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British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2014), 32, 94–99 © 2013 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Brief report

In beauty we trust: Children prefer information from more attractive informants Igor Bascandziev1,2* and Paul L. Harris3 1

Department of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 3 Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 2

Preschool children were presented with slides on a computer screen showing a novel object, together with two informants, one with an attractive and one with a less attractive face. Children were asked which informant they would like to ask about the name of the novel object. After hearing the informants provide conflicting names, they were asked who they thought was correct. Children were more likely to endorse names provided by the person with the more attractive face, a bias that cannot be justified on epistemic grounds. The implications of this finding are discussed.

When learning about the world, children rely heavily on information provided to them by conspecifics (Csibra & Gergely, 2009; Harris, 2012; Tomasello, 2008). However, relying on such information can make one vulnerable to accepting false information from ignorant or deceptive informants. Is there a mechanism that guards children against this danger? Previous research suggests that the answer to this question is yes. When given a choice, children choose to seek and accept information from informants who were accurate rather than inaccurate in the past (Clement, Koenig, & Harris, 2004; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004; Sabbagh, Wdowiak, & Ottaway, 2003), from informants who are familiar to them rather than from strangers (Corriveau & Harris, 2009), from benevolent rather than from malevolent informants (Mascaro & Sperber, 2009), from smart and honest informants (Lane, Wellman, & Gellman, 2013), from non-dissenters rather than from dissenters (Corriveau, Fusaro, & Harris, 2009), and from native-accented informants rather than from informants who speak with a foreign accent (Corriveau, Kinzler, & Harris, 2013). These findings suggest that children are rational agents with a preference for accepting information from benevolent and epistemically superior informants. For example, previously accurate informants are more likely to provide accurate information in future than previously inaccurate informants. Informants who speak with a native accent are more likely to have access to culturally specific information and are therefore more likely to produce accurate information. Similarly, whereas a benevolent informant is expected to give truthful information, a malevolent informant may provide misleading, false information. Finally, whereas honest and smart informants are expected to give accurate

*Correspondence should be addressed to Igor Bascandziev, Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA (email: [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/bjdp.12022

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information, dishonest and not smart informants are more likely to give inaccurate information. Thus, it seems that children’s selection among informants is guided by epistemic prudence. But are children’s selections always guided by this principle? If they are, then they should display a systematic preference only if they have some information about the epistemic status of the informant. Lacking such information, they should not show a preference. An alternative is that children choose on purely non-epistemic grounds. If the latter alternative is true, then there will be cases when children systematically prefer information from one informant over another for no good (epistemic) reason. The goal of this study was to test whether children’s choice of informant is always guided by epistemic prudence. We asked whether children would trust more attractive over less attractive informants. Attractiveness is not an index of epistemic status or benevolence. Nevertheless, a large body of literature shows that infants show a bias towards more attractive people (Langlois, Ritter, Roggman, & Vaughn, 1991). Indeed, adults perceive more attractive faces to be more trustworthy and more intelligent (Todorov, Pakrashi, & Oosterhof, 2009). Would this apparent bias towards more attractive faces – which cannot be justified on epistemic grounds – guide children’s decision to seek and accept information from the more attractive person?

Method Participants A total of 32 children (Mage = 56 months, SD = 6.79, range = 44–65, 18 females) were tested.

Stimuli The stimuli were chosen from a large pool of 56 faces (Minear & Park, 2004). All pictures were colour pictures of Caucasian females with neutral facial expressions and ages ranging between 18 and 29 years. The 56 pictures were presented to 39 undergraduate students (Mage = 20, SD = 1.1, 28 females) who rated each face on a 5-point Likert scale as very unattractive, unattractive, average, attractive, or very attractive. The reliability of the ratings for all 56 faces was very high (Cronbach’s a = .95). The faces that received the lowest and the highest ratings were chosen as potential stimuli. Eight attractive faces and eight less attractive faces were chosen after ensuring that attractive faces were comparable to the less attractive faces in terms of hair length, hair colour, hair style, jewellery, make-up, and eye colour. There were no clothing cues that could have produced systematic differences between the attractive and the less attractive faces (Langlois et al., 1991). Each attractive face was randomly paired with a less attractive face across all trials and across all participants. In addition, which face appeared on which trial was also randomized. Furthermore, whether the attractive face appeared on the left or right side of the screen was also randomized across all trials and across all participants. Finally, the side to which the experimenter first pointed was counterbalanced across participants.

Procedure Children were seated on a chair in front of a laptop computer. The experimenter could not see the pictures that were being presented to children. All sessions were videotaped.

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Ask and endorse questions Children were presented with six novel objects and 12 novel names.1 At the beginning of the procedure, the experimenter said: ‘I’ll show you some pictures of objects on this computer and I’ll ask you to help me find out the names of those objects’. Then, he advanced to the next slide on which there was a picture of a novel object. The experimenter said: ‘Do you know what this is called?’ In cases when children offered an answer, the experimenter said: ‘That is a very good guess. But you know what? I don’t think that that’s the name of this object’. Next, he said: ‘I bet that one of these two people can help us find out’. At that point, the experimenter advanced to the next slide showing a picture of an attractive and a picture of a less attractive face. The experimenter then posed the Ask question: ‘Who would you like to ask about the name of the object?’ ‘Would you like to ask this person (the experimenter pointed either on the left or on the right side of the screen)?’ or ‘Would you like to ask this person (the experimenter pointed on the opposite side of the screen)?’ Children responded to the Ask question by pointing towards one of the pictures. Next, the experimenter advanced to the next slide that displayed a centred picture of the face that he pointed to first on that trial and a smaller picture of the object that was below the face and he said: ‘This person says that the name of this object is a _________’. The next slide displayed the picture of the other face and the object. The experimenter said: ‘This person says that the name of this object is a ________’. Then, on the next slide, children saw both faces again and a smaller picture of the object centred below the two faces. The experimenter said: ‘So, who do you think is right? What is the name of this object? Is the name of the object a _______ as this person said (while pointing at one of the faces) or Is the name of the object a __________ as this person said (while pointing at the other face)?’ Children responded to the Endorse question either by pointing towards one of the pictures or by saying the name of the object.

Results Two different age groups were created to check for possible age changes. The younger group included 17 children (Mage = 51 months, SD = 4.98, range = 44–59, nine females). The older group included 15 children (Mage = 62 months, SD = 2.20, range = 59–65, nine females). A preliminary analysis showed that there were no age differences (p = .63). Therefore, the data were collapsed across this variable. Finally, a further preliminary analysis showed that there was an effect of gender on children’s choices. Therefore, we present the results as a function of gender. Table 1 presents the mean proportion of trials on which children chose the more attractive face. Inspection of Table 1 shows that females chose to ask the person with a more attractive face about the name of a novel object significantly more often than chance (p < .0001; chance level = .5). Males were not significantly different from chance performance (p = .68). Nevertheless, further inspection of Table 1 shows that both males (p = .01) and females (p = .001) chose to endorse the answer from the person with a more attractive face significantly more often than chance. A Mann–Whitney U-test showed that the mean proportion of times that females chose the more attractive informant was significantly higher than that of males for the Ask

1 The pictures and names of novel objects used in this experiment courtesy of Jessica S. Horst, University of Sussex (Novel Object and Unusual Name [NOUN] database).

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Table 1. Mean proportion of trials on which children chose the more attractive face as a function of gender and comparisons against chance performance (n = 32) Males

Ask Endorse Total

Females

Total

M

t

M

t

M

t

0.52 (0.06) 0.62 (0.04) 0.57 (0.04)

0.42 2.93* 1.72

0.80 (0.05) 0.72 (0.06) 0.76 (0.05)

5.56**** 3.84** 5.18***

0.68 (0.04) 0.68 (0.04) 0.68 (0.04)

3.89*** 4.71**** 4.80****

Note. Chance level = .5; standard errors in parentheses. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001; ****p < .0001.

question (z = 3.1, p = .002). However, the mean proportion of times that females chose the more attractive informant on the Endorse question was not statistically different from that of males (z = 1.56, p = .12).

Discussion These results support the hypothesis that children sometimes base their decisions about whom to trust on purely non-epistemic grounds. Although there are no obvious reasons why people with more attractive faces would be more knowledgeable about object labels, female children sought, and both female and male children endorsed, information provided by the person with a more attractive face. Thus, children are not always guided by epistemic prudence when deciding whom to trust. These findings highlight children’s vulnerability to a transmission bias. Although the ability to learn from other people is very beneficial because it enables children to acquire generic knowledge about opaque, invisible, and distant processes and events in a single instance of learning, it also makes the learner receptive to information provided by informants who are distinguished by their attractiveness, irrespective of their epistemic reliability. The findings of the present study raise two broad theoretical questions. The first question is how consistently children rely on non-epistemic criteria when deciding whom to trust. For example, ‘Would children continue to favour the more attractive informant even when they know that both informants have been reliable in the past?’ A related question is whether children would continue favouring the more attractive informant even when they have evidence that the more attractive informant is unreliable and the less attractive informant is a reliable informant. Recent studies have confirmed that when such evidence of an informant’s accuracy is available, it inhibits reliance on cues like familiarity (Corriveau & Harris, 2009) or accent (Corriveau et al., 2013) among older preschoolers. A similar pattern might emerge when accuracy is pitted against attractiveness. Future research might explore each of these questions. One interesting and unexpected result in this study was that males performed no differently from chance on the Ask question. A plausible interpretation of this finding is that males did not pay as much attention to the initial, relatively short presentation of the faces for the Ask question as females did. Support for this interpretation comes from studies showing that 12-month-old male infants prefer looking at mechanical objects rather than at faces, whereas the pattern is opposite for females (Lutchmaya & Baron-Cohen, 2002). Moreover, many studies have found that females have a superior

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ability for face perception and face memory when compared to men throughout the lifespan (e.g., see Sommer, Hildebrandt, Kunina-Habenicht, Schacht, & Wilhelm, 2013). Another possible reason why males might have paid less attention to the faces of the female informants in this experiment is that male infants look less at opposite sex faces (Langlois et al., 1991). Indeed, either or both of these reasons might explain why males showed no preference for the more attractive informant with respect to the Ask question even though they did so with respect to the later Endorse question. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest that children sometimes base their selective trust on non-epistemic grounds. This raises important questions about the extent to which non-epistemic factors can influence children’s selective trust when indices of accuracy or knowledge are not available and indeed even when such indices are available. Answering those questions will in turn help us identify the various factors that shape children’s receptivity to information provided by other people.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Lycoming Nursery School and to the children and their families for participating in this study.

References Clement, F., Koenig, M., & Harris, P. L. (2004). The ontogenesis of trust in testimony. Mind and Language, 19, 360–379. doi:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2004.00263.x Corriveau, K. H., Fusaro, M., & Harris, P. L. (2009). Going with the flow: Preschoolers prefer non-dissenters as informants. Psychological Science, 20, 372–377. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280. 2009.02291.x Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2009). Choosing your informant: Weighing familiarity and past accuracy. Developmental Science, 12, 426–437. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00792.x Corriveau, K. H., Kinzler, K. D., & Harris, P. L. (2013). Accuracy trumps accent in children’s endorsement of object labels. Developmental Psychology, 49, 470–479. doi:10.1037/a0030604 Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 148–153. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.03.031 Harris, P. L. (2012). Trusting what you’re told: How children learn from others. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Jaswal, V. K., & Neely, L. A. (2006). Adults don’t always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science, 17, 757–758. doi:10.1111/j. 1467-9280.2006.01778.x Koenig, M., Clement, F., & Harris, P. L. (2004). Trust in testimony: Children’s use of true and false statements. Psychological Science, 10, 694–698. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00742.x Lane, J. D., Wellman, H. M., & Gellman, S. A. (2013). Informants’ traits weigh heavily in young children’s trust in testimony and in their epistemic inferences. Child Development, 84, 1253– 1268. doi:10.1111/cdev.12029 Langlois, J. H., Ritter, J. M., Roggman, L. A., & Vaughn, L. S. (1991). Facial diversity and infant preferences for attractive faces. Developmental Psychology, 27, 79–84. doi:10.1037/ 0012-1649.27.1.79 Lutchmaya, S., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2002). Human sex differences in social and non-social looking preferences, at 12 months of age. Infant Behavior and Development, 25, 319–325. doi:10. 1016/S0163-6383(02)00095-4 Mascaro, O., & Sperber, D. (2009). The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception. Cognition, 112, 367–380. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.05.012

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Minear, M., & Park, D. C. (2004). A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 630–633. doi:10.3758/BF03206543 Sabbagh, M. A., Wdowiak, S. D., & Ottaway, J. M. (2003). Do word learners ignore ignorant speakers? Journal of Child Language, 30, 905–924. doi:10.1017/S0305000903005828 Sommer, W., Hildebrandt, A., Kunina-Habenicht, O., Schacht, A., & Wilhelm, O. (2013). Sex differences in face cognition. Acta Psychologica, 142, 62–73. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.11.001 Todorov, A., Pakrashi, M., & Oosterhof, N. N. (2009). Evaluating faces on trustworthiness after minimal time exposure. Social Cognition, 27, 813–833. doi:10.1521/soco.2009.27.6.813 Tomasello, M. (2008). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Received 24 April 2013; revised version received 24 September 2013

In beauty we trust: children prefer information from more attractive informants.

Preschool children were presented with slides on a computer screen showing a novel object, together with two informants, one with an attractive and on...
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