Efeitos das variáveis gênero e sotaque do informante na confiança seletiva de pré-escolares

Abstract

Children and adults learn new information in different ways: through direct experience and the testimony of people around them. It is therefore necessary for children to select who, among these people, is trustworthy. Recent research has revealed that children use not only epistemic criteria (e.g., who seems to have the most knowledge about a subject) but also non-epistemic cues to accept informants or information. For example, when two possible informants prove to be equally competent, young children show a preference for an informant who looks more like them (e.g., of the same gender or a native speaker of their language, as opposed to someone who speaks with an accent). When there is evidence of the same reliability history from two possible informants, will children choose the one with a similar accent to their own or the one with the same gender? To answer this question, 73 children aged between 4 and 5 years (Mage = 4 years and 6 months; SDage = 6 months) participated and were administered a selective trust task. Initially, during a familiarization phase, children were shown an animated video in which the characters narrated early parts of the story "The Three Little Pigs", which enabled them to identify the presence of an accent and the gender difference between two informants. During the test phase, the two informants provided conflicting information about the location of a lost object and the child had to choose the testimony of one of them. Participants were randomly assigned to three conditions. For each condition, there were male and female participants. In Condition 1, the two characters were a man and a woman, both with foreign accents. In Condition 2, the informants were a man with a foreign accent and a woman who is a native Portuguese speaker. Condition 3 featured a man who is a native Portuguese speaker and a woman with a foreign accent. No age effect was found in the choice of informants. Data analysis showed that children preferred informants with the same gender as their own (in detriment to those of a different gender) in all conditions. In C1 and C3, significant differences between boys and girls were found with regard to both the preference and the endorsement measures. However, in C2, a significant gender effect was only found for the preference measure. Together, these results are consistent with previous studies suggesting that informants’gender may be more important than accent in their selective trust judgments. Despite the fact that many studies on the topic have been conducted, more research investigating the relationship between different characteristics of the informants is needed.