Gender influences on children’s selective trust of adult testimony in Iranian context

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the Iranian culture, do children prefer to trust same-gender adults for learning new information? A sample of 106 three and half- to seven-year-old preschool children participated in two tasks. The testimony task was designed to set the prior accuracy of informants against their gender. To establish prior accuracy, children watched a man and woman label neutral objects. Children then decided (a) who to ask about naming unfamiliar objects, (b) whose label for each unfamiliar object is more accurate, and (c) who was better in responding to questions. Children also completed measures of personal sex-typing and stereotyped attitudes towards others. During the testimony task, children responded based on prior informant accuracy while there was only one reliable informant (same-gender or other-gender). The results showed that when both adults were the same in reliability or unreliability, children were above chance in favouring the same-gender informant for ask and choice questions. Notably, in our study, the girls with higher scores in the personal sex-typing measure were more likely to trust the man’s information even when the man had been unreliable or equal to the woman in reliability in the previous phase. However, the boys did not demonstrate such behaviour. Findings are discussed from the perspective of Iranian culture.