Behavioral experiment demonstrates informativeness-based epistemic trust in children, indicating that communicative quantity serves as a proxy for speaker competence.
Key Points
To test whether children use communicative informativeness as a proxy signal for speaker trustworthiness and competence when prior track records are unavailable.
Conducted Study 1 (N = 225, ages 4–11) presenting children with choices between an accurate but uninformative tautological speaker and an informative speaker with unknown or inaccurate claims.
Conducted Study 2 (N = 159, ages 4–11) evaluating children's knowledge attributions across four conditions varying in the nature and magnitude of informativeness contrasts.
Children as young as four years old preferentially sought and endorsed novel information from more informative speakers over uninformative tautological speakers.
Trust shifted back to uninformative but accurate speakers when the informative speaker made overtly inaccurate statements.
Children consistently attributed greater overall domain knowledge to speakers who provided more informative statements across all test conditions.