Poster #195 - Children’s Prosocial Lying Differs in Real-Life Versus Hypothetical Contexts

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The distinction between competence and performance is a core theme in cognitive science. Developmental social-cognitive studies of the competence-performance gap, however, have predominately focused on comparing across explicit and implicit tasks (e.g., theory of mind; Kulke et al., 2018), or on situations where acting is costly (e.g., preference for sharing vs. giving up one’s own toy; Blake et al., 2014). In this study, we used explicit story-based and real-life scenarios to examine whether there was a competence-performance gap for socially complex behaviors with minimal personal cost: prosocial, or white, lies.

Twenty-seven (15 male) children aged 4 to 7 (mean=5.9y, SD=1.2y) completed a prosocial lying paradigm in which they gave feedback to artists about their bad artwork (modified from Warneken & Orlins, 2015). First, a puppet showed the child a terrible drawing they made, said they were sad about their drawing skills, and asked the child to sort the picture into a good or bad pile. Children sorted the drawing and gave it a 1-5 rating in front of the puppet. Next, the experimenter presented her own bad drawing, and followed the same script as the puppet. Children sorted and rated her picture. Finally, after filler tasks, children listened to a vignette where a student showed her classmate a bad drawing and said that she was sad she could not draw well. Children were asked how the classmate should sort the drawing and what score she should give it.

Children’s performance was equivalent in the puppet and live experimenter trials, with 56% of children telling the truth and 44% of children telling a prosocial lie in both contexts. Although a minority of children prosocially lied in the two real-life scenarios, 67% of children said that the character in the story should tell a prosocial lie to her classmate. Further, 85% of children said that the character in the story should tell her classmate that the picture was a 4 or 5 (out of 5), but only 22% of children actually gave a 4 or 5 to the puppet and experimenter drawings. Overall, the mean rating children gave in the story context was significantly higher than the ratings in the real-life contexts (Figure 1). This discrepancy cannot be explained by the children assuming that the story character actually liked the picture. When asked what the character really thought of the picture, children gave an average score of 1.9 out of 5, significantly lower than the score children thought she should tell her classmate (p<.0001).

These results suggest that a social-cognitive competence-performance gap persists even in explicit situations with minimal personal cost. Future research should target the mechanisms driving this gap. One possibility is that the saliency of a real-world interaction overrides the inhibitory mechanisms required to prosocially lie. Reducing the executive function demands or affective salience of the real-life tasks could address this hypothesis and provide more insight into early social functioning. Such findings have relevance for disorders such as autism, which is frequently characterized by social-cognitive competence-performance gaps.
 

Authors

• Callie Brooke De La Cerda, Texas State University
  Presenting Author

• Hailey E Thomas, Texas State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Rice Warnell, Texas State University
  Non-Presenting Author