How familiar characters influence children’s judgments about information and products

Highlights

• Examined trust in familiar characters and how characters influence product choices.

• 4-year-olds endorsed objective and subjective claims made by a familiar character.

• Children continued trusting familiar characters who were unreliable.

• Children preferred damaged products with a character’s image up to 74% of the time.

Abstract

Children are exposed to advertisements and products that incorporate familiar characters, such as Dora the Explorer and Bob the Builder, virtually from birth. How does the presence of these characters influence children’s judgments about information and products? Three experiments (N = 125) explored how 4-year-olds evaluate messages from familiar characters and how their trust in a familiar character’s testimony relates to their product preferences. Children endorsed objective and subjective claims made by a familiar character more often than those made by a perceptually similar but unfamiliar character even in situations where they had evidence that the familiar character was unreliable. Children also preferred low-quality products bearing a familiar character’s image over high-quality products without a character image up to 74% of the time (whereas control groups preferred the low-quality products less than 6% of the time when they did not include a character image). These findings suggest that young children are powerfully influenced by familiar characters encountered in the media, leaving them vulnerable to advertising messages and clouding their judgments about products.

Introduction

Over the past few decades, children have come to wield unprecedented purchasing power. Companies spend billions of dollars annually on advertising directed specifically toward children (Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, n.d.). These advertisements often incorporate characters from popular children’s television shows and movies or novel characters created for marketing purposes (Connor, 2006). Characters in advertisements are intended to capture children’s attention, induce positive affect, and provide memory cues for products (Neeley & Schumann, 2004). This strategy appears to be effective; children show excellent recall and recognition of characters that appear in advertisements even when the characters have only been encountered in the context of advertising (e.g., Toucan Sam and other characters associated with cereal brands; Batada & Borzekowski, 2008) or the characters promote products intended for adults (e.g., the Budweiser Frogs; Lieber, 1996).

In addition to their presence in advertisements, familiar characters sometimes appear on the actual products for sale. Brand licensed products—including toys, food, and clothing—that incorporate images from children’s media programs accounted for more than $5 billion in sales in 2011 (NPD Group, 2012). Food packages incorporating characters from children’s media are common in American supermarkets, and the foods they contain are often of low nutritional value (Harris, Schwartz, & Brownell, 2009). Furthermore, the presence of a licensed character on food packaging influences children’s evaluations of the product’s taste and desirability. Children ages 4 to 6 years prefer food products with a licensed character on the package and rate foods that come out of a package with a character on it as tasting better than identical foods from a package without a character on it (Lapierre et al., 2011, Roberto et al., 2010).

Despite the widespread use of characters to market products to children, little is known about how the presence of a familiar character influences children’s evaluations of advertising messages. In particular, to what extent do children trust what a familiar character says? Recent research has demonstrated that by 4 years of age children consider a number of factors, including prior accuracy (Birch et al., 2008, Koenig et al., 2004, Pasquini et al., 2007) and confidence (Birch et al., 2010, Sabbagh and Baldwin, 2001), when deciding whether to trust another’s testimony (for reviews, see Mills, 2013, Sobel and Kushnir, 2013). Familiarity can also strongly influence children’s trust in an individual’s statements. When seeking out information about a novel object, for instance, children are more likely to consult their mother than an unfamiliar woman and show more trust in their mother’s responses (Corriveau et al., 2009). Children ages 3 to 5 years also prefer learning the name or function of novel objects from a familiar source (their teacher) over an unfamiliar source with similar characteristics (a teacher from a different school), at least when they have no other information to use to make their decisions. If children later hear a familiar teacher making statements that the children recognize as inaccurate (e.g., calling a spoon a duck; Corriveau & Harris, 2009), developmental differences emerge in how they respond to that new information. Whereas 3-year-olds continue to trust the familiar teacher over an accurate yet unfamiliar teacher, 4-year-olds begin to moderate their trust in a familiar individual based on the individual’s history of accuracy. If the familiar teacher is 100% accurate, 4-year-olds show increased trust in the teacher’s statements, but if the teacher is 100% inaccurate, their trust weakens (although they do not necessarily shift to trusting an accurate unfamiliar source). Thus, there is evidence that at 4 years of age, familiarity with an informant is an important factor in children’s trust in testimony, yet children take an informant’s prior accuracy into account as well.

The current experiments build on this research to examine how familiar characters influence children’s trust and consumer choices, with three specific goals. Our first goal was to understand whether 4-year-olds prefer to seek out information from a familiar cartoon character and whether children take into account a familiar character’s history of accuracy when deciding whether to trust the character’s statements. By 4 years of age, children show increased trust in adults with whom they have a close relationship (Corriveau and Harris, 2009, Corriveau et al., 2009). But crucially, our study involves characters that, although they may be quite familiar to children, have had no meaningful interactions with the children (e.g., even if a child has encountered a life-size costumed version of the character, this was unlikely to have been a meaningful social interaction). The absence of a reciprocal social relationship with familiar characters may allow 4-year-olds to prioritize accuracy over familiarity, whereas for familiar people such as mothers and teachers children may need to take into account the potential repercussions of distrust for their relationships.

In addition, 4-year-olds understand that most fictional characters encountered in the media are not real and that they cannot act in the real world (Corriveau, Kim, et al., 2009, Skolnick and Bloom, 2006). Children are also less likely to apply information learned from a fantasy character than from a real person to a real-world problem (Richert et al., 2009, Richert and Smith, 2011). Thus, another possibility is that when an informant is not real, children find it more difficult to evaluate the accuracy of the informant’s statements or have different expectations for the informant’s behavior. For instance, children may believe that prior examples of inaccuracy are less predictive of whether a character will be accurate in the future because fantasy characters do not necessarily have the same abilities or limitations as humans (Lane et al., 2010, Sharon and Woolley, 2004). Likewise, children who are very fond of a particular character may be reluctant to discount that character’s statements even when the character is revealed to be inaccurate. This case would parallel situations where young children persist in trusting a familiar person, such as their mother or teacher, who makes inaccurate statements relative to a reliable unfamiliar person (Corriveau & Harris, 2009). Of course, a third possibility is that children will have no clear preference for familiar versus accurate characters, perhaps because other characteristics of the characters besides familiarity or accuracy determine their trust (e.g., perceived benevolence: Landrum, Mills, & Johnston, 2013; in-group affiliations: MacDonald, Schug, Chase, & Barth, 2013).

Our second goal was to examine whether the nature of a familiar character’s message influences children’s trust. Prior work on trust in familiar individuals has focused on children’s acceptance of objective information such as object labels and functions (e.g., Corriveau & Harris, 2009). Given that the messages relayed by characters in advertisements can be either objective or subjective in nature, we examined whether children respond differently to a familiar character’s testimony based on whether the character’s statements involve objective or subjective information. The majority of research on children’s trust in testimony has involved information about object names, functions, or properties (e.g., Birch et al., 2008, Clément et al., 2004, Koenig and Harris, 2005), yet there is emerging evidence that preschoolers trust informants’ judgments about subjective matters as well (e.g., the taste of novel foods; Nguyen, 2012). However, no research has examined whether children weight subjective information differently than objective information when determining who to trust.

Children as young as 4 years are sensitive to an informant’s degree of inaccuracy when evaluating claims (Einav and Robinson, 2010, Pasquini et al., 2007), and they excuse some errors more often than others (e.g., errors resulting from a lack of access to information; Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009). This suggests that children’s trust in an unreliable familiar character may depend on how children interpret the character’s errors. One possibility is that children are equally skeptical about individuals who make claims that disagree with their prior knowledge or opinions and that the subjective or objective nature of an individual’s statements does not play a major role in children’s subsequent decisions about trust. A second possibility is that children may be more forgiving of strange claims about subjective information (e.g., what food tastes best) than of incorrect claims about objective information (e.g., the shape of a wheel) given that even toddlers recognize that people can have different tastes (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). Therefore, children may be more likely to keep trusting a familiar character’s testimony after observing the character express unusual subjective opinions than after observing the character make unequivocally false statements. Children may also construe a few examples of differences in opinion to be more fleeting than differences in answers to objective questions given that they generally like the familiar character and continue trusting that character. A third possibility is that young children will pay more attention and react more negatively when a familiar character makes subjective statements that contradict general public consensus (e.g., birthday parties are fun) than when the character makes incorrect statements about objective facts. Children may then develop a more negative view of the familiar character and be more likely to reject other subjective information provided by that character. The current study was intended to clarify which of these three possibilities most accurately describes children’s behavior when faced with a familiar character that makes unreliable objective or subjective statements.

Finally, our third goal was to examine the relationship between children’s trust in a familiar character and how children evaluate products bearing that character’s image. We were interested in whether children who heard their favorite character make inaccurate statements would be less likely to prefer objects bearing that character’s image and, similarly, whether children who showed persistent trust in the character’s statements (regardless of prior accuracy) would show a stronger preference for objects bearing the character’s image. This question has practical implications for understanding children’s vulnerability to marketing tactics, and it provides an important theoretical test of whether trust in an individual’s claims influences judgments in an entirely different domain of behavior—in this case, children’s evaluation of a product’s desirability. That is, if children do not trust an individual’s statements, do unrelated objects associated with that individual become less desirable? To the best of our knowledge, this study is also the first to measure how the presence of a familiar character on a non-edible product influences children’s preferences and whether it can compensate for other undesirable characteristics.

To address our primary research questions, we conducted three experiments using the trust in testimony paradigm to determine whether children rely more on familiarity or accuracy when evaluating claims from conflicting sources (Birch et al., 2008, Koenig et al., 2004). In all experiments, children first identified their favorite character from a set of popular characters. Children then witnessed the familiar character that they selected and a similar-looking but unfamiliar character making conflicting claims about novel concepts, and they were asked which statement they endorsed in order to assess their baseline trust in the familiar character. Next, children witnessed the two characters making conflicting claims about familiar concepts. In one condition, the familiar character made statements that were accurate or consistent with the child’s opinion and the unfamiliar character did not. In a contrasting condition, the roles were reversed such that the familiar character was inaccurate or expressed uncommon subjective opinions. After endorsing one of the character’s statements about the familiar concepts, children observed both characters again providing conflicting perspectives for a different set of novel claims and again needed to endorse one character’s statements.

Following the trust in testimony task, children completed an object preference task in which they chose between plain new objects and damaged objects bearing the familiar character’s image. The design of the object preference task was based on the assumption that children view an object with a familiar character’s image on it as more desirable than a plain object—at least as long as the objects are otherwise identical. Thus, this task involved damaged objects bearing the character’s image, and children needed to weigh the value added by the character’s image against the value lost by damage to the object. Children who place a higher value on the presence of the character on the object should select the damaged objects more often than children who do not value the presence of the character as much. We hypothesized that children who persisted in trusting the familiar character’s statement despite prior inaccuracy or inconsistency with the children’s own beliefs would also show a stronger preference for the damaged objects bearing the character’s image.