Updating trust: How children combine trait information with prior accuracy as they interact with an informant.

= 144, 89 female, 55 male), the informant produced a less predictable pattern of (in)accuracy, but remained 55% accurate overall. The trait information children initially received about the informant's honesty strongly influenced their epistemic trust when they lacked additional information about the informant's reliability (the earliest trials). When children's first-hand experiences with the informant prevented them from making strong predictions about the informant's future behavior, only children approximately 7 years and older utilized trait information to guide their epistemic trust. These results demonstrate some similarities in children's causal reasoning about the physical world and their social reasoning. The results also demonstrate developmental patterns in how children weigh different types of social information at different junctures in social interaction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).