Prosocial lying in children between 4 and 11 years of age: The role of emotional understanding and empathy

What motivates early lies? Deception in 2½- to 5-year-olds

What motivates young children to produce early lies? A total of 217 2½- to 5-year-old children (Mage = 44.5 months, SD = 8.45; 54% girls; 61.7% White) from the southeastern United States were tested using a modified third-party transgression paradigm to examine the motivation behind their deception. Children were assigned to one of three conditions-baseline, self-motivated, or other-motivated condition-and their propensity to lie was captured through both verbal and nonverbal measures. Results show that children's early lies are primarily driven by a self-serving motivation. However, the motivation to lie diversifies by 4 years of age, when children begin to lie for both self-serving and other-serving motivations.

Advanced theory of mind and children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood: A training study

Children's advanced theory of mind (AToM) is concurrently associated with their prosocial lie-telling. However, the causal link between AToM and prosocial lie-telling has not yet been demonstrated. To address this gap, the current study adopted a training paradigm and investigated the role of AToM in children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. A total of 66 9- and 10-year-old children who did not demonstrate any prosocial lie-telling in a disappointment gift paradigm at the baseline were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n = 32) or an active control group (n = 34). The experimental group underwent a conversation-based training program of four sessions. The results showed significantly greater gains in AToM at the posttest for the experimental group children compared with the control group children, controlling for family socioeconomic status, children's literacy score, working memory, and inhibition. More important, the experimental group children were more likely to tell prosocial lies than the control group, even after controlling for the pretest AToM and other covariates. However, the training effects faded at the 6-month follow-up test after the training's completion. These findings provide the first evidence for the causal role of AToM in the development of prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. The fade-out effect is discussed in the context of educational interventions.

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.

To tell the truth or not: What effortful control, false belief, and sympathy tell us about preschoolers' instrumental lies

This study aimed to examine the predictors of instrumental lies in preschool children, specifically focusing on false belief, effortful control, and sympathy. Instrumental lies are intentional falsehoods used to achieve personal goals such as avoiding punishment and obtaining an undeserved reward. A total of 192 preschool children (age range = 32-73 month-olds), along with their mothers and fathers, participated in the study. The Temptation Resistance Paradigm, an experimental task, was employed to elicit instrumental lies from the children. The children also completed first-order false belief measures, and their parents filled out questionnaires assessing their children's effortful control and sympathy skills. Results revealed a positive association between children's effortful control and their decisions to tell instrumental lies. However, no significant relationship was found between false belief and instrumental lying. Age moderated the link between sympathy and the decision to tell instrumental lies, with sympathy being negatively associated with lie-telling behavior among older children but showing no effect among younger children. The study variables did not predict the maintenance of instrumental lies. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the role of effortful control and sympathy as underlying temperamental and emotional processes influencing children's decisions to engage in instrumental lie-telling.

Testing Causal Effects of Empathy on Children's Prosociality in Politeness Dilemmas - An Intervention Study

Empathy is commonly considered a driver of prosociality in child ontogeny, but causal assumptions regarding this effect mostly rely on correlational research designs. Here, 96 urban German children (5-8 years; 48 girls; predominantly White; from mid-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds) participated in an empathy intervention or a control condition before prosocial behaviors (polite lie-telling: rating the drawing as good; prosocial encouragement: utterances interpreted as cheering up the artist) were assessed in an art-rating task. Contrasting children's empathy at baseline with their empathy after the intervention indicated promoted empathy compared to the control group. Despite the intervention's effect on children's empathy, there were no simultaneous changes in prosocial behaviors. At the same time, children's empathy at baseline was associated with their prosocial encouragement. These results indicate conceptual associations between children's empathy and prosociality. However, they do not support strict causal claims regarding this association in middle childhood. Further applications of the novel short-time intervention to address causal effects of empathy on prosociality and other developmental outcomes are discussed.

Other-Benefiting Lying Behavior in Preschool Children and Its Relation to Theory of Mind and Empathy

The present study examined children's lies to help others obtain benefits (other-benefiting lying) and its relation to theory of mind (ToM) and empathy among 3-5-year-old preschool children. One hundred nine children were recruited from preschools in China. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was used to measure children's other-benefiting lying behavior, a ToM scale was used to measure children's ToM abilities, and an empathy scale was used to measure children's empathy abilities. Results showed that children tended to tell more lies to help other to get benefits as age increased, and further analyses showed that this other-benefiting lying was related to children's ToM component of false belief understanding and their cognitive empathy performance. These findings provide evidence that cognitive factors play important roles in children's lying to help others.

Prosocial lies: Causes and consequences

Prosocial lies-lies that are intended to benefit others-are ubiquitous. This article reviews recent research on the causes and consequences of prosocial lies. Prosocial lies are often motivated by the desire to spare others from emotional harm. Therefore, prosocial lies are frequently told in situations in which honesty would cause heightened emotional harm (e.g. when a target is fragile) and by people who are sensitive to others' emotional suffering (e.g. those high in compassion). However, targets only react positively to prosocial lies when they prevent emotional harm and when honesty lacks instrumental value (i.e. when they prevent unnecessary harm). Outside of these situations, targets typically view prosocial lies as paternalistic and therefore penalize those who tell them.