Three studies of Singaporean children aged 36 to 83 months found that children were less likely to use deception in strategic games after they were explicitly allowed to do so. The paper was published in developmental science.
Deception is the act of intentionally making someone believe something false. This may be done by lying, hiding information, exaggerating, or creating a misleading impression. In everyday life, deception is part of social interaction, competition, and self-defense.
People use deception to avoid punishment, gain benefits, protect privacy, or save someone’s feelings. In some situations, deception, like polite or tactful communication, can help maintain social harmony. In other situations, it can seriously damage trust, relationships, and cooperation.
Engaging in deception requires both advanced cognitive abilities to mislead others and moral awareness to avoid the ethical consequences of such acts. This dual nature makes deception very difficult to study scientifically. For example, if a person fails to deceive in a given situation, it is very difficult to determine whether this is due to ethical concerns or simply because the person lacks the cognitive processes necessary to deceive.
Most children learn about deception from an early age, both how to recognize it and how to engage in it. For example, parents may teach that lying is wrong, but children may also learn that lying is a way to avoid punishment. From an evolutionary perspective, both the ability to deceive others and the recognition of deception had survival value. Because deception is such a widespread phenomenon, human societies have developed moral rules, laws, and social norms to limit harmful deception.
Study author Chadmen Tan and colleagues wanted to explore how Singapore’s culture’s strong norms against deception interact with the context of strategic games, where lying is morally acceptable and expected. They assessed how 3- to 6-year-old children behaved in strategic games when they were explicitly given permission to engage in deception compared to when they were not explicitly given this permission.
The study authors hypothesized that teaching children that lying is acceptable would lead to them telling more lies. They expected that children who would refrain from lying out of moral concerns would be relieved of that guilt and be more able to focus on what they needed to do to win the game.
In the experiment, children participated in a game with one of the researchers. First, the children selected 10 stickers depicting a combination of cartoon characters (Pokémon, Transformers, Paw Patrol, Frozen, Sanrio, Cars, etc.). The child’s task in the game was to hide a sticker under one of two identical cups while the experimenter’s eyes were closed. The experimenter’s task was to try to find the sticker. After the experimenter opens his eyes, he asks, “Where is the sticker?”
The child then points to one of the two cups, and the experimenter always lifts that cup. If the experimenter did not find the sticker, the child won the trial and could keep the sticker. If the experimenter finds the sticker, the child loses the trial and the sticker. Thus, the child was able to secure victory by deceiving the experimenter about the location of the sticker.
In the experimental group, before the main game began, the experimenter told the child, “Usually it’s bad to give someone a wrong answer, but in this game, the rules are that you can give someone a right answer or a wrong answer.In other words, in this game, it’s okay to say whatever you want to win.” This instruction was not given to children in the control group. Before this instruction and the main competition, the children had several practice sessions learning how to play the game.
Participants in the first study were 124 children between the ages of 3 and 7. Their average age was about 5 years, and 49 of them were girls. The children were divided into two groups, with 63 assigned to the experimental condition and 61 serving as the control.
Study 2 included 99 children aged 4 to 6 years. Exploratory analyzes of the first study suggested that 3-year-olds were not influenced by experimental instruction, so 3-year-olds were excluded this time. Finally, the third study involved 56 5- and 6-year-olds. All studies used the same experimental procedure.
The results of the three studies showed that both groups of children lied between 60% and 80% of the time during both the practice session and the main test session. However, contrary to the researchers’ expectations, children in the experimental condition of Study 1 lied less frequently than children in the control group.
A second study, applying the analysis procedures originally planned by the study authors, found no statistically significant differences in lying rates. However, a secondary exploratory analysis revealed that children in the experimental condition lied less than children in the control group, after controlling for the different proportions of lies that occurred during the initial practice phase.
The results of Study 3, which was preregistered to account for lying rates during these early practice stages, confirmed the paradoxical finding. In other words, children who were explicitly told that they could lie were less likely to actually lie than children in a control group who received no such instruction.
“This paradoxical effect has been replicated, suggesting that moral considerations persist even in situations where ethical guidelines appear to be withheld, suggesting that cognitive and moral aspects of deception are deeply intertwined early in development,” the study authors concluded.
Researchers have proposed several psychological reasons why giving children permission to lie actually makes them more honest. For one thing, by saying, “It’s usually a bad thing to give someone the wrong answer,” the adult mistakenly emphasized the word “bad” and pushed the moral weight of the lie to the forefront of the child’s mind. Children are also very good at trying to figure out what adults really want, leading them to believe that the game was a secret test of their honesty.
However, you should also consider that winning strategic games tends to require you to do things that your opponent doesn’t expect. Giving the children explicit permission to lie may simply have told them that the other person (the experimenter) expected them to lie. This makes telling the truth an action that the other person is less likely to expect, and thus an action in which the child is more likely to win. This could potentially explain the observed results without requiring moral considerations.
The paper, “Permission Paradox: Tolerance of Deception May Promote Honesty in Young Children,” was authored by Chadmen Tan, Xiao Pan Ding, and Gail D. Heyman.
