"a promise kept, a promise broken": developmental bases of trust

"A Promise Kept, a Promise Broken": Developmental Bases of TrustAuthor(s): Ken J. RotenbergSource: Child Development, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 614-617Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for Research in Child DevelopmentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1129307 .

Accessed: 03/09/2014 07:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and Society for Research in Child Development are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Child Development.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 162.38.186.136 on Wed, 3 Sep 2014 07:15:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=srcd

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1129307?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


"A Promise Kept, a Promise Broken":

Developmental Bases of Trust

Ken J. Rotenberg University of Western Ontario

ROTENBERG, KEN J. "A Promise Kept, a Promise Broken": Developmental Bases of Trust. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 614-617. 16 children from each of kindergarten, second, and fourth grades were presented pictorially and verbally with a series of stories. The stories depicted actors who varied in the amount of helping they promised to do and in whether or not they helped. Children's judgments of trust of the actors, their explanations for their judgments, and(for 1 set of stories) their selection of a borrower of their favorite toy, were obtained. The pattern of findings for all 3 measures indicated a developmental change in the bases of trust, changing from 1 emphasizing behavior to 1 emphasizing the consistency between promises and behavior. The judgments of trust by kindergarten children also provided evidence that young children may, to some extent, base their trust of others on whether or not those others say "nice" things.

Several authors (e.g. Rotter 1967) have argued that interpersonal trust is essential to the maintenance of society. However, few em- pirical investigations have examined trust and its role in development. In particular, little is known about the types of information that children use in deciding who they trust and whether or not use of such information changes with development.

Overt behavior is one type of information that children could use in deciding who they trust. For example, a child might base his/her trust of another person on whether or not that person engages in helping or other prosocial behavior-the more the person helps, the more he is trusted.

Rotter's (1967) theory suggests that children consider the consistency between other's promises and behavior in deciding who they trust. He defined interpersonal trust as "the ex- pectancy held by an individual or group that the word, promise or written statement of another individual or group can be relied upon" (p. 65). Support for the adequacy of his con- ceptualization of trust for adults is provided by the research of Schlenker, Helm, and Te- deschi (1973). It was found that, within the context of a Prisoner's Dilemma game, the more an opponent showed consistency between his

promises and game playing behavior the more the adult subjects trusted and cooperated with the opponent. Direct evidence supporting the adequacy of Rotter's position for children is lacking, however.

Piaget's (1965) theory of moral development provides some clues about the way in which children's use of information in judgments of trust might change with development. He proposed and found that, when judging the naughtiness of others, young children base their judgments on consequences of behavior while older children place comparatively greater emphasis on their judgments of others on intentions.

The present experiment extended these no- tions to judgments of trust. Treating promises as "stated intentions to act" and overt behavior as the "consequences of the act itself," it was hypothesized that there would be a shift in the bases of trust with age, such that (a) young children would base their trust almost solely on overt behavior and (b) older children would place greater emphasis on the consistency between stated intentions to act (promises) and behavior.

Sixteen children (equal numbers of boys and girls) were tested from each of three grade

Portions of the paper were presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, San Francisco, March 1979. The author would like to thank Dr. D. Pederson, Dr. J. Olson, and Maureen Temme for their help in the preparation of the manuscript. He would also like to thank the principal, Mr. R. Harvey, and the London, Ontario, Board of Education for their cooperation. Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. Ken J. Rotenberg, Psychology Department, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4.

[Child Devdelopment, 1980, 51, 614-617. @ 1980 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. 0009-3920/80/5102-0044$00.75]



levels: kindergarten, second, and fourth. The mean ages at these grade levels were 5-10, 7-9, and 9-9, respectively. The children were obtained from a school located in London, On- tario.

Two sets of stories were used-behavior varied and promise varied. There were two stories in the behavior-varied set. In both stories, the protagonist promised to help a peer: he stated that, after returning from play, he either would hang up another, smaller child's coat or would get a ball down from on top of a locker for another child. The protagonist either fulfilled his promise or did not. Stories and helping were counterbalanced across subjects by grade level.

There were three stories in the promise- varied set. In each story, the protagonist promised either to do all, some, or none of a helping activity. Specifically, the protagonist stated that he would pick up and put away all/some/none of either marbles, toys, or papers while his friend was away. The protagonist always carried out some of the helping activity. In test- ing, the three different stories were presented to all subjects, with each depicting the protagonist as making a promise of a different magnitude. Again, the use of a given story with a given magnitude of promise was counterbalanced across subjects for each grade level.

The stories in the promise-varied set, then, depicted two types of protagonists-consistent and inconsistent. The protagonist who made the "some" promise showed consistency between promises and behavior. The protagonists who made "all" or "none" promises were inconsistent, and their promises were either greater or less than their behavior.

The protagonists and coactors in the stories were identified as the same sex as the subjects. The protagonists were given different proper names, which were randomly assigned to the different protagonists. Twenty-eight 1412 x I1T1-inch line drawings were used to depict the stories.

The subjects judged the trustworthiness of the protagonists on a push-button apparatus which depicted a series of black columns of in- creasing height on a vertical backboard. The columns and their corresponding buttons were assigned the following labels (in the order from shortest to tallest columns): trust him (her) not at all, trust him just a little bit, trust him kind of, trust him a lot, trust him very very much.

Ken J. Rotenberg 615

The subjects were tested individually. Each subject was trained until he identified correctly the labels for each of the columns and buttons. The stories from the behavior-varied set were presented first, then those of the promise-varied set. The stories were randomized for presentation within each story set.

Each story was presented verbally and pictorially by the experimenter. The subject was required to retell the story, which was repeated until complete recall was achieved. The subject was then required to push the button of the scale that best described how much he trusted the protagonist and to give his reasons for that judgment. The subjects' answers were recorded on audiotape.

Following the presentation of all five stories, the subject was asked what his favorite toy was. The experimenter then displayed the first drawing from each of the three stories from the promise-varied set and briefly retold the stories. The subject was asked to which of the three protagonists he would prefer to lend his toy.

Subjects' judgments of trust of the protagonists were scored from 1 to 5, with larger numbers corresponding to greater ratings of trust. The judgment ratings from the behavior- varied set were subjected to a 3 (grade level) x 2 (sex) x 2 (protagonist) analysis of variance, with repeated measures on the last variable. This analysis yielded a main effect for type of protagonist, F(1,42) = 214.20, p < .001. Subjects assigned higher ratings of trust to the protagonist who helped (as promised) than to the protagonist who did not help (and hence did not behave as promised). Effects of grade level were not reliable, F (2,42) < 1.

The subjects' explanations for their judgments were coded by two naive raters as to whether the explanations were behavior based (i.e., helped) or promise-reliability based (i.e., did or did not do what was promised). Inter- rater agreement for both types of explanations for each of the five stories was 90% or greater.

It was found that, for the behavior-varied stories, 50% of kindergarten subjects' explanations were behavior based and 6% were promise-reliability based. The opposite pattern was found for second- and fourth-grade subjects, where 47% and 50% of their explanations were promise-reliability based (respectively) and 25% and 16% were behavior based (respectively). Chi square analyses on the subjects' explanations for each of the two behavior-varied stories



616 Child Development indicated that promise-reliability-based explanations increased with age, while behavior-based explanations decreased with age (all X2s > 6.01, p <.05). This pattern of explanation was also found for the promise-varied stories.

Subjects' judgments of trust of the protagonists in the promise-varied set were subjected to a 3 (grade level) x 2 (sex) x 3 (type of protagonist) analysis of variance, with repeated measures on the last variable. This analysis yielded a main effect for type of protagonist, F (2,84) = 26.73, p < .001, and a grade x type of protagonist interaction, F(4,84) = 8.87, p < .001. Tukey a posteriori comparisons were carried out. The comparisons showed, as expected, that subjects in fourth grade assigned higher ratings of trust to the some protagonist (mean 4.40) than to either the all (mean 2.60) or none (mean 2.72) protagonists (all p's < .01). Also, subjects in second grade assigned higher values of trust to the some (mean 3.94) than to the all (mean 2.50) or none (mean 2.50) protagonists (all p's < .01). None of these comparisons was significant for the kindergarten subjects. The comparisons did show, however, that subjects in kindergarten tended to assign higher trust values to protagonists who promised more (mean of 2.63, 2.81, and 3.19, for the none, some, and all protagonists, respectively; the all versus none protagonists comparison was reliable, p < .05). The analysis also yielded main effects of sex and an interaction of sex and grade, but these were unrelated to the age differences in the judgment of the different types of protagonists.

A 3 (grade level) x 2 (some vs. all/none protagonists) X2 analysis was carried out on the subjects' selection of who they would prefer to lend their favorite toy to. The X2 was significant, X2(2) = 10.46, p < .01, and indicated that the frequency of the choice of the some protagonist increased with age, with 50% of the kindergarten subjects choosing the some protagonist compared with 100% of the fourth- grade subjects.

These findings provide support for the hy- pothesis that there are shifts in the bases of trust with age, going from one emphasizing overt behavior to one emphasizing the reliability of a promise. It was found, as expected, that children at all ages assigned higher values of trust to the protagonist who helped (as promised) than to the protagonist who did not help (and therefore broke his promise). Also as expected, however, kindergarten children tended

to emphasize overt behavior, while fourth-grade children tended to emphasize promise reliability as a rationale for their judgments of trust. For the promise-varied stories, there were in- creases with age in children's emphasis on the consistency between promises and behavior both in trust judgments and in the selection of a borrower for their favorite toy. Fourth-grade children showed, in their trust judgment and selection of a borrower, a strong preference for the some protagonist (who demonstrated consistency between his promise and behavior), whereas kindergarten children did not manifest this preference.

Contrary to expectations, kindergarten children assigned greater judgments of trust to the protagonist who promised to do greater than lesser amounts of helping. These findings show that the kindergarten children were sensitive to promises. One way to summarize the pattern of findings, then, is that, for the kindergarten children, the trust of others was based mainly on whether or not the individuals did nice things and, to a lesser extent, on whether or not they said nice things.

Recently, researchers have found the effects of the order of information on young children's moral judgment and have provided evidence that those effects may be due, in part, to the children's limited memory ability (see Austin, Ruble, & Trabasso 1977). It should be pointed out that order effects are not critical to an investigation of Rotter's (1967) concept of trust since it specified a certain order of information-that in which promises precede behavior. Also in the present research, children at all ages were trained until they achieved complete recall of the information. This pro- cedure would likely have minimized, but not necessarily eliminated, the possible contribution of order effects.

Piaget's (1965) theory of moral development would lead to the conclusion that the greater perspective-taking ability of older children accounts for their emphasis on stated intentions in judgments of trust. The nature of the relation between promises and behavior in the present findings leads to the conclusion, however, that other factors may contribute to the developmental changes in the bases of trust. There may be two reasons why young children may not be as concerned as older children with the reliability of promises for trust. First, there may be developmental differences in children's tendency to integrate and compare promise and



behavior information. Young children may not tend to engage in comparing what others say and what they do. Second, there may be in- creases with age in children's belief that language controls behavior. Young children may tend to believe that language and behavior often function independently.

References

Austin, V. D.; Ruble, D. N.; & Trabasso, T. Re- call and order effects as factors in children's

Ken J. Rotenberg 617

moral judgments. Child Development, 1977, 48, 470-474.

Piaget, J. The moral judgment of the child. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

Rotter, J. B. A new scale for the measurement of interpersonal trust. Journal of Personality, 1967, 35, 651-665.

Schlenker, B. R.; Helm, B.; & Tedeschi, J. T. The effects of personality and situational variables on behavioral trust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 25, 419-427.



"a promise kept, a promise broken": developmental bases of trust

Documents