Trusting information from friends: Adults expect it but preschoolers do not.

As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend’s unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to privilege friendship over reliability? Across three experiments, we explored whether friendship influences the evaluations of trust when others learn labels for novel objects as well as personal opinions. After watching scenes involving a main character, her best friend, and a stranger, preschoolers and adults judged who would be trusted for information from the main character’s perspective (third person) as well as their own (first person). Adults (n = 128, 55 female, recruited online from across the United States) expected the main character to trust information from her friend even if she had been previously inaccurate, while basing their own first-person judgments on accuracy. In contrast, 4- and 5-year-olds (n = 128, 62 female, from the United States) thought that the main character would be like themselves and prioritize accuracy over friendship. Further, preschoolers expected the main character to trust her (inaccurate) friend and (accurate) stranger equally when forming personal opinions. Thus, young children, unlike adults, do not expect others’ epistemic trust to privilege friendship with the speaker over accuracy information. Children have stable and often enduring friendships from a young age, but how much do they favor a friend’s words in learning contexts? The present study suggests that the U.S. American adults expected others to trust a friend over a stranger when learning new information, even if the friend had been previously inaccurate. By contrast, 4- and 5-year-old children did not expect others to show such learning biases toward a friend. These findings suggest that unlike adults, young children considered the prior accuracy of the speaker a more important factor than the friendship between the speaker and the addressee.