Trusting the vigilant: How children value others' vigilance against deception

Humans rely extensively on communicated information, yet communication exposes receivers to the risk of misinformation. To manage this risk, individuals must not only be vigilant against dishonest informants but also monitor others' vigilance towards deception, especially when information is transmitted across social chains. The present study investigates children's vigilance towards dishonesty ('first-order vigilance'), as well as their ability to monitor others' vigilance and to make trust decisions accordingly ('second-order vigilance'). Children aged four to seven years completed three tasks assessing first-order vigilance towards dishonest informants and three tasks using a novel second-order vigilance paradigm, measuring their tendency to trust informants who had previously shown vigilance or gullibility towards deception. Our findings show that children's first-order vigilance towards dishonesty improves between the ages of four and seven, and is modulated by how deceptive informants are characterised. Children are less likely to trust informants described as lying or having antisocial intentions (epistemic and intentional dimensions of deception) than those described simply as mean (moral dimension of deception). Furthermore, from the age of four to five, children are more likely to trust an informant who has previously demonstrated vigilance towards dishonesty than one who has shown gullibility, based on observational evidence of their past trust towards a dishonest source. These findings shed light on children's emerging sensitivity to the social history of communicated information and point to the role of second-order vigilance mechanisms in mitigating the risk of misinformation through transmission.