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Informant’s Age can Trump Accuracy in Selective Trust in Korean 5-year-olds but not in 4-year-olds

  • THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
  • 2020, 33(1), pp.53-64
  • DOI : 10.35574/KJDP.2020.3.33.1.53
  • Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
  • Research Area : Social Science > Psychological Science
  • Received : January 15, 2020
  • Accepted : February 27, 2020
  • Published : March 15, 2020

Jimin Beom 1 Youngon Choi 2

1중앙대학교 심리학과
2중앙대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

An informant’s history of past accuracy is an important factor that is considered in selective trust in children as well as adults. Three- to five-year-olds select a peer as a reliable source of information if they were 100% accurate in the past and reject an adult if they were 0% accurate in the past. This pattern was observed in both American and Korean children. The present study examined how Korean 4 and 5-year-olds weigh the informant’s age in their selective trust under a circumstance where the informants’ accuracy was contrasted relatively less extremely: 75% versus 25%. In particular, we presented an adult informant who named objects accurately 1 out of 4 times (25%) and a child peer informant who labeled objects accurately 3 out of 4 times (75%) to 4- to 5-year-olds, and observed which informant they chose as a reliable source for a novel object’s label. While 4-year-olds still chose the relatively more accurate peer informant, 5-year-olds selected the relatively less accurate adult informant over the more accurate peer informant, showing that the older children gave greater weight to the informant’s age than the informant’s past accuracy. Further corroboration would be necessary, but the current results appear linked to the possibility that sociocultural factors in Korean culture, such as respecting older people and viewing older people as more wise and experienced than younger people, begin to influence Korean 5-year-olds in their selective trust.

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