Children are less likely to use deception after being given permission to deceive, study finds

A set of three studies of 36- to 83-month-old Singaporean children found that they were less likely to use deception in a strategic game after they were given explicit permission to deceive. The paper was published in Developmental Science.

Deception is the act of intentionally causing another person to believe something that is false. It can be done through lying, hiding information, exaggeration, or creating a misleading impression. In everyday life, deception is part of social interactions, competition, and self-protection.

People use deception to avoid punishment, gain an advantage, protect privacy, or spare someone’s feelings. In some situations, deception can help maintain social harmony, as in polite or tactful communication. In other situations, it can seriously damage trust, relationships, and cooperation.

Engaging in deception demands both the cognitive sophistication to mislead others and the moral awareness to navigate the ethical implications of such behavior. Because of this dual nature, scientifically researching deception can be quite difficult. For example, when a person does not engage in deception in a certain situation, it is very difficult to determine whether this was because of ethical concerns or because the person was simply not capable of the cognitive processes needed to deceive.

Most children learn about deception—both how to recognize it and how to engage in it—from a very young age. For example, parents may teach them that lying is bad, but children may also learn that lying can be a way to avoid punishment. From an evolutionary perspective, both being able to deceive others and to recognize deception had survival value. Because deception is such a widespread phenomenon, human societies developed moral rules, laws, and social norms to limit harmful deception.

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Study author Chadmen Tan and his colleagues wanted to explore how the strong norms against deception in Singaporean culture interact with the context of a strategic game in which lying is morally acceptable and expected. They assessed how 3- to 6-year-old children would behave in a strategic game when explicitly given permission to engage in deception compared to when this permission is not explicitly given.

The study authors hypothesized that telling children lying is permitted would lead to more lies being told. They expected that children who would otherwise refrain from lying due to moral concerns would be relieved of that guilt and focus more on what is needed 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 mix of cartoon characters (e.g., Pokémon, Transformers, Paw Patrol, Frozen, Sanrio, Cars). The child’s task in the game was to hide a sticker under one of two identical cups while the experimenter kept their eyes closed. The experimenter’s task was to try to find the sticker. After opening their eyes, the experimenter would ask, “Where is the sticker?”

The child would then point to one of the two cups, and the experimenter would always lift that cup. If the experimenter did not find the sticker, the child would win that trial and could keep the sticker. If the experimenter found the sticker, the child would lose the trial and the sticker. Therefore, the child could ensure they won by deceiving the experimenter about the location of the sticker.

In the experimental group, before the main game started, the experimenter told the child: “Usually it is bad to give someone the wrong answer, but in this game, the rules say that you can give either the right or the wrong answer. So, in this game you can say whatever you want to win.” This instruction was not given to children in the control group. Before this instruction and the main game, there were several practice sessions in which the children learned how to play the game.

The participants of the first study were 124 children between 3 and 7 years of age. Their average age was around 5 years, and 49 of them were girls. The children were divided into two groups: 63 were assigned to the experimental condition, while 61 children were controls.

Study 2 included 99 children between 4 and 6 years of age. Three-year-olds were excluded this time, as exploratory analyses from the first study suggested they were not affected by the experimental instruction. 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, in both practice and main test sessions, children in both groups lied between 60% and 80% of the time. However, contrary to the researchers’ expectations, children in the experimental condition in Study 1 lied less often than children in the control group.

There was no statistically significant difference in lying rates in the second study when the study authors applied their initially planned analytic procedure. However, a secondary exploratory analysis revealed that children in the experimental condition engaged in fewer lies than their counterparts in the control group after controlling for varying lying rates that occurred during the initial practice phase.

The results of Study 3, which was pre-registered to account for those initial practice phase lying rates, confirmed the paradoxical finding: children who were explicitly told that they were allowed to lie actually became less likely to lie compared to children in the control group who did not receive the instruction.

“This paradoxical effect was replicated, suggesting that moral considerations persist even in contexts where ethical guidelines are presumed to be suspended and that the cognitive and moral aspects of deception are deeply intertwined during early development,” the study authors concluded.

The researchers propose a few psychological reasons for why giving a child permission to lie actually makes them more honest. For one, by saying, “Usually it is bad to give someone the wrong answer,” the adult accidentally highlighted the word “bad,” bringing the moral weight of lying to the very front of the child’s mind. Children are also very good at trying to figure out what adults really want, leading them to assume the game was a secret test of their honesty.

However, it should also be considered that winning in strategic games tends to be about doing what the opposing side does not expect. Giving children explicit permission to lie might have simply communicated to them that their opponent (the experimenter) was expecting them to lie. This would make telling the truth the behavior that the opponent would be less likely to expect, and thus the behavior that would make the child more likely to win. This could potentially explain the observed results without the need to involve moral considerations.

The paper, “The Permission Paradox: Condoning Deception Can Promote Honesty in Young Children,” was authored by Chadmen Tan, Xiao Pan Ding, and Gail D. Heyman.