Children’s attributions of knowledge and trustworthiness to persons with disabilities

Abstract

Children’s inferences about people’s knowledge and epistemic trustworthiness can be swayed by seemingly unimportant qualities, such as their personality traits or appearance. Very little is known about how children reason about the minds and statements of persons with disabilities. In this study, we examined children’s inferences about the knowledge and epistemic trustworthiness of people with physical or auditory disabilities; disabilities that had no actual bearing on the quality of their visually-derived knowledge or claims. U.S. children ages 3.00–6.99 years (N = 76) were presented with scenarios in which a character who was disabled looked inside a box and another character who was typically-developing simply held that same box (without looking inside). Children were asked who knew what was inside the box. Then, the two characters made contrasting claims about what object the box contained, and children were asked to endorse one of the characters’ claims. Regardless of characters’ abilities, children across the age-range were significantly more likely to attribute knowledge to characters who had seen inside the boxes. This pattern was found even among the youngest participants (3-year-olds), and became more pronounced with age. As well, across the entire age range, children’s trust in informants’ claims did not differ depending upon characters’ disabilities. By 4.5 years, children preferred claims provided by characters who had seen the boxes’ contents, and this pattern, too, became more pronounced with age. Thus, children’s attributions of knowledge and trustworthiness to persons were not swayed if they possessed an irrelevant physical or perceptual disability.