PragTICAL

Humans have some faith in what is communicated to them, even when their informants are complete strangers, who could be mistaken or lying. Where does this trust come from? Although this question was raised more than two centuries ago (e.g. Hume, 1748; Reid, 1764), it remains largely unanswered, in great part because of a lack of appropriate empirical evidence. This project will capitalise on the tools of infancy research to probe the origins of human trust in communication in the first years of life. In the last ten years, great progress has been made in the study of preschoolers’ skepticism (for a review see e.g. Einav & Robinson, in press). Conversely, very little is known about the sources of trust in communication in infancy. The overarching goal of this project is to investigate the building blocks, scope, and origins of human trust in communication, central to learning and cultural transmission. Its main objectives are (1) to decompose the expectations that are guiding infants’ interpretation and acceptance of communicated information, and study (2) how these different expectations develop and interact in the first years of life, (3) how they support human conception of knowledge and truth, (4) how they interact with the representation of others as agents with beliefs and goals, (5) how they interact with the formation of social relationships, and (6) to what extent these expectations are experience-dependent. The project will focus on two sources of trust in communication: the assumptions of competence (TASK 1) and benevolence (TASK 2) that attach to communication. To this date, most research on the development of selective trust has been performed with preschoolers and older children. The kind of tests employed in these researches are generally far too complex to test human infants. To address this challenge, the project will rely on a combination of methods that allow to test pre-verbal subjects: Violation of expectation, interactive behavioural studies, and eye-tracking. The project will also turn to the very early developmental origins and limits of infants’ trust in communication (TASK 3). Studies will assess the effect of maturation by comparing the developmental windows of early trust in communication in pre-term and full-term infants. Moreover experimental studies will probe the development of infants’ selective trust before one year of age, to assess the effect of experience in a controlled setting. This inherently multidisciplinary research program will be completed at the L2C2 (CNRS UMR5304) in collaboration with philosophers, experts on adult pragmatics, communication and linguistic, and specialists of infants’ social cognition. Each task, and the theoretical integration of results accross tasks will be achieved by distinct teams of complementary experts, composed of researchers at the host institute and external collaborators: Task 1 : COMPETENCE TEAM (A. Kovács, O. Mascaro, J.-B. Van der Henst) Task 2: BENEVOLENCE TEAM (O. Mascaro, H. Mercier, A. Reboul, D. Sperber) Task 3: ORIGINS TEAM (G. Csibra, O. Mascaro, A. Reboul) Task 4: THEORIES TEAM (O. Mascaro, O. Morin, A. Reboul, D. Sperber) This research structure will create a core network of international collaborators working the origins of human communicative abilities, in particular creating a long term partnership between the host institute, and the Cognitive Science Department of Central European University, one of the top research infrastructures working on social cognition in Europe. The project will further reinforce the host institution by making its babylab fully operational, and by opening novel relevant research fields, that are complementary to existing research at the host institute in the domain of pragmatics, reasoning, and argumentation. Lastly, the project will support the reintegration of its coordinator (Olivier Mascaro) to the French research area, by setting the conditions for its permanent recruitement at the host institute.