Cultural variation in children's interpersonal trust: Honesty, reliability and confidentiality

Children develop a complex understanding of honesty, promise-keeping and secret-keeping during early school years. Yet, these concepts have largely been examined in isolation and little is known about how they develop together across relational contexts, particularly in relation to children's trust beliefs. We investigated how age-related changes in children's trust vary across these bases and relational contexts in Sweden and Turkey, two societies that differ markedly in trust beliefs. Children aged 7-10 years (N = 200) rated their trust towards familiar and unfamiliar targets across hypothetical scenarios tapping each trust base. In Sweden, developmental changes in trust depended on both the trust base and the familiarity of the target. In contrast, in Turkey, age-related changes were driven primarily by growing selectivity based on target familiarity rather than by the trust base. These findings suggest that how trust attitudes are developmentally organized across trust bases and relational contexts may be shaped by children's broader sociocultural environment.