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Being honest won't pay. Seven- but not 5-year-olds begin to predict that others will lie for reputational reasons

Children begin to manage their reputation around school-age, but it remains unclear when they start to explicitly reason about reputational strategies such as lying from a third-person perspective. The current study investigated whether 5- and 7-year-old children would explicitly predict reputationa...

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Published in:PloS one 2025, Vol.20 (1), p.e0317334
Main Authors: Klafka, Mareike, Liszkowski, Ulf
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description Children begin to manage their reputation around school-age, but it remains unclear when they start to explicitly reason about reputational strategies such as lying from a third-person perspective. The current study investigated whether 5- and 7-year-old children would explicitly predict reputational lying in the context of a third party interaction. Participants were told hypothetical stories and asked to predict whether a protagonist would lie to a peer character about a selfish resource allocation. Results revealed that about half of the 7-year-olds and neglectable few of the 5-year-olds began to predict that the protagonist would lie to his peer out of reputational concern and whitewash the selfishly distributed amount. The prediction of reputational lying did not differ for ingroup or outgroup third parties. Seven-year-olds justified their prediction of a lie with reference to how the protagonist would look to others. While reputational lying has been shown in 5-year-olds in comparable interactive scenarios with peers, a more abstract, explicit understanding of reputational lying seems to be a more complex cognitive ability, emerging around the age of 7 years.
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subjects Age
Behavior
Child
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Cognitive ability
Cooperation
Cultural differences
Deception
Demographic aspects
Explicit knowledge
Female
Humans
Male
Methods
Peer Group
Reputation management
Resource allocation
Third party
title Being honest won't pay. Seven- but not 5-year-olds begin to predict that others will lie for reputational reasons
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