Sparing Whose Feelings: Comparing Young Children’s White Lies in Puppet-, Human-, and Vignette-Based Contexts

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

Abstract

Children learn about social norms from a young age, but their understanding of these norms frequently precedes their ability to follow them in their own behavior. This discrepancy between knowledge and behavior, however, has predominantly been examined in the realm of personally-costly actions, such as sharing–an action that requires children to forfeit limited resources. Children’s ability to prosocially lie (i.e., to tell lies that spare feelings) reflects sophisticated social reasoning and emotional awareness (Demedardi et al., 2021; Talwar & Crossman, 2011), but does not directly incur personal costs. These features make prosocial lying an important domain in which to explore children’s understanding of versus behavioral adherence to social norms.

In the current study, 46 children aged 4-7 years (M = 5.83y, SD = 1.17y, 23 boys) participated in a prosocial lying task in which they gave feedback to an artist (an adult research assistant), about an objectively poor drawing (modified from Warneken & Orlins, 2015) and answered questions about what another child should do in a similar situation. In addition to comparing children’s responses to a real person to their answers on the hypothetical vignette, we included a third condition: children were asked to give feedback to a puppet. Puppets offer methodological advantages in flexibility and control, but there is on-going debate in the field about whether they motivate socially-complex behaviors like prosocial lying (Rakoczy, 2022). In the two live contexts (person, puppet), we specifically asked children to rate the artist’s drawing on 1-5 Likert scale. In the vignette context, we asked children what rating another child should give a classmate’s bad drawing.

A linear mixed-effects model found a significant effect of context (person, puppet, vignette) on children’s ratings (F(2,130) = 7.35, p < .001; Table 1). Post-hoc analyses indicated that children understood the social norm of prosocial lying (i.e., 74% said that the vignette character should give the drawing a 4 or 5), but in real-life contexts gave significantly lower scores to the person and the puppet (ps<.01). This effect was not explained by children believing that the vignette character actually thought the drawing was good, because when children were asked what the character really thought, they gave significantly lower ratings (p<.001). Additionally, children’s ratings of the person’s and puppet’s drawings were significantly correlated (r(44) = .37, p = .011), but neither puppet nor person ratings were correlated with the ratings children said the vignette character should give (ps > .10).

Overall, our results indicate that a discrepancy between knowledge and behavior is present in prosocial lying, even though the behavior is not personally costly. That is, children were much more likely to display an understanding of the norm and endorse prosocial lying as the appropriate behavior in a hypothetical scenario than they were to tell a prosocial lie to either a puppet or a human social partner. Future research should explore the genesis of this gap, including how behaviors are socialized and whether the demands of a real-world interaction overwhelm children’s explicit knowledge of social rules.

Authors

• Callie De La Cerda, University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Marie Clegg, Texas State University

• Katherine Rice Warnell, Texas State University