Children's Evaluation of Self-Serving and Prosocial Lies in the Context of Social Groups

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Despite caregivers’ early attempts to dissuade children from lying, honesty sometimes conflicts with another early taught virtue–being kind to others. Though prosocial lies are widely accepted among adults (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998) and preferred over self-serving lies, less is known about younger children’s moral and trust judgments in response to prosocial versus self-serving liars. Additionally, though young children are highly influenced by social groups (e.g., race, gender) when judging others’ interpersonal behaviors (Rhodes & Chalik, 2013), the influence of social group information on young children’s evaluations of prosocial and self-serving lies has not been examined. The present research investigated children’s (ages 3-7) trust and moral evaluations of prosocial and self-serving lies and whether these evaluations were altered by the presence of arbitrary social groups.
As 3rd party observers, children (N = 49) listened to four stories about an agent who told a prosocial or self-serving lie that was used to take the blame for, or wrongfully place blame on, the agent’s in-group or out-group member. After each story, children’s moral and trust evaluations were assessed.
Although children judged all lies to be immoral, they judged self-serving lies as more immoral than prosocial lies (p < .001), suggesting that even 3-7-year-olds use both veracity and context-specific details when morally evaluating other people’s lies. Children also judged lies to be more immoral when they involved the agent’s out-group member (p = .018), possibly suggesting children viewed the mere affiliation with an out-group member as “wrong.”
Importantly, we found distinct patterns between younger (47-60 mos.) and older children’s (61-90 mos.) trust judgments. Although both older and younger children judged the trustworthiness of prosocial liars similarly and in an overall neutral manner, this was not the case for self-serving liars; older children, but not younger children, systematically distrusted self-serving liars (p < .001), while younger children placed greater trust in self-serving liars overall (p = .001). This overall pattern may suggest an aversion to self-serving liars arises prior to a trust in prosocial liars, thus aligning with research suggesting humans to be especially keen at detecting antisocial others compared to benign or prosocial others (Gray et al., 2012).
Overall, the current study is one of the first to demonstrate a moral preference for prosocial over self-serving liars in a younger sample of 3- to 7-year-olds. Our results also suggest an age-related shift in children’s trust judgments of self-serving liars, suggesting children become aversive to self-serving liars over prosocial liars around five-to-seven years of age. Overall, the present study supports the idea that children are sensitive to both prosocial and social group contexts and are selective in their use of these context-specific details when forming sociomoral judgments.

Authors

• Rosa Hunt, California State University San Marcos
  Presenting Author

• Kimberly E. Vanderbilt, California State University San Marcos
  Non-Presenting Author