trust comes when you admit what you don’t know – lessons from child development research

neither one of these experts is factually incorrect. but the confident source likely has some additional appeal. research suggests that people are more likely to  follow advice delivered with confidence and to reject advice delivered with hesitancy or uncertainty.

during the pandemic, public health officials  have seemed to operate on this assumption  – that confidence conveys expertise, leadership and authority and is necessary to get people to trust you. but  public health recommendations about covid-19  are complicated by the rapidly changing scientific understanding of the disease and its spread. each time there’s new information, some of the old knowledge becomes obsolete and is replaced.

over the course of the pandemic, pew research center polling has found that the percentage of americans who  feel confused and less confident in public health officials’ recommendations because of changing guidelines has grown.

in a landscape of constantly changing science, is  communicating with total confidence  the best way to win public trust? maybe not. our research suggests that, in many cases, people trust those who are willing to say “i don’t know.”

we are   psychological   scientists  who study the emergence, in childhood, of what is termed “epistemic trust” – which is trusting that someone is a knowledgeable and reliable source of information. infants learn to trust their caregivers for other reasons – attachment bonds are formed based on love and consistent care.

but, from the time children are 3 or 4 years old, they  also begin to trust people   based on what they claim to know . in other words, from early in life our minds separate the love-and-care kind of trust from  the sort of trust you need   to get reliable, accurate information  that helps you learn about the world. these are the origins of adult trust in experts – and in science.

observing trust in the lab

electrical activity in the brain shows  that children both remember the event and learn the word when someone teaches with confidence. when someone communicates uncertainty, they remember the event but don’t learn the word.

effects of acknowledging uncertainty

our research shows that even 5-year-old children learn about uncertain data better from  someone who expresses that uncertainty outright  than someone who is confident that things will always work the same way.

overconfidence undermines trust

in a recent study, we showed that over the long term, when you have a chance of being wrong,  too much confidence carries risk . one group of 4-year-olds saw an adult who admitted not knowing the names for common objects: a ball, a book, a cup. another group saw an adult who claimed to know what the objects were called but got them all wrong – for example, calling a ball “a shoe.”

safeguarding trust by saying ‘i don’t know’

public health communication can have two goals. one is to get people to act fast and follow best practices based on what’s known now. a second is to gain the sustained, long-term trust of the public so that when fast action is needed, people have faith that they are doing the right thing by following guidelines. rhetoric that is  designed to convey certainty  in hopes of  earning widespread compliance  may be counterproductive if it risks mortgaging the long-term trust of the public.