It's Ok To Lie...Sometimes

7/20/17

In “Lying and Truth Telling in Children: From Concept to Action” (Xu, et. al, 2010), the authors examine the concept of prosocial lying because while much research has been conducted on antisocial lying (breaking a moral rule for selfish purposes or deceit), there is not much literature on children’s prosocial lying behaviors (with purpose of sparing someone else’s feelings or politeness in general).

This study examined the relationship between children’s opinions on prosocial lying and their actions (whether or not they’d actually do what they said): 7,9, and 11 year old Chinese children were told a story where another student was receiving a gift from a teacher. The story included whether or not the student liked that gift and how the student answered their teacher when asked “Do you like it?”. The character either told the truth or lied about their personal assessment of the gift (either like or dislike) in each condition. Participants then were asked to classify the character’s statement as a lie or truth and then rated the positivity/negativity of the character’s statement.

Then to see what the children would do in real life, participants were told they were going to take two short memory tests and would receive a prize if they passed both. Experimenters made the tests purposefully easy for the age group so that everyone would pass. Before the first test, participants were able to see all the prize options, which included previously-rated “desirable” prizes (colorful pens, stickers, etc) and “undesirable” prizes (blank flashcards, black pens, etc). Upon completion of both tests, the experimenter would hand an undesirable prize to the participant (because they supposedly bought all of that kind) and asked if the participant liked it. Then, the experimenter “had to leave” and a second experimenter entered and asked the child if they truly liked the prize. If they had lied, participants were then asked to explain why they did (afterward each child was allowed to switch out their prize!).

After collecting all the data, the researchers found that (for the stories) the older the children got, the less they disapproved of prosocial lying, meaning that they were more likely to think that it was ok to lie in order to spare someone’s feelings. This likely has to do with the fact that younger children have yet to learn about exceptions to rules. Rather, they want to keep rules inflexible and simpler. The study also found that children who used politeness and honesty (ex. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was lying”) as reasons for lying in context of the stories were more likely to actually engage in prosocial behavior in the real life task.

These findings have implications for encouraging positive behavior in children regarding social groups and boundaries. Whereas a lot of prior research has been done on negative lies and social behaviors (with applications for discouraging and preventing bullying, exclusion, and dishonesty), not as much has been done on how to encourage good behaviors. For instance, a teacher could teach kids about prosocial lying in order to encourage empathy (how would your friend feel if they spent time to pick out a gift for you and you said you didn’t like it?), which could help kids be more respectful and considerate.