Young children (about 2 or so) may be trusting in "the veracity of others," but they are also great liars! Both of my 2 year old grandchildren (one boy, one girl) have already learned that they can lie to my face and defend that lie and make up stuff to support that lie, and they have at least some hope that I will "bite" and accept what they say. "Is that your cookie or your sister's?" "It's mine!" . . . ."No, it's mine! She ate hers!" Me: "Hers was red; yours was blue; you're eating the red one." "No it's not; it's blue!" So why would anybody call children gullible? Because they think WE are so gullible?
Eric Yost wrote:
. . . Thomas Reid, a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment, argued that an original principle implanted in us: "is a disposition to confide in the veracity of others and to believe what they tell us.It is unlimited in children" . . . . Similarly, Wittgenstein claimed that: "A child learns there are reliable and unreliable informants much later than it learns the facts which are told it" (1969, sec. 143). The same emphasis on early credulity and the absence of doubt can be found among contemporary psychologists and biologists. Dan Gilbert, for example, proposes that: "Children are especially credulous, especially gullible, especially prone toward acceptance and belief" (p.111) and Richard Dawkins calls attention to the alleged biological advantages of such credulity
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