‘Can I trust you?’ A study of the psychological factors influencing school children’s decision to trust and peer’s perception of their trustworthiness

**Author NotesThis manuscript has been submitted for publication and is likely to be edited as part of the peer-review process. Correspondence regarding this paper should be addressed to Keri Ka-Yee Wong, [email protected].**How children’s trust beliefs in others and how peers determine children’s levels of trustworthiness is the bedrock of all relationships. Yet very little prior research exists on understanding the nature of this relationship and even fewer studies compare across cultures to understand the specificity of potential interventions. This study addressed these gaps by conducting a set of serial mediation models to test the hypothesized causal flow from social mistrust and its subscales (home, school, general mistrust) to anxiety to aggression and to peer-rated untrustworthiness in 2,464 school children aged 8-14 years from the UK (N = 994; M = 11.38 years, female = 45.6%) and Hong Kong (N = 1,470, M = 11.46 years, female = 47.1%). Increased levels of self-reported social mistrust (and its associated subscales) were found to be independently associated with increased untrustworthiness in both countries. Children with high levels of social mistrust, particularly school mistrust, were more likely to have high levels of anxiety and aggressive behaviors concurrently, which in turn was associated with higher levels of peer-rated untrustworthiness. This explanatory model suggests that future longitudinal intervention studies that aim to reduce aggressive responses from suspicious children may improve peer’s perception of untrustworthiness and childhood relationships with others.