Good person, but bad friend: Children's beliefs about secret disclosure

• In Event: Knowing Right and Wrong: Intersections Between Sociomoral and Epistemic Reasoning

Abstract

Secrets are an important part of the social lives of both adults (Kelly, 1999) and children (Bottoms et al., 2002). Children expect friends to share secrets with other friends (Liberman & Shaw, 2018) and believe disclosing friends’ secrets will harm friendships (Liberman, 2020). However, from a moral standpoint, not all secrets should be kept secret. Suppose a friend discloses a moral transgression. Here morality and loyalty make different prescriptions. Disclosing the secret to others can prevent future harm and ensure the perpetrator gets their just desserts but doing so may be at odds with being loyal. When do children understand this specific conflict between morality and loyalty-based obligations?

In the pre-registered Study 1, we presented 4-to-10-year-old children (N=93) with two within-subjects vignettes involving two best friends. One friend told the other a piece of information and said to keep it secret. The friend then disclosed that secret to a teacher. The experimenter asked participants whether telling the teacher was good or bad (morality) and whether disclosing the secret made the discloser a good or bad friend (loyalty). Between conditions, we varied the nature of the secret. In the immoral condition, the secret was about bullying kids in class. In the neutral condition, the secret was about dancing when nobody is watching, which while potentially embarrassing, is not immoral. We predicted and found that in the immoral condition, secret disclosure was seen as positive on the dimension of morality, but negative on the dimension of loyalty, t(92)=5.44,p<.001. In contrast, in the neutral condition, secret disclosure was seen as negative on both the dimension of morality and loyalty t(92)=-1.27, p=.21) This interaction was significant across our entire sample, F(3,368)=16.68, p< .001, ηp2=0.12). However, when we split the data into three predetermined age bins (young, 4-5; middle, 6-7; and old, 8-9) this effect was only present in the middle (F(3,116)=5.72, p=.001, ηp2=0.13) and older (F(3,124)=35.29, p<.001,ηp2=0.46) age groups.

In an ongoing pre-registered Study 2, we present 4-to-10-year-old children (N=180, 60 collected) vignettes similar to Study 1 with two changes. First, we added a between-subjects condition in which the friend shares the information, without explicitly calling it a secret. We included this condition to determine whether calling a piece of information a secret made it particularly disloyal to share. Second, we replaced the neutral vignette with a prosocial vignette (helping a classmate) to explore if children think it is bad to disclose positive secrets. Our prediction is that the use of the word “secret” should make it more immoral and disloyal to disclose a piece of information shared by a friend, particularly in the prosocial condition (where disclosing the information should only be bad when it’s tagged as secret). Some pilot data (N=16) showed support for these hypotheses.

These results suggest children have nuanced evaluations of those who disclose secrets and, further, reveal sophistication in their intuitions about partner choice—suggesting that they do not always think that moral people will make good friends and vice versa.

Authors

• Katherine Vasquez, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago