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Description
Faces influence our initial trust decisions but sometimes can be deceiving. Young children can form trust impressions from faces and use them to guide their decisions in economic trust games (Ewing et al., 2015). Older children can also consider the fairness of partners' return behavior when making trust decisions (Siddique et al., 2022). Here, we explored how 5-7-year-olds adjust their trust behavior based on social experience.
Children (N=80) played a web-based child-friendly online trust game, collecting as many gems as possible along a journey where they met trustworthy- or untrustworthy-looking fairies. The fairies could act fairly or unfairly (congruently or incongruently with their facial appearance), multiplying or keeping the gems the child would offer them. Children’s spontaneous sharing behavior with novel fairies’ faces was monitored before and after their exposure to the fairies’ return behavior to assess generalization to new social partners.
Data collection is still in progress. Preliminary results confirmed that children’s sharing behavior was biased by facial trustworthiness, but this changed based on the fairies’ actions. Children shared more with fair fairies and less with unfair ones (Time x Face trust x Congruency, p <.001). Notably, this effect showed a tendency to generalize to new faces, which, if confirmed in the final sample, would suggest children learned to adjust trust based on experience (Face trust x Congruency, p= .11).
These findings highlight the flexibility of children's trust formation. They can adapt their initial impressions based on social interactions, potentially beneficial in situations where appearances might be misleading.
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