Children's and adults' epistemic trust in and impressions of inaccurate informants.

As children and adults interact with new individuals, they make and revise inferences about these individuals' traits and intentions; they build and refine psychological profiles. Here, we examined how this ability develops during early childhood and manifests during adulthood by focusing on the construction of psychological profiles for individuals who have repeatedly provided inaccurate information. Children aged 4-7 years (n = 66) and adults (n = 62) played six rounds of a game in which they needed to find a hidden sticker. In each round, an informant made a claim about the sticker's location, and then participants guessed the sticker's location. In each round, after participants guessed, it was revealed that the informant's claim was incorrect. Across trials, children and adults quickly lost trust in the informant's claims. Children's impressions of the informant's smartness, niceness, and intentions became slightly more negative across trials. In contrast, adults' impressions of the informant's smartness increased, whereas their impressions of the informant's niceness decreased, and adults nearly unanimously judged the informant to be purposely (rather than mistakenly) inaccurate. In sum, children and adults track the accuracy of an informant over time and use this information to update their epistemic trust in the informant. However, based on the same data, children and adults end up with different interpretations of the informant's psychological characteristics-her traits and intentions.

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