Children’s Evaluations of Tattles, Confessions, Prosocial and Antisocial Lies

Abstract

Lie-telling is a false verbal statement made with the intention to deceive another. Lies may be told for selfish reasons or due to prosocial motivations. As a result, the veracity of a statement holds more than just communicative intent but rather represents social intentions. In the current experiment children (6- to 12-years old) viewed 12 vignettes which depicted a protagonist either telling a truth or a lie. The protagonist’s statements either hurt another or themselves (other versus self). Following viewing of each vignette participants provided a moral evaluation of the protagonist’s statement (five-point Likert) and a classification of the statements; as either a truth or lie. Additionally, a novel method of evaluating statements was introduced, whereby children evaluated communicative intent as an act, to be rewarded or punished. Results revealed that both lies and truths were accurately identified, with the exception of altruistic lies (benefits to another) and tattling truths (harms another). Younger children rewarded truthful statements, which harmed or hurt another, significantly more often than older children. Older children ranked lies to help another significantly more favorably than lies to protect the self. Children also rewarded confessions and punished antisocial lies most frequently. Results highlight the notable differences in children’s perceptions of varying forms of honesty and lying.

Do They Really Mean It? Children’s Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

“…Additionally, some of the variability we found for teasing and prosocial lies seemed to originate in differences depending on age and gender. For prosocial lies, the results show an increasing ability to identify lies with age, a trend that has been shown in the literature as well (Bussey, 1999; Talwar, Williams, Renaud, Arruda, & Saykaly, 2016). The processing of prosocial lies is associated with children’s socialization experience, moral judgment, and attention to the social context in which the lie is told (Hsu & Cheung, 2013; Ma, Xu, Heyman, & Lee, 2011; Perkins & Turiel, 2007; Popliger et al, 2011).…”

Because ‘everybody believes in different things’: Examining tolerance of divergent preferences, beliefs, and morals in kindergarten students

“…This aligns with research highlighting age differences in how children view and endorse different types of lying. Younger children have been found to reward telling the truth, even when it harms another, significantly more often than older children, who have been found to rate prosocial lies more favourably (Talwar et al., 2016). It may be the case that these types of moral norms, much like more serious moral digressions such as causing physical harm, tend to be viewed as nonrelative and obligatory (rules that apply to everyone) by children in this age group and therefore differing opinions cannot be tolerated.…”

“…For example, lying or tattling can be done for either prosocial or anti‐social reasons. Lying to deliberately deceive another is generally considered to be morally wrong, whereas lying for prosocial reasons such as to avoid hurting someone's feelings is considered to be acceptable in most cultures (Talwar et al., 2016). Similarly, tattling (or telling ‘tattle tales’) can be done to cause harm or for personal gain and could be seen as a negative action, or it can be done to report a serious transgression and could be viewed as an appropriate moral action (Ingram & Bering, 2010).…”

Exploring the decision component of the Activation‐Decision‐Construction‐Action Theory for different reasons to deceive

“…There were two scenarios where self‐oriented lies could be told, and two where other‐oriented lies could be told. These scenarios were then further split to manipulate the presence of an additional cost (i.e., harm) as introduced by Talwar, Williams, Renaud, Arruda, and Saykaly (). See Appendix for the full scenarios.…”