Inferences are more than skin deep: Behavior outweighs appearance in 4- and 5-year-olds’ competence and trust judgments

Abstract

Children must weigh many different pieces of information when making inferences about the people around them. The current studies were designed to explore how children weigh others’ behaviors and appearance when determining their potential competence (i.e., smart/not smart) and trustworthiness (e.g., nice/not nice). In Study 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were presented with 16 computer-generated characters: 8 whose faces were designed to appear competent or incompetent and 8 whose faces were designed to appear trustworthy or untrustworthy (Todorov et al., 2013). The characters whose faces appeared more or less trustworthy then engaged in a trustworthy or untrustworthy behavior (e.g., sharing equally or not) and the characters whose faces appeared more or less competent engaged in a competent or incompetent behavior (e.g., knowing the function of a familiar object or not). Finally, children were asked to make inferences about the characters’ future trustworthiness or competence. Study 2 highlighted the characters’ appearance by using the same paradigm, but asking a different group of 4- and 5-year-olds to make inferences about the characters twice: once after only seeing their appearance, and again after seeing their behavior. Across both studies, children primarily relied on the characters’ behaviors to make their inferences, but the strength of behavior varied by inference type. Therefore, when both cues are available, behavior, not appearance, tends to drive children’s inferences about others, but children’s epistemic judgments may be more conservative than their social judgments.