Epistemic Cost of Loyalty: Children’s Selective Trust Balances Social and Epistemic Cues

The sources we rely on are embedded in networks of affiliation and competition, and engaging with them carries epistemic and social costs, yet little is known about how children navigate these demands when they conflict. Across two experiments, 543 children aged 5-15 played a tablet-based quest game in which they joined a team, learned whether their team was winning or losing, and were exposed to contrasting leader traits—competence in Experiment 1, prosociality in Experiment 2. They then made four decisions: which leader to gather information from, whether to ask the other leader as well, utilize the information they gathered, and pick which leader they’d play with in a future game. Children displayed a consistent baseline preference for their own team leader across all dependent variables, but this preference was modulated differently depending on the available trait: when competence was explicit, children disambiguated leader quality from team performance and Team Status had no effect; when only prosociality was available, children used team performance as a proxy for competence, with both factors independently shaping their decisions. A hierarchical Bayesian model pooling both experiments confirmed that older children were more loyal in their choice of information source and future leader preference, yet more likely to deviate when acting on the information they gathered—and when they did, increasingly resolved the conflict by choosing a neutral third option rather than endorsing the opposing leader—suggesting that over development, children do not simply become less biased but more strategic in managing competing epistemic and social goals.