Cheat to win: Children’s judgements of advantageous vs. disadvantageous rule breaking

Marlow, Christina; Kelsey, Caroline M.; Vaish, Amrisha

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101328

“…In contrast, five-year-olds and older kids thought worse of a copied drawing than of an original drawing. And Marlow et al (2023) found that, while both 5-and 7-year-olds condemned game-rule violations, only 7-year-olds viewed cheatingrule violations that benefited the transgressormore negatively than non-cheating violations that did not benefit the transgressor. Though these findings are about children's evaluations, which we return to in a later section, the evaluative distinctions suggest a perceptual distinction between cheating and noncheating.…”

Section: Seeking An Alternative Framework For Studying and Explaining...mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…There is surprisingly little research on how children's evaluations of cheating develop (Lavoie et al, 2017;Marlow et al, 2023). Scholars may have lacked interest in how evaluations of cheating develop because they assumed that everyone, even children, judged cheating to be wrong (Bouville, 2010).…”

Section: Variability In Evaluation Across Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals about Morality and Its Development

Dahl,

Waltzer

2023

Human Development

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Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. This inference, that cheating is a dying canary in the coal mine of morality, assumes that youth who cheat lack genuine, moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating and other forms of dishonesty result from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) prioritization of non-integrity actions during conflict. Each of these three steps—perceptions, evaluations, and action-selections—show both situational and developmental variability. From this perspective, research on cheating reveals moral engagement, not moral disengagement: Developmental and psychological research shows that, far from being a dying canary, cheating reveals the pervasive role of morality in decision-making.

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“…There is surprisingly little research on how children's evaluations of cheating develop (Lavoie et al, 2017;Marlow et al, 2023). Scholars may have lacked interest in how evaluations of cheating develop because they assumed that everyone, even children, judged 25 cheating to be wrong (Bouville, 2010).…”

Section: Variability In Evaluation Across Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals About Morality and Its Development

Dahl,

Waltzer

2023

Preprint

0

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Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. This inference, that cheating is a dying canary in the coal mine of morality, assumes that youth who cheat lack genuine, moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating and other forms of dishonesty result from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) prioritization of non-integrity actions during conflict. Each of these three steps—perceptions, evaluations, and action-selections—show both situational and developmental variability. From this perspective, research on cheating reveals moral engagement, not moral disengagement: Developmental and psychological research shows that, far from being a dying canary, cheating reveals the pervasive role of morality in decision-making.

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“…This distribution task has been widely used in the developmental literature (e.g. Marlow et al, 2023 ; McElroy et al, 2023 ; Misch et al, 2014 ; Vaish et al, 2011 ) as it elicits children’s preferences behaviorally, with minimal reliance on verbalizations, and presents simple, dichotomous response options (e.g., teacher vs. stranger). Though children in prior studies did not distribute resources to teachers specifically, they did distribute resources between adults.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No one is going to recess: How children evaluate collective and targeted punishment

Thomas,

Kelsey,

Vaish

2024

Social Development

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This study examined children's responses to targeted and collective punishment. Thirty‐six 4–5‐year‐olds and 36 6–7‐year‐olds (36 females; 54 White; data collected 2018–2019 in the United States) experienced three classroom punishment situations: Targeted (only transgressing student punished), Collective (one student transgressed, all students punished), and Baseline (all students transgressed, all punished). The older children evaluated collective punishment as less fair than targeted, whereas younger children evaluated both similarly. Across ages, children distributed fewer resources to teachers who administered collective than targeted punishment, and rated transgressors more negatively and distributed fewer resources to transgressors in Collective and Targeted than Baseline. These findings demonstrate children's increasing understanding of punishment and point to the potential impact of different forms of punishment on children's social lives.

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Cheat to win: Children’s judgements of advantageous vs. disadvantageous rule breaking

Cited by 6 publications

References 49 publications

A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals about Morality and Its Development

A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals about Morality and Its Development

A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals About Morality and Its Development

No one is going to recess: How children evaluate collective and targeted punishment

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