The development of intent-based trust in moral testimony

Abstract

Research has shown that by age 5–6 years, children fully integrate information about agents’ mental states into their verbal moral judgments: When asked to say whether an agent is morally good or bad, they rely on the agent’s intentions more than on its action’s outcomes. Research has also shown that from an early age, children use a plethora of social and moral cues when deciding whom to trust in learning and testimony situations. Here, for the first time, we asked if and how children’s trust in informants who relay information about the moral character of a novel agent is influenced by the valence of the intentions underlying the informants’ prior actions. Italian children aged 6 to 10 years (n = 219, 112 female) were first presented with two puppets and asked to judge them. One puppet accidentally caused harm (neutral intention, negative outcome), the other attempted but failed to do so (negative intention, neutral outcome). Next, the puppets gave contrasting testimonies about whether a novel agent was good or bad. Findings revealed that the tendency to trust the assessment of the well-intentioned puppet concerning the novel agent emerged at age 8, whereas younger children simply showed to believe that the novel agent was good, regardless of the testimonies they received. These results suggest that despite the ability to generate intent-based moral judgments emerges at age 5–6, the tendency to rely on intentions underlying past actions of informants when assessing informants’ testimonies about the moral character of a third party undergoes significant change in childhood.