Children approve of lying to benefit another person’s reputation

Children see private correction as a cue to friendship

Children use a number of cues to infer friendship. For instance, children believe that people who are similar, spend time together, and are loyal to each other are friends (Liberman & Shaw, 2019). Here, in two studies (total N = 524), we investigated whether 4- to 12-year-old children infer friendship using a novel cue: managing someone's reputation by correcting them in private. Children were asked whether an agent was better friends with a person they corrected in public, or one they corrected in private. Both younger (4- to 7-years-old) and older (8- to 12-years-old) children inferred stronger friendship between the agent and the privately corrected character (Study 1). In a second study, we asked whether an agent was better friends with a person they corrected in private, or a person who shared a different friendship cue (similarity, propinquity, loyalty). With age children became more likely to privilege private correction, and children who were attentive to the task expected private correction to be a stronger friendship cue than similarity (Study 2). These findings suggest that concerns for others' reputations may play an important role in friendships, and protecting another person's reputation may be increasingly indicative of friendship with development.

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.

Children's consideration of motivation in evaluations of socially (un)mindful actions

Previous research shows that both adults and children by 5 or 6 years of age appreciate socially mindful actions where one leaves a choice for others. However, less is known as to whether children consider motivations in their evaluations of socially (un)mindful actions. Here we investigated whether children and adults can spontaneously evaluate socially (un)mindful behaviors depending on contextual cues, specifically whether the actions happen in public or in private. We also investigated how children evaluate these actions when provided with explicit information on motivations. We presented 99 children (aged 6-11 years) and 99 adults in China with two characters performing the same socially mindful or unmindful behaviors. One character acted publicly, whereas the other acted privately. Participants were asked to compare the two characters first spontaneously and then again after explicit information on the characters' motivations was provided. We found that whereas adults spontaneously favor private socially mindful acts, children favor public socially mindful acts. Only after motivations were provided did children favor private socially mindful acts like adults. In addition, we found asymmetry in that motivation seems to matter more in evaluations of socially mindful actions than in evaluations of socially unmindful ones. These findings are the first to reveal children's consideration of motivations in their evaluations of socially mindful behaviors.

Lying to recommend unqualified friends: Diverging implications for interpersonal and epistemic trust inferences

When people are asked to recommend individuals they care about, they often grapple with conflicts regarding the level of honesty they should maintain when being truthful could potentially hinder those individuals' chances of receiving beneficial opportunities. In the current study, we examined how adolescents evaluate people based on how they respond to such dilemmas, with a focus on how it affects judgments of interpersonal and epistemic trustworthiness. We tested a sample of high school students in the southwestern United States (N = 78; Mage = 16.45 years), who were asked about a moral dilemma in which a story character needed to decide whether to recommend an unqualified friend. We experimentally manipulated whether the friend was very close to the standard (requiring a small exaggeration) or was far from the standard (requiring a large exaggeration) between participants. Across both exaggeration conditions, we observed a dissociation in judgments of epistemic and interpersonal trustworthiness: Lie-tellers were judged to be more interpersonally trustworthy than epistemically trustworthy, whereas truth-tellers were judged to be more epistemically trustworthy than interpersonally trustworthy. These results show that adolescents are capable of using information about an individual's lie-telling versus truth-telling decisions to make highly nuanced social inferences.

Moral evaluations of children's truths and lies in a prosocial context: The role of reputation

The current investigation examined the influence of a child's reputation on 7- to 12-year-olds' (Study 1; N = 146) and parents' (Study 2; N = 198) moral evaluations of the child's blunt truths (i.e., truths told despite possible hurt feelings) and prosocial lies (i.e., lies told to protect another's feelings). In Study 1, children were read a series of vignettes in which a child, described as being smart, kind, or clean (with clean serving as the irrelevant control reputation), told either the blunt truth or a prosocial lie that varied in content (opinions or facts). In Study 2, parents evaluated the same vignettes and reputations as in Study 1 with the addition of a troublemaker reputation. The reputation of the child protagonist significantly influenced both children's and parents' moral evaluations. Children rated the kind child's lies more positively, and parents rated the smart child's truths and lies less positively, than those of the clean (control) child when told about opinions. No differences were noted in the facts content condition. Findings suggest that a child's perceived reputation may influence both children's and adults' moral interpretations of the child's honesty behaviors.

What is known about personal reputation? A systematic literature review

This systematic literature review encompassed the results of previous research on personal reputation and found opportunities in state of the literature to guide future research in communication, management, and other disciplines in the social sciences. A content analysis was conducted of 91 manuscripts from 1984 to November 2022, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The findings suggest that the amount of literature on personal reputation has increased since 2006; however, it is still in a developing stage. Due to its scarcity, it is advisable to conduct more qualitative and probability studies. For this review, several of the most cited articles are probably pioneering manuscripts that contributed to building the personal reputation construct. This review establishes a total of six categories for guiding future research opportunities on personal reputation. To facilitate the classification of the different future research opportunities, some types of areas suggested by Gomez-Trujillo et al. were considered. The discussion of future research opportunities includes categories like Causes and Effects, Inventories and Scales, Online and Digital Context, Organizational and Group Environments, Leaders and Top Management Executives, and Theory-building. On the other hand, this study could be considered the first step towards future research on how personal reputation influences audiences' opinions and perceptions in different research fields. It also opens the possibility of conducting more specific systematic literature reviews on this topic. Finally, this manuscript offers an overview of the present and the future of construct of personal reputation in the social sciences.

Omission bias in children's and adults' moral judgments of lies

This study examined whether omission bias occurs in moral judgments of lies. Omission bias is the tendency to judge acts of commission as morally worse than equivalent acts of omission. Children aged 8 and 9 years (third graders) and 11 and 12 years (sixth graders), as well as adults, made moral judgments about lies of commission and omission to conceal transgressions. Descriptions of four scenarios varied in terms of whether the protagonists lied to benefit themselves or others and whether the transgression was deliberate or accidental. The results showed that both age groups of children, as well as adults, judged that lies of commission were morally worse than lies of omission in all four scenarios, indicating that omission bias clearly occurs in moral judgments of lies. However, there were age differences in the magnitude of omission bias. Third and sixth graders generally showed omission bias of the same magnitude for all scenarios, whereas omission bias in adults was stronger for the scenarios that benefited self rather than others and for scenarios in which deliberate transgressions, rather than accidental ones, were concealed. These results reveal differences in moral judgments of lies between middle childhood and adulthood.