Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 20;13(8):e0202506. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202506. eCollection 2018.
Keeping commitments to others can be difficult, and we know that people sometimes fail to keep them. How does a speaker's ability to keep commitments affect children's practical decisions to trust and their epistemic decisions to learn? An amassing body of research documents children's trust in testimonial learning decisions, which can be moved in the face of epistemic and moral evidence about an agent. However, other bases for trust go largely unexplored in this literature, such as interpersonal reasons to trust. Here, we investigated how direct bids for interpersonal trust in the form of making commitments, or obligations to the listener, influence a range of decisions toward that agent. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds' (N = 75) practical decisions to wait and to share were moved as a function of a person's commitment-keeping ability, but epistemic decisions to learn were not. Keeping one's commitments may provide children with interpersonal reasons to trust, reasons that may function in ways distinct from the considerations that bear on accepting a claim.
对他人信守承诺可能很困难，我们知道人们有时无法做到这一点。说话者信守承诺的能力如何影响儿童的实际信任决策和认知学习决策？越来越多的研究记录了儿童在证言学习决策中的信任，这些决策可以根据有关代理人的认知和道德证据进行改变。然而，在这一文献中，其他信任基础在很大程度上仍未得到探索，例如人际信任的原因。在这里，我们研究了以做出承诺或对听众承担义务的形式直接寻求人际信任如何影响对该代理人的一系列决策。我们发现，3 岁和 4 岁儿童（N=75）的等待和分享的实际决策取决于一个人的守信能力，但认知学习决策则不受影响。遵守承诺可以为儿童提供人际信任的理由，这些理由可能与接受主张的考虑因素不同。
