Children's Selective Trust in the Perspectives of Dual-Process Model

Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-10-29

张芷诺 杜瑶 汤玉龙

Abstract： Children understand the world through learning. But they cannot obtain knowledge only through direct observation. Such as ethics, morality, and religious beliefs, children need to obtain knowledge from others. But children are likely to be deceived or gain wrong knowledge if they trusted the information indiscriminately. Therefore, as one of the basic abilities required for children's learning, the selective trust could help children gain useful information and construct their cognitive world. Selective trust germinated in infancy and matured from toddler to childhood. Current research results showed that children's selective trust was a credulous and rational process. So, what was the true nature of children's selective learning? How to explain these inconsistent findings? What was the cognitive mechanism behind these inconsistencies? The proposed dual-processing model of selective trust provided a new idea for explaining the cognitive mechanism behind children's learning. A core point of the dual-processing model was that children use simple heuristic strategies to make default judgments in the early stages of development. However, as they grew up and their cognitive level developed, children's trust judgment strategies became more rational. The heuristic strategy was a Type I processing, and the rational processing strategy was Type II processing. When Type II processing appeared, Type I processing would not disappear but still coexist with Type II processing in children's cognitive strategies. When the Type I processing could not work, Type II processing would intervene and help children make rational choices. Unlike the dual-processing model in cognitive psychology, the character of the dual-processing model in selective trust was that, in selective trust, Type I processing was based on simple heuristic strategies and did not require specific ability and knowledge. The Type I process was a collection of multiple heuristic strategies, and there were at least two main strategies: general-trust heuristic and trust-the-better heuristic. Type II processing required children to use rational processing methods to compare and match the information providers' abilities and traits more accurately according to specific task requirements. Type II processing had two manifestations. The first aspect was that children could trust appropriate information providers based on the clues and specific task scenarios given when faced with a single trust clue. The second aspect was that children could overcome the interference of social cues and make trust judgments based on cognitive cues when faced with multiple trust cues. The age, having the task-related background and conceptual knowledge, the availability of cognitive resources, the nature of the task, and others factors would affect children how use these two processing strategies. In sum, based on introducing the dual-processing model, this article sorted out the credulity and rationality of children under different selective trust task situations, and discussed how to distinguish between Type I and Type II processing and some influencing factors. Although this model did not explain all the research in the field of selective trust perfectly, discussing this model could help researchers understand the relevant results in children's selective trust and clarify the mechanism behind it to better understand children's learning process. " "

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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