The influence of mutually beneficial and self-beneficial situations on the lying behavior and cognition of Chinese 4- to 5-year-old children

Background

Children's moral development is influenced by their sociocultural context. However, relatively few studies have investigated whether the sociocultural context affects children's lying behavior and cognition and the relation between them.

Methods

The present study was designed to examine this question in two experiments by posing two moral dilemmas: lying is good for mutually beneficial (honesty conflicts with mutual interests) and lying is good for self-beneficial (honesty conflicts with self-interests). Experiment 1 used the "hide-and-seek" game to investigate the lying behavior of 96 Chinese 4- to 5-year-old children. Experiment 2 used two videos to investigate lying cognition (conceptualization of lying, moral assessment of lying, and prediction of lying) with the same group of children.

Results

In Experiment 1, children lied more in mutually beneficial situations than in self-beneficial situations. Experiment 2 revealed that, compared with self-beneficial situations, children in mutually beneficial situations were more likely to judge untrue statements as truth, to evaluate lying positively, and to predict that they would lie. Further, in mutually beneficial situations, children's predicted and actual lying behaviors are significantly positively correlated.

Conclusion

These findings support the folk model and highlight the influence of sociocultural factors on lying in Chinese 4- to 5-year-old children. They offer meaningful insights into the development of early moral understanding and behavior.

Toddlers' social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

Mature social evaluations privilege agents' intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention-based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods with 15-month-old toddlers. Toddlers viewed scenarios depicting a protagonist who sought to obtain one of two toys, each inside a different box, as two other agents observed. Then, the boxes' contents were switched in the absence of the protagonist and either in the presence or the absence of the other agents. When the protagonist returned, one agent opened the box containing the protagonist's desired toy (a positive outcome), and the other opened the other box (a neutral outcome). When both agents had observed the toys move to their current locations, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box containing the desired toy. In contrast, when the agents had not seen the toys move and therefore should have expected the desired toy's location to be unchanged, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box that no longer contained the desired toy. Thus, the toddlers preferred the agent who intended to make the protagonist's desired toy accessible, even when its action, guided by a false belief concerning that toy's location, did not produce a positive outcome. Well before children connect beliefs to social behavior in verbal tasks, toddlers engage in intention-based evaluations of social agents with false beliefs.

Easy or difficult? Children's understanding of how supply and demand affect goal completion

Three experiments examined children's understanding of how supply and demand affect the difficulty of completing goals. Participants were 368 predominantly White Canadians (52% female, 48% male) tested in 2017-2022. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds recognized that obtaining resources is easier where supply exceeds demand than where demand exceeds supply. However, in Experiment 2, 3-year-olds were insensitive to supply and demand when comparing situations where demand exceeded supply to a greater or lesser degree. Finally, Experiment 3 revealed a developmental lag in 3- to 7-year-olds' understanding of how supply and demand affects goal completion: Children succeeded when contrasting a surplus and a shortage of supply relative to demand at 4;2. But they only succeeded when contrasting degrees of greater supply than demand at 5;10.