Toddlers DO Know best!

Children as young as three years can tell by a person's face if they are trustworthy.

Many parents have dealt with excruciating embarrassment as a result of their children’s powers of observation. There are few who have escaped without their child pointing out a stranger’s flaws loudly in public.   So, it may come as little surprise that new research shows even toddlers can form sophisticated character judgements by looking at a person’s face.

Previous research has shown that adults regularly use faces to make judgements about the character
traits of others, even with only a brief glance. However, it was unclear whether the tendency is one that slowly builds as a result of life experiences, or is instead a more fundamental impulse that emerges early in life.

Children are particularly good at judging trustworthiness in a face. If instead young children's inferences are like those of adults, this would indicate that face-to-trait character inferences are a fundamental social cognitive capacity that emerges early in life.’

To explore the ideas, the researchers asked 99 adults and 141 children, aged three to 10, to evaluate pairs of computer-generated faces that differed on one of three traits - trustworthiness, dominance, and competence.

After being shown a pair of faces, participants might be asked, for example, to judge ‘which one of the people is very nice’. As expected, the adults showed consensus on the traits they attributed to specific faces. And so did the children.

Children aged three to four were only slightly less consistent in their assessments than were seven-year-olds. But the older children's judgements were in as much agreement as adults' - indicating a possible developmental trend.

Overall, children seemed to be most consistent in judging trustworthiness, compared to the other two traits. This suggests children may tend to pay particular attention to the demeanour of a face - that is, whether it is broadly positive or negative.

Importantly, the findings do not address the question of whether the judgements the children are making are accurate inferences of character. Rather, they simply demonstrate that adults and children are consistent in the traits they attribute to faces, irrespective of the validity of those judgements.

While it is still unclear exactly when the tendency to infer character from faces first emerges, it might be possible to test younger children with the same computer-generated faces to find out.