Compassionate deception: Do children tell lies to be kind?
© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved
At that place are times when we corroborate of lying, when we believe it's the better option. For instance, suppose a would-be murderer comes to your door. He asks yous to tell him where his intended victim is hiding. Should yous tell him the truth?
Virtually people would say no. The expert of preventing harm outweighs the good of telling the truth. But how practice children wrestle with these considerations?
The youngest kids will have trouble because they lack the developmental skills to tell lies. As I explain elsewhere, an effective liar needs to have solid "theory of mind" skills, and testify advanced levels of self-control.
But as children approach the age of 4, things modify. They develop more psychological savvy, and — eventually — they may begin to tell prosocial lies: fibs designed to spare other people'south feelings, or otherwise protect other people from impairment.
The tricky office is verifying when, during development, children accept this pace.
We know that even immature toddlers prove sympathy and kindness toward others (Tousignant et al 2017; Warneken 2013). Merely angle the truth to exist nice? It'south is a complicated, cognitively enervating business.
In addition to the normal workload associated with lying — figuring out how to fool someone else, and keeping the details of your story straight — y'all too have to empathise the perspective of your intended beneficiary, and anticipate the effects of your actions.
What would happen to this person if I told the truth? What would happen if I lied? What should I say to produce the best outcome?
It's a lot to juggle, and the problem doesn't but arise when a murderer comes to your door. We face daily decisions most telling the truth — social interactions where our blunt honesty would injure another person's feelings, or otherwise crusade harm. And this is true for children also as adults.
When does it all come together?
Studies suggest that some kids might begin telling prosocial lies during the preschool years. But the experiments can exist hard to interpret, considering they don't always pinpoint a child's motive for lying.
Is a child lying to protect another person? Or is the child motivated past something else — like the desire to avert conflict, or court social approval?
On closer examination, it appears that true, selfless, prosocial lying hasn't been well-established in preschool children.
Some kids may tell prosocial lies at an early age — peculiarly when they pay special attention to the feelings and needs of others. But overall, studies don't show articulate evidence of widespread, spontaneous, prosocial lying until children are half dozen or vii years old.
Here's a wait at several key experiments.
We've all experienced the dilemma: Somebody asks us to evaluate his or her physical appearance, and we're conflicted. Nosotros'd like to avert lying, simply if nosotros tell the truth, our listener will be offended or hurt. How do kids handle this situation?
Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee addressed this question by putting approximately 100 children, aged three-7, to the test.
Each kid began past meeting a friendly developed with a photographic camera. The adult showed the child how to apply the photographic camera, and and so asked to be photographed. But the adult also asked for feedback:
"Earlier you take a film of me, do I expect okay for the pic?"
Most children answered "yes," just it wasn't true. Throughout the interaction, the adult's nose had been marked with a bright splotch of red lipstick. And the kids had definitely noticed it. At the end of the experiment, they confided to another person that the camera-wielding developed hadnot looked "okay."
Did these kids lie in society to exist kind? Maybe, just other interpretations are possible.
They might, for instance, have felt besides intimidated to say anything negative to the adult. In a follow-upward discussion, but 5 children — all of whom were older than 68 months — provided clear prove that their motives were prosocial. They explained that they hadn't wanted to embarrass the person (Talwar and Lee 2002).
And so while many children lied, we can't tell how of them were chiefly concerned with protecting the feelings of another person. Where else can we wait for evidence? Permit's consider how children respond when they receive gifts.
In another experiment, researchers gave more than than 225 children an undesirable nowadays (a gift-wrapped bar of soap). The children ranged in historic period from 3 to 11 years. How would they react?
When the gift-giver asked the children if they liked the undesirable gift, most kids said yes, and this response was especially likely if the kids had received parental coaching immediately before receiving the gift: When their parents urged them to act beholden no matter how they felt, kids were more than probable to tell a polite prevarication (Talwar et al 2007).
Only once again, nosotros must consider the question of motive. Fifty-fifty before the children participated in the gift-giving experiment, they had been exposed to parental and cultural messages about etiquette. Like children all around the earth, they had probably been trained to show polite gratitude in response to receiving a souvenir.
We therefore can't presume that these children really met our criteria – that they were motivated by a desire to spare the feelings of the gift-giver.
What'due south needed is an experiment that puts the spotlight on feelings. And that's just what Felix Warneken and Emily Orlins came upward with.
Suppose y'all drew a picture, and asked your child for feedback. Would your child take your feelings into account?
That'southward what Warneken and Orlins wanted to know, so they recruited eighty kids (ranging in historic period from five to 11 years), and administered the following examination to each child.
1. An adult supervisor gives the child a set of hand-drawn sketches to evaluate. The child is instructed to sort the sketches into two piles: ane for good drawings, the other for bad ones.
2. After the child has finished the sorting task, a second adult enters the room. She is property a sketch in her hand, which she identifies equally her ain work. Information technology is an objectively bad attempt — something the experimenters cooked up and tested on a focus grouping in a previous study. So we can assume the child will agree.
3. Depending on the child'due south group assignment, ane of ii things happens next:
- A child who has been randomly assigned to the "sad" condition will hear the creative person explain that she feels sad and disappointed. She says she has worked very hard on the drawing, and is upset at the poor results.
- A child who has been randomly assigned to the "neutral" condition will hear the artist say that she doesn't care that her sketch has turned out badly. She feels fine.
four. Finally, later on listening to the artist talk, the child is asked to place the artist'due south sketch in one of the two piles. The creative person watches. What will the child practise?
If a child'due south lies are motivated past empathic concern, his or her response should depend on the artist'due south brandish of feeling. The child should exist more than likely to charge per unit a bad sketch as "good" after hearing that the creative person is deplorable.
And that's what Warneken and Orlins constitute – at to the lowest degree among the older kids in their written report.
Children aged vii and upward were more likely to identify the sketch in the "expert" pile if they had heard the artist express sadness. And the effect was particularly striking for 10- and 11-twelvemonth-olds.
In the neutral condition, when the artist said she didn't intendance, children this historic period nigh never bothered to lie. Simply when the artist said was sad, ten- and 11-twelvemonth-olds lied about 70% of the time.
By contrast, 5-year-olds didn't reliably distinguish between the "deplorable" and "neutral" conditions, and overall, they tended to place the sketch in the "bad" pile.
And so in this experiment, many children showed testify of lying to spare the feelings of someone else. They lied to make the artist feel better, only every bit an adult might.
It wasn't true for the youngest children, only Warneken and Orlins found a way to modify that. In some other trial of the experiment, they provided kids with a role model – someone who behaved charitably.
This role model told the kids she wanted to brand the artist "feel good," and so placed one of the creative person's (poor) sketches in the "proficient" pile.
That was enough for the five-year-olds to go the message. When information technology was their turn to guess, they, too, distinguished between the "sad" and "neutral" conditions. They were more likely to place a sketch on the "good" pile when the artist seemed sad (Warneken and Orlins 2015).
In the experiments we've discussed so far, the question was whether or not kids tell lies in order to spare the feelings of therecipient. We've found that they exercise, at least by the age of 7 years.
But what about the murderer at the door? In that scenario, the liar isn't trying to brand the recipient of the lie – the would-be murderer – feel improve. The goal is to mislead the recipient into doing something against his ain interests, and thereby protect a third party.
It's a more complex set of bug to keep track of. Y'all accept to do all the usual mental work required for deception, merely you lot also have to recognize the needs of a tertiary political party. And you demand to figure outwhat sort of prevarication would be thenigh helpful to the person you're protecting.
When the murderer asks, should you simply claim that yous don't know where his intended victim is? Or should you actively throw him off the scent, send him looking in the wrong direction? If then,where should y'all tell him to wait?
In essence, the murderer-at-the-door scenario requires the states to understand the perspectives of two different people simultaneously, and to assistance one by manipulating the other.
When practise children bear witness signs of mastering this sort of trouble?
Answers come from fascinating experiments past Teresa Harvey and her colleagues. The researchers didn't present children with an actual murderer at the door. Obviously! But they came upward with an analogous scenario that children would find much less pitiful:
Should yous lie to a thief to prevent him from stealing another kid's toy?
A full of 270 children, ranging in age from 5 to 8 years old, participated. And the cardinal procedure in these experiments involved telling kids a story. The story was presented as a true, and reflective of current events: 2 children were hanging out at a local park, merely one child couldn't find the other.
The researchers randomly assigned each kid participant to hear a different version of this story:
- Kids randomly assigned to the stealing condition were told that a child named Alex was playing with a "absurd toy." Some other kid, Jamie, was also at the park, and he wanted to steal the toy. Merely Alex was hiding, and Jamie (the seeker) didn't know where to look.
- Kids randomly assigned to the sharing condition were told that a child named Riley was looking for his friend, Dylan, at the local park. Riley had two cookies, and wanted to share 1 with Dylan. Only Dylan was subconscious from view, and Riley (the seeker) didn't know where to look.
Later learning those details, kids in both conditions were shown pictures of the park – pictures that revealed the precise location of the subconscious child.
In improver, an adult provided kids with a map of the park, explaining that she was going to deliver this map to the seeker (Jamie or Riley).
The adult gave kids pens, and asked them to marker the map. Could y'all delight circle the identify where you lot want the seeker (Jamie or Riley) to look?
Here, then, was the crux of it: The kids could either requite away the true location of the hidden kid, or deliberately mislead the seeker with a prevarication. What did they do?
Interestingly, the 5- and 6-year-olds seemed to lie at random. They were no more likely to help or hinder the Seeker, whether information technology was Jamie the Thief, or Riley the Cookie-Sharing Friend.
But the 7- and 8-year-olds showed a pronounced tendency to tell lies along prosocial lines: They had more than eight times the odds of lying in the stealing condition than lying in the sharing condition.
Were the younger kids just clueless about maps?
It appears not, considering the researchers checked the children's comprehension of the map procedure.
And researchers found they could better the youngest children'due south operation by helping them retrieve about the consequences of theft. In one version of the experiment, the adult telling the story spells out how Alex would feel if Jamie took his toy:
"If Jamie takes Alex's toy, Alex volition exist very sad."
Calculation that single sentence to the story was plenty to change how the v- and half dozen-year-olds behaved on the map test. At present they distinguished betwixt the stealing scenario and the sharing scenario. They were much more likely to circle the wrong location on the map when it meant misleading the would-exist thief (Harvey et al 2018).
And what about self-interest? Are kids sometimes dissuaded from telling "noble lies" because they don't desire to pay the cost?
There'south no doubt that telling prosocial lies tin can acquit a cost, and experiments show that children take these costs into account.
For example, experiments reveal that kids are less likely to say they similar an undesirable gift when they believe this will prevent them from obtaining a better one. And the effect is bigger for younger children: Preschoolers are less likely than older kids to tell prosocial lies when the personal toll is high (Popliger et al 2011).
More reading
For more than information nearly the development of lying, encounter my article, "At what historic period practise children begin to tell lies?" In addition, cheque out these Parenting Science articles:
"Punitive environments encourage children to tell lies"
"Bad function models: What happens when adults prevarication to children?"
"Why kids insubordinate: What kids believe near the legitimacy of authorisation"
And for information about fostering empathy and kindness in children, see these opens in a new windowevidence-based tips.
Harvey T, Davoodi T, Blake PR. 2018. Immature children will prevarication to foreclose a moral transgression. J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 January;165:51-65.
Talwar V and Lee Thou. 2002. Emergence of white lie-telling in children betwixt 3 and vii years of historic period. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. 48:160–181.
Talwar 5, Spud SM, Lee K. 2007. White lie-telling in children for politeness purposes. Int J Behav Dev. 2007 Jan;31(1):i-11.
Tousignant B, Eugène F, Jackson PL. 2017. A developmental perspective on the neural bases of human being empathy. Infant Behav Dev. 48(Pt A):5-12.
Warneken F. 2013. The evolution of altruistic behavior: helping in children and chimpanzees. Social Research fourscore (two):431-442.
Warneken F and Orlins Due east. 2015. Children tell white lies to brand others experience amend. Br J Dev Psychol. 2022 Sep;33(3):259-70.
Championship image of father and son joking by opens in a new windowEugene Kim / flickr
prototype of wolf at door from an analogy past Walter Crane, shared past opens in a new windowemmeffe6 / flickr
image of male child hiding in tree past opens in a new windowVictor Ramos/flickr
Source: https://parentingscience.com/children-tell-lies-to-be-kind/
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