The Development of Intent-based Epistemic Trust

We asked if and how children’s epistemic trust is influenced by the valence of the intentions underlying 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), the other attempted but failed to do so (negative intention). 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 emerges at age 8, whereas younger children simply showed to believe that the novel agent was good, regardless of the testimonies they received.