Cheating among children: Temptation, loss framing, and previous cheating

Cognitive empathy boosts honesty in children and young adolescents

Children and young adolescents often tend to behave dishonestly in order to serve their self-interests. This study focused on how empathic abilities affect children's tendency to deceive others. Deception is the act of causing others to form a false belief to get them to act in a way that serves the deceiver's interests. As such, it requires the ability to predict how others might use the provided information. In two experiments, 274 participants (aged 10-16 years) played a game in which they could send a deceptive message to another participant to boost their own payoff at the other player's expense. We measured participants' cognitive and emotional empathy using different measures. We found that a measure of cognitive empathy, namely the fantasy scale, was associated with less deception of another player when that other player was not identified and was presented only as "Player B." However, when Player B was identified by name, empathy did not predict deception. In such cases, the only factors affecting deception rates were the gain for the participant (higher possible gains lead to more deception) and loss to the other player (higher possible losses lead to less deception). Overall, the findings suggest that even by 11 years of age, children can understand the impact of their unethical behavior on another child and adjust their actions accordingly. However, when the other child is not identified, children need to possess high levels of cognitive empathy toward imagined individuals to resist the temptation to deceive the other child.

Common and distinct equity preferences in children and adults

Fairness plays a crucial role in children's social life and has garnered considerable attention. However, previous research and theories primarily examined the development of children's fairness behaviors in the conflict between self-interest motivation and fairness-complying motivation, neglecting the influence of advantage-seeking motivation. Moreover, despite the well-established role of gain/loss frame in human decision-making, it remains largely unclear whether the framing effect modulates fairness behaviors in children. It was hypothesized that children would exhibit advantage-seeking motivation resulting in more selfish behaviors in the loss context. To examine the hypothesis, we combined an adapted dictator game and computational modeling to investigate various motivations underlying fairness behaviors of children in both loss and gain contexts and to explore the developmental directions by contrasting children and adults. In addition, the current design enabled the dissociation between fairness knowledge and behaviors by asking participants to decide for themselves (the first-party role) or for others (the third-party role). This study recruited a total of 34 children (9-10 years, Mage = 9.82, SDage = 0.38, 16 females) and 31 college students (Mage = 19.81, SDage = 1.40, 17 females). The behavioral results indicated that children behaved more selfishly in first-party and more fairly in third-party than adults, without any significant framing effects. The computational results revealed that both children and adults exhibited aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity in third-party. However, they showed distinct preferences for advantageous inequity in first-party, with advantage-seeking preferences among children and aversion to advantageous inequity among adults. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of children's social preferences and their developmental directions.

Prosocial Gains and Losses: Modulations of Human Social Decision-Making by Loss-Gain Context

The role of the loss-gain context in human social decision-making remains heavily debated, with mixed evidence showing that losses (vs. gains) boost both selfish and prosocial motivations. Herein, we propose that the loss context, compared to the gain context, exacerbates intuitive reactions in response to the conflict between self-interest and prosocial preferences, regardless of whether those dominant responses are selfish or altruistic. We then synthesize evidence from three lines of research to support the account, which indicates that losses may either enhance or inhibit altruistic behaviors depending on the dominant responses in the employed interactive economic games, prosocial/proself traits, and the explicit engagement of deliberative processes. The current perspective contributes to the ongoing debate on the association between loss-gain context and human prosociality by putting forward a theoretical framework to integrate previous conflicting perspectives.

Cheaters, Liars, or Both? A New Classification of Dishonesty Profiles

Experimental studies of dishonesty usually rely on population-level analyses, which compare the distribution of claimed rewards in an unsupervised, self-administered lottery (e.g., tossing a coin) with the expected lottery statistics (e.g., 50/50 chance of winning). Here, we provide a paradigm that measures dishonesty at the individual level and identifies new dishonesty profiles with specific theoretical interpretations. We found that among dishonest participants, (a) some did not bother implementing the lottery at all, (b) some implemented but lied about the lottery outcome, and (c) some violated instructions by repeating the lottery multiple times until obtaining an outcome they felt was acceptable. These results held both in the lab and with online participants. In Experiment 1 (N = 178), the lottery was a coin toss, which permitted only a binary honest/dishonest response; Experiment 2 (N = 172) employed a six-sided-die roll, which permitted gradations in dishonesty. We replicated some previous results and also provide a new, richer classification of dishonest behavior.