Shaping children's honesty: The influence of social learning and moral evaluations on 5- to 8-year old's truth- and lie-telling behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lie-telling is considered to be part of children's development, emerging at similar ages across cultures.Children are socialized by their caregivers and through their surrounding environment to know what truth-and lie-telling is.Through socialization they learn the consequences of truthor lie-telling behaviours, leading to the internalization of these social sanctions and norms.While research has demonstrated the role of cognitive functioning in the development of lying, less research has examined the impact of socialization on children's lie-telling.The relationship between children's social learning and their actual truth/lie-telling behavior has yet to be examined.As such, the current study had two objectives; (a) to enhance our understanding of how children's truth-and lie-telling behaviour is influenced by social learning through modelling, and, (b) to examine how this social influence potentially interacts with children's moral understanding of lie-and truth-telling.In their schools, children (N = 224, 5 to 8 years of age) took part in two experimental sessions.Session 1 assessed their conceptual and moral understanding of truth-and lie-telling using a series of vignettes adapted from previous research, as well as assessed select cognitive functioning associated with successful lie-telling behavior (i.e.first-and second-order theory-of-mind understanding).Session 2 assessed children's actual truth-and lie-telling behavior when exposed to learning through social modelling using a temptation resistance paradigm (TRP).Children observed an experimenter (E) tell the truth or lie about a minor transgression in one of five conditions: (1) Truth-Positive -E told the truth with a positive outcome; (2) Truth-Negative -E told the truth with a negative outcome; (3) Lie-Positive -E lied with a positive outcome; (4) Lie-Negative -E lied with a negative outcome; (5) Control -E did not tell a lie or tell the truth.Later, to examine children's truth or lie-telling behaviour children participated in a TRP where they were told not to peek at a trivia question's answer.Overall, 85 % of children lied about peeking in the TRP, and with increased age children were CHILDREN'S TRUTH-AND LIE-TELLING iii better at maintaining their lies.Results found that children were less likely to lie about their transgression when they had seen the experimenter tell the truth with a positive outcome or when they saw the experimenter lie with a negative outcome.Children who rated the truth-telling behaviour of vignette characters who were believed and not punished more positively were more likely to confess to their transgression in the TRP.Children who rated the lie-telling behaviour of vignette characters who were not believed and not punished less negatively were also more likely to confess in the TRP.Practically, this research provides insight into factors that influence children's social motivation to lie or to tell the truth.These results have implications for the development of interventions for fostering honesty, for parents and professionals working with children across applied settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".