferred to learn new information from the previously accurate speaker.
Since that work on early accuracy monitoring, researchers like Kathleen Corriveau and Paul Harris have gone on to show that, A, children remember that accuracy information about individuals over time, and secondly, that they don’t only monitor an individual’s track record of accuracy, but they monitor agreement or rates of disagreement across several individuals.
So, when you think about children’s growing beliefs about religion or God, or their growing scientific beliefs about the body or the shape of the earth, we know that children need to reconcile the different claims that people are presenting about these things.
So, when people’s statements are treated as evidence, you can think of children needing to put together the different pieces of evidence they receive from other people.
To the extent that a child is surrounded by people who agree or disagree about God or dinosaurs or climate change, children can monitor people’s agreement or rates of disagreement, much like a young sociologist who samples public opinion.
So, this work on epistemic trust suggests that children are making these judgments quite flexibly.
Bumper: What Marshmallows Tell Us about Interpersonal Trust
When we’re interested in children’s interpersonal trust, it makes sense to study some of the practical decisions they make about us.
We know that children frequently face the need to wait for things that they might like right away—they have to, for example, wait for dessert until after dinner, or they have to wait to watch television until their homework is finished.
And researchers have found that children’s ability to wait for a larger reward later relates to how trustworthy or reliable the people around them prove to be.
In research by Celeste Kidd and colleagues, or Laura Michaelson and Yuko Munakata, and Annelise Pesch in my own lab have all presented children with people who make promises or commitments concerning a new and exciting art project.
Some of the people in these experiments came through on their commitments and delivered exciting art supplies, and others did not.
Later on, after the art project was put away and children were told that if they resisted a single marshmallow now in exchange for two or three marshmallows later, children were much more willing to wait for a larger reward when those claims came from people who kept their promises regarding the art supplies than when those claims came from people who made empty promises.
In research by Emily Cogsdill and colleagues, children were presented with pairs of computer-generated faces that adults had previously rated as highly trustworthy or as not very trustworthy.
And children showed great agreement, or consensus, in their own ratings and judged the faces deemed more trustworthy as nice and the faces deemed untrustworthy as mean.
So, they showed these same faces to children who were three to four years of age, five to six, and seven to ten years of age, and they found that children across all of these age groups showed great consensus, or agreement, and rated the faces that were deemed as highly trustworthy as nice and the faces that were deemed untrustworthy as mean.
So, this research shows that judgments about how trustworthy someone is does not require having evidence about someone.
Children can make first impressions about how trustworthy you are based on how you appear.
Trust Through the Eyes of Children: A Psychologist’s Perspective
Foundations
Contributor / Melissa Koenig
Melissa Koenig
Human Development in Psychology
Definitions,Trust Formation
Children are often said to be highly trusting, or credulous, and for several reasons.
First, it’s a cherished notion, both historically and currently. It’s one of the things that adults find so charming about young children—namely, their trusting nature.
Second, don’t children have to be credulous to some degree? After all, children are in the business of acquiring an enormous amount of information about the world.
And the people around them—their family, friends, teachers, the surrounding culture—are an important source of that information.
So, they can’t afford to be skeptical about it. In this respect, trust simply makes sense.
Developmental scientists are changing people’s minds about how credulous children are by studying the different forms that trust can take, the ways in which children reason about other people—who they are, what they say, and what they do.
Bumper: Exploring Two Varieties of Trust
In thinking about varieties of trust, we can distinguish between epistemic trust and interpersonal trust.
Epistemic trust treats testimony as a species of evidence. And when treated as a species of evidence, people trust others based on the evidence they have about them.
This notion of epistemic trust is borrowed from philosophy. Philosophers have pointed to the grounds we often have for trusting others—information about the speaker or the context or a particular testimonial practice.
And when we think about epistemic trust in this way, trust is really grounded in some form of evidence.
In the field of developmental psychology, psychologists are studying epistemic trust by manipulating the evidence they present to young children.
So, you might present children with three pieces of evidence that someone’s an accurate speaker, or you might give them three pieces of evidence that someone’s pro-social or kind in their actions.
And we can ask how that evidence bears on their future trusting decisions.
There’s another type of trust that we might call “interpersonal trust”; others have called it “social trust.”
And with this form of trust, it’s not about having evidence or beliefs about a person; rather, interpersonal trust is about making a kind of decision to rely or depend on someone and doing so despite having evidence against them or having no evidence at all.
So, young children often believe what others tell them, despite their having evidence against it or having evidence against them as a speaker.
And when children trust others in this way, we think there’s other reasons or other bases of their trust in that source.
So, when children trust someone despite having evidence against them, it could be that they’re deciding to rely on someone because of other reasons or other ways we have of valuing the people around us.
One way to see this is to appreciate that even if someone provides you with false information, you might still have good interpersonal reasons to trust them.
In research by Vikram Jaswal and colleagues and Gail Heyman and others, adults are tasked with hiding a treat under one of two locations, under one of two cups, and children are invited to find the treat.
And in the task, the adult actually presents false information about where the treat is hiding. And despite these falsehoods, children continue to trust that source for information.
So, if you think of this in terms of epistemic trust, it could be that you simply need more evidence to identify a deceptive intention and discount that source.
So, this makes clear the ways in which there are two varieties of trust—the epistemic and the interpersonal.
Both of these are distinct and unique from each other, but they’re both appropriate and rational forms that trust can take.
Bumper: Three Sets of Trust Questions for Developmental Psychology
For developmental psychology, this opens up three new and really interesting sets of questions.
First, we can ask, when in development do children begin to evaluate people as sources of information? In infancy? As soon as they begin to rely on others? When they begin to understand a basic set of behavior? Or when they begin to understand what other people tell them?
Second, if children can monitor something like the accuracy of a statement, then we can ask, well, what other kinds of things are they monitoring in other people’s speech and behavior?
So, we can start to ask, what other characteristics matter to children when they’re making judgments or decisions about whether to trust another person?
And this is where research in developmental psychology draws beautifully on the work of other disciplines.
In social psychology, we know that factors like group membership, authority, and consensus factor in people’s decisions. And we can ask whether or not those same factors influence children’s reasoning about others.
And third, we can ask, in the eyes of an infant or a young child, what information makes someone worth trusting?
We can ask, what makes someone a rational agent? What makes someone a reliable agent? What makes someone a morally good agent?
And to investigate all of these questions, it makes sense to keep in mind this distinction between epistemic trust and the interpersonal.
First, it’s a cherished notion, both historically and currently. It’s one of the things that adults find so charming about young children—namely, their trusting nature.
Second, don’t children have to be credulous to some degree? After all, children are in the business of acquiring an enormous amount of information about the world.
And the people around them—their family, friends, teachers, the surrounding culture—are an important source of that information.
So, they can’t afford to be skeptical about it. In this respect, trust simply makes sense.
Developmental scientists are changing people’s minds about how credulous children are by studying the different forms that trust can take, the ways in which children reason about other people—who they are, what they say, and what they do.
Bumper: Exploring Two Varieties of Trust
In thinking about varieties of trust, we can distinguish between epistemic trust and interpersonal trust.
Epistemic trust treats testimony as a species of evidence. And when treated as a species of evidence, people trust others based on the evidence they have about them.
This notion of epistemic trust is borrowed from philosophy. Philosophers have pointed to the grounds we often have for trusting others—information about the speaker or the context or a particular testimonial practice.
And when we think about epistemic trust in this way, trust is really grounded in some form of evidence.
In the field of developmental psychology, psychologists are studying epistemic trust by manipulating the evidence they present to young children.
So, you might present children with three pieces of evidence that someone’s an accurate speaker, or you might give them three pieces of evidence that someone’s pro-social or kind in their actions.
And we can ask how that evidence bears on their future trusting decisions.
There’s another type of trust that we might call “interpersonal trust”; others have called it “social trust.”
And with this form of trust, it’s not about having evidence or beliefs about a person; rather, interpersonal trust is about making a kind of decision to rely or depend on someone and doing so despite having evidence against them or having no evidence at all.
So, young children often believe what others tell them, despite their having evidence against it or having evidence against them as a speaker.
And when children trust others in this way, we think there’s other reasons or other bases of their trust in that source.
So, when children trust someone despite having evidence against them, it could be that they’re deciding to rely on someone because of other reasons or other ways we have of valuing the people around us.
One way to see this is to appreciate that even if someone provides you with false information, you might still have good interpersonal reasons to trust them.
In research by Vikram Jaswal and colleagues and Gail Heyman and others, adults are tasked with hiding a treat under one of two locations, under one of two cups, and children are invited to find the treat.
And in the task, the adult actually presents false information about where the treat is hiding. And despite these falsehoods, children continue to trust that source for information.
So, if you think of this in terms of epistemic trust, it could be that you simply need more evidence to identify a deceptive intention and discount that source.
So, this makes clear the ways in which there are two varieties of trust—the epistemic and the interpersonal.
Both of these are distinct and unique from each other, but they’re both appropriate and rational forms that trust can take.
Bumper: Three Sets of Trust Questions for Developmental Psychology
For developmental psychology, this opens up three new and really interesting sets of questions.
First, we can ask, when in development do children begin to evaluate people as sources of information? In infancy? As soon as they begin to rely on others? When they begin to understand a basic set of behavior? Or when they begin to understand what other people tell them?
Second, if children can monitor something like the accuracy of a statement, then we can ask, well, what other kinds of things are they monitoring in other people’s speech and behavior?
So, we can start to ask, what other characteristics matter to children when they’re making judgments or decisions about whether to trust another person?
And this is where research in developmental psychology draws beautifully on the work of other disciplines.
In social psychology, we know that factors like group membership, authority, and consensus factor in people’s decisions. And we can ask whether or not those same factors influence children’s reasoning about others.
And third, we can ask, in the eyes of an infant or a young child, what information makes someone worth trusting?
We can ask, what makes someone a rational agent? What makes someone a reliable agent? What makes someone a morally good agent?
And to investigate all of these questions, it makes sense to keep in mind this distinction between epistemic trust and the interpersonal.