A Bully-to-Leader Developmental Shift in the Allocation of Epistemic Trust

From early toddlerhood, children distinguish between respect-based power exerted by a leader and fear-based power exerted by a bully. Here, we tested if and from what age children rely on this ability to allocate their epistemic trust. Children aged 1.5 to 10 years (n = 337) were presented with a leader-character and a bully-character who both used the same novel word (“zaffo”) to label each a different novel object. Next, children were asked to select the zaffo. Results revealed that toddlers trusted the bully-character (i.e., when asked to select the zaffo from a number of objects, they tended to pick up and pass the object labeled as zaffo by the bully-character). At 3 years the opposite tendency emerged (i.e., children tended to select the object previously labeled as zaffo by the leader-character) and it is not until the age of 8 years that children also displayed a clear distrust for bullies (i.e., only a handful of children selected the object labeled as zaffo by the bully-character). These results show that early in life learning is affected by the type of social power displayed by informants and that an adult-like tendency to selectively learn from respected leaders emerges gradually after an initial shift.