Kids Trust Hard Workers Over Naturally Gifted Teachers, Study Finds

When young children decide whom to trust, whom to learn from, and even whom to befriend, they appear to do something surprisingly sophisticated: they look past the outcome and scrutinize the process that produced it. A new study published in Communications Psychology by Nina N. Ye and Kathleen H. Corriveau of Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development reports that children between roughly six and nine years old prefer to learn from a “striver” — someone who succeeded through sustained effort — over an “endowed” informant who achieved the same result through natural talent. The preference held even when the naturally gifted person was, on the surface, the more successful of the two, and it extended beyond learning decisions into the social realm, shaping whom children wanted as friends and future sources of information.

The research addresses a deceptively simple question with real developmental weight: do children reason about the unequal means to success when deciding whom to learn from? Developmental scientists have long known that children are selective learners. From preschool age onward, they track an informant’s history of accuracy, prefer confident speakers over hesitant ones, and favor individuals whose past claims have been verified. But most of this work has focused on outcomes — who was right, who was wrong, who solved the puzzle. Far less is known about whether children attend to how a person arrived at their knowledge, and whether the route to success carries epistemic weight of its own.

To find out, the researchers ran two studies with a combined 220 children. In the first study, 100 children with an average age of 7.58 years — 45 of them girls — were introduced to two hypothetical informants. One, the striver, reached a goal through visible effort and persistence. The other, the endowed individual, reached the identical goal effortlessly, apparently by virtue of natural ability. Crucially, the outcomes were matched: both informants achieved the same result. Children were then asked whom they would prefer to learn from in the future and were invited to explain their choices. With increasing age, children not only preferred the striver as a teacher but also attributed greater competence to that person, suggesting that effort was being read as a signal of underlying knowledge rather than as mere industriousness.

The second study raised the stakes. Here, 120 children with an average age of 7.30 years — 65 girls — compared informants whose outcomes actually differed in success. This design choice matters, because it rules out the simplest explanation of the first finding: that children simply could not tell the two informants apart, or that they defaulted to the striver because both seemed equally capable. Even when the endowed informant was the more successful of the pair, children still preferred to learn from the striver. The pattern replicated the first study’s learning preference and, notably, spilled over into interpersonal decisions: children also chose the striver as the person they would want to seek information from and as a potential friend.

Why would effort trump talent in a child’s calculus of trustworthiness? The authors’ explanation, grounded in the children’s own justifications, is that effort functions as an epistemic cue. When children explained their choices, they referenced two distinct kinds of reasons. Some invoked epistemic grounds — statements such as “she knows more” — indicating that they saw the striver as a more reliable source of knowledge. Others invoked effort directly — “because she worked hard” — treating the labor itself as evidence of value. Taken together, these justifications suggest that children assign epistemic value to effort, viewing hard work as an indicator of future informant reliability rather than merely an admirable character trait.

There is a plausible cognitive logic behind this intuition. A person who succeeds effortlessly may have reached their current level through innate endowment, but their history says little about how they acquired their knowledge or how they will perform when faced with something genuinely new. A striver, by contrast, has demonstrated a repeatable process: encountering difficulty, persisting, and converting effort into mastery. From a predictive standpoint, that process may be the more informative signal about future reliability. If a teacher had to work to understand material, they may also understand the obstacles a learner faces — a hypothesis the study’s findings are consistent with, though the authors frame their conclusions in terms of the epistemic value children assign to effort rather than any single mechanism.

The age trend in the first study adds a developmental dimension to the story. Older children in the sample attributed more competence to the striver and showed a stronger preference for learning from that person. This suggests that the valuation of effort is not a fixed early bias but something that strengthens across the middle-childhood years, possibly as children accumulate experience with learning itself — discovering, for example, that persistent practice yields understanding in ways that passive talent does not. It also aligns with a broader literature showing that children’s implicit theories of ability and effort become increasingly nuanced with age, shaping how they interpret achievement in themselves and others.

The extension of the preference into friendship choices may be the study’s most culturally resonant finding. Children did not merely treat the striver as a better teacher; they treated the striver as a better person to have around. This hints that the same evaluative machinery children use to select informants also feeds their social preferences, and that the process of achievement — not just its products — shapes early social evaluation. In a culture that often celebrates giftedness and effortless brilliance, the finding that seven-year-olds gravitate toward effort offers a striking counterpoint: the children themselves may already be valuing the struggle.

The findings also carry implications for education and parenting. If children as young as six or seven use effort as a cue for whom to trust and learn from, then the way adults model learning may matter more than previously appreciated. Educators who visibly persist through difficulty, revise their thinking, and demonstrate the work behind their knowledge may be signaling exactly the qualities children find epistemically trustworthy. Conversely, presenting knowledge as something that flows effortlessly from innate brilliance may inadvertently undermine a child’s confidence in that very source. The study stops short of direct recommendations, but its core message — that children’s learning and interpersonal preferences are not solely based on successful outcomes, but also on the process through which success is attained — speaks directly to long-running debates about praising effort versus praising ability.

Like all studies of this kind, the work has boundaries worth noting. The participants were drawn from a single cultural context, and preferences for effort over endowment may vary across communities with different beliefs about achievement and ability. The informants were hypothetical characters presented in structured scenarios rather than real teachers observed over time, and the study measured stated preferences rather than actual learning gains. Still, the convergence of two studies, the replication of the learning preference under unequal outcomes, and the consistency between children’s choices and their verbal justifications make a compelling case that by middle childhood, effort is not just morally admired — it is epistemically trusted. In the economy of childhood credibility, it seems, the striver holds the stronger currency.

Subject of Research: Children's selective trust and preferences for learning from effortful versus naturally gifted informants

Article Title: Young children prefer to learn from and befriend strivers rather than endowed individuals

Article References: Ye, N. N., & Corriveau, K. H. (2026). Young children prefer to learn from and befriend strivers rather than endowed individuals. Communications Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00543-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00543-3

Keywords: child development, selective learning, epistemic trust, effort versus talent, striver preference, social cognition, developmental psychology, informant reliability, friendship choices, Boston University, Communications Psychology, achievement motivation