Feel My Pain: Children’s Assessments of Empathetic and Apathetic Testimony
Children rely on interactions with their social environment to learn and develop prosocial behavior. However, young children do not indiscriminately trust all potential informants. This study explores whether children monitor empathy in others and use it to make selective trust judgments. Four- and six-year-old children (N = 67) were told stories about a character who went through a painful experience and confided in two social agents: an empathetic person, and an apathetic one. Children were then asked to make prosocial evaluations and selective trust judgments about the two agents. Results revealed that children judged the empathetic individual to be more prosocial than the apathetic individual. However, 6-year-olds were more likely to distinguish between the two individuals and to selectively trust the empathetic agent than 4-year-olds. Moreover, children, especially the 4-year-olds, were more likely to judge the empathetic agent as more prosocial if the situation involved physical pain than psychological pain.