Poster #132 - Young Children’s Willingness to Deceive Shows In-Group Bias Only in Specific Social Contexts

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

The ability to deceive others is an early-emerging and socially-complex skill which has been consistently linked to other social outcomes, including theory of mind. Children display higher theory of mind when reasoning about in-group versus out-group members (McLoughlin & Over, 2017), but we do not know whether children adjust their deceptive behaviors based on group membership. To better understand how social circumstances affect deception in early childhood, we used a minimal group paradigm to examine children’s willingness to deceive in-group versus out-group members across varied contexts (e.g., lying for personal gain; lying to spite).
Forty-one children (24 males) aged 4-7 (mean=6.1y, SD=1.2y) played a puppet in three versions of a sticker-hiding game (adapted from Yi et al., 2014): (1) Self-Benefit, where the child could lie to receive a sticker, (2) Other-Benefit, where the child could lie to give another puppet a sicker, and (3) No-Benefit, where if the child lied, no one received a sticker. In all three games, if the child told the truth, the puppet they were playing with kept the sticker. Children played each game twice, once with an in-group puppet (assigned to the same color team) and once with an out-group puppet (assigned to a different color team). For the Other-Benefit game, when the child was playing with an in-group puppet, a lie would result in the out-group puppet getting a sticker, and vice versa. Each child completed five trials of each game (Self-Benefit, Other-Benefit, and No-Benefit) with each puppet (in-group, out-group), for 30 total trials. We also assessed theory of mind using a battery of false belief and appearance-reality emotion tasks (Rice et al., 2014).
We examined rates of lying in a 3 (game type) x 2 (group membership) repeated measures ANOVA. There were significant main effects of game type and group membership (ps<.001), as well as a significant interaction (F(2,58)=8.1, p<.001). Children lied the most in the Self-Benefit condition, lying equally to in-group and out-group members. In-group bias emerged, however, when the potential for self-gain disappeared. In the Other-Benefit condition and in the No-Benefit condition, children engaged in more lie-telling to outgroup members (ps<.05). Although in-group lying did not decrease between the Other-Benefit and No-Benefit conditions (p=.669), out-group lying did (p=.053), suggesting lying is influenced both by the desire to help one’s own teammate and by the desire to spite out-group members. Although total number of lies was related to age (r=.31, p<.1), it was not related to theory of mind.
These results suggest that lying behavior is sensitive to group membership only in certain social situations. Specifically, young children are able to flexibly apply a complex social skill (i.e., deception) based on group membership and task demands. Further, children’s desire to benefit themselves appears to trump in-group bias. Future research should examine alternate situations, such as lying to avoid punishment, to determine whether the context of the lie has a stronger effect on children, or if group membership seems to override the desire to benefit oneself.

Authors

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

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