3-009 - Children’s Evaluation and Production of Prosocial and Anti-social Lies

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children must adhere to social and moral rules; acting to preserve the well being of others through use of prosocial deception (e.g. a “white lie”). They must also identify harmful deception and evaluate it negatively following moral and social conventions. The four papers presented here explore the production and evaluation of lie telling in various intentional contexts.

The first paper asks how children evaluate intentional or unintentional lie-telling in a resource allocation context. All children evaluate the intentional liar more negatively, but evaluation of unintentional lying changes with age. In the second paper, children evaluate prosocial liars and blunt-truth tellers in the context of politeness. With age, children show stronger tendencies to judge polite lie-tellers to be nicer and infer that a white-lie would make the listener feel positively. The third paper assesses how empathy and Theory of Mind impact the production of prosocial lie-telling. Preliminary findings suggest that appraisal of one’s emotions aids in false-belief creation. The final paper tests children’s willingness to engage in a prosocial lie to intervene on a moral transgression. Only older children actively deceived a transgressor to prevent a moral wrong, while younger children were more likely to tell the truth even when lying would help another.

Taken together, these findings show that children are attentive to different types of deception and recognize differences in prosocial and antisocial deception, evaluating them differently. Understanding how children navigate moral and social conventional deception aids in socializing with peers and understanding of cooperation at a societal level.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Teresa Harvey, Boston University

• Alexander P. D'Esterre, University of Maryland, College Park

Individual Presentations

• Age-related Differences Regarding Children’s Evaluations and Punishments of Accidental and Intentional Lies - Presenting Author: Alexander P. D'Esterre, University of Maryland, College Park; Michael T Rizzo, University of Maryland; Melanie Killen, University of Maryland, College Park

• Children’s reasoning about honest versus dishonest (but polite) speakers - Presenting Author: Erica Jiye Yoon, Stanford University; Michael Frank, Stanford University

• “Please lie for me”: the influence of empathy on prosocial deception - Presenting Author: Megha Nagar, McGill University; Victoria Talwar, McGill University

• Children’s Prosocial Lying to Prevent a Moral Transgression - Presenting Author: Teresa Harvey, Boston University; Peter R Blake, Boston University