Children's trust in image-based online information obtained on their own or relayed by an adult

Abstract

Portable internet-based devices activated via touchscreen or voice commands have provided young children with unprecedented opportunities to obtain information from the internet not only with the help of a parent, but also on their own. An open question is whether young children show differential trust in information that they view online independently and online information relayed by an adult. Three experiments addressed this question with 4- to 8-year-old Chinese children (N = 248). Children were confronted with conflicting image-based information attributed to the internet that they accessed on their own (by tapping on a smartphone screen) or that was accessed by an unfamiliar adult experimenter who relayed the information to them. Experiment 1 showed that children were more likely to trust image-based online information that they obtained independently than information from the internet that was relayed to them by an adult. Experiment 2 replicated this finding when the adult informant also displayed an image corresponding to their answer. Moreover, even when the adult informant explicitly described selecting the most reliable answer among multiple answers (Experiment 3), children persisted in trusting image-based online information that they accessed independently more than information retrieved by the adult informant. Together, these results demonstrate that children value their direct experience when assessing image-based information attributed to the internet, and children's trust in online information is sensitive to how the information was acquired.