Who do I believe? Children's epistemic trust in internet, teacher, and peer informants

In the cultural context of rapidly increasing internet access, two experiments examine how 5- to 8-year-old Chinese children and adults evaluate information from an unspecified internet source or a known human informant (a teacher or a peer). In Experiment 1, when evaluating statements from a variety of domains, adults regarded the internet and a teacher as more trustworthy than a peer. Younger children did not show differential endorsement of statements by any source, and older children endorsed statements attributed to a teacher over those from the internet. In Experiment 2, when the statements involved scientific and historical facts only, all age groups sought out and endorsed information from the internet or a teacher more often than from a peer, but only adults trusted the Internet more than the teacher. These results demonstrate that children can reason about the reliability of informants across different categories and that their trust in information sources is contingent on the type of information being presented.