Young children's interpersonal trust update based on promise fulfillment: Relationship counts

Abstract

To navigate the ever-changing social world, children need to update trust in response to new experience. Little is known, however, about how young children update trust in interpersonal interactions. The current study investigated how 5–6-year-olds (N = 160) predicted that a protagonist would update their trust for a mother character based on the mother's promise-fulfillment behavior, with unfamiliar others included for comparison. Results showed that 5–6-year-olds predicted that the protagonist would decrease trust for both mother and unfamiliar characters in the promise-breaking condition. However, in the promise-keeping condition, children predicted that the protagonist would increase trust only for the unfamiliar character, not for the mother character. These results suggest that 5–6-year-olds are able to update interpersonal trust based on promise-fulfillment observed from a third-party perspective, and this process is moderated by the relationships between characters in observed interactions. These results underscore the dynamic and relationship nature of children's interpersonal trust, which offers insights into establishing trusting relationships with children in daily caregiving and education settings.