Trust tangles: Who do kids trust? Unraveling young children’s attitudes in the gossip mill

Objective: As an important channel of social-information transmission, gossip enables individuals to acquire reputational information indirectly and to guide partner selection. This study systematically investigates the cognitive development from social evaluation to trust-based decision-making in children. Through two experiments, we examine how young children evaluate different roles in gossip scenarios and how those evaluations influence subsequent trust decisions. Methods: Study 1 examined how 141 children (aged 5-7) integrated factors such as gossip valence, emotional cues, and information transmission frequency to form moral evaluations and social preferences toward gossip spreaders. Study 2 employed a Trust Game paradigm with 108 children aged 5-6 to evaluate how a spreader's reputation and social relationships affect trust judgments and behavioral decisions in contexts involving negative gossip. Results: Findings indicate task-dependent age differences among 5- and 6-year-olds in gossip contexts. Specifically, for moral evaluations of spreaders, 6-year-olds attended more to information valence (positive vs. negative testimony) than 5-year-olds, who relied primarily on transmission frequency. In Trust Games, both age groups adjust trust based on role-specific reputation and relational information. Conclusion: These findings underscore that children' reputation-based trust judgments exhibit early stability, while their integrated moral evaluations of motives become more refined with age.