Trust me, I'm a competent expert: Developmental differences in children's use of an expert's explanation quality to infer trustworthiness.

•Children use epistemic cues to make decisions about informants’ reliability.•Little is known about how children weigh conflicting epistemic cues.•This study examined children’s trust based on expertise and competency.•5- & 7-year-olds’ trust in an expert who did not display competency decreased.•7-year-olds limited their judgments to the expert’s area of expertise.