Children’s cost–benefit assessment of lies across three cultures

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2022-05, Vol.217, p.105355-105355, Article 105355
• Main Authors: Guo, Cynthia Xinran, Rochat, Philippe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antisocial Personality Disorder; Child; Child Behavior; Child, Preschool; China; Cost-Benefit Analysis; Cross-cultural development; Deception; Humans; Lie understanding; Lie-telling; Moral decision-making; Moral development
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105355

•From 4 years of age, children appear to evaluate lies along dimensions that factor both the anticipated costs to the lie-teller and the anticipated benefits for the lie recipient.•Despite being traditionally viewed as opposites on the collectivistic-individualistic spectrum, urban Chinese and American children show comparable judgement of lies.•Differences in explicit moral teaching and lack of experience in resource allocation may contribute to Samoan children’s overall less differential evaluation of lies compared to Chinese and U.S. children. We examined 4- to 11-year-old children’s evaluation of six types of lies arranged along a cost–benefit assessment scale factoring both the lie teller and the lie recipient. Children were from three distinct cultural environments: rural Samoa (n = 99), urban China (n = 49), and urban United States (n = 109). Following the simple script of six different stories involving a lie teller and a lie recipient, children were asked to evaluate the character who lied and whether it deserved reward or punishment using a child-friendly Likert scale. From the age when children produce both antisocial and prosocial lies, our results show that their evaluation of lies rests on a cost–benefit analysis of both the lie teller and the lie recipient. Such analysis varies depending on age, type of lie, and the child’s cultural environment. In general, Samoan children tended to rate lies more negatively, and they were less differential in their evaluation of the different types of lies compared with both Chinese and U.S. children. We interpret these results as reflecting the differences across cultures in explicit moral teaching and children’s relative experience in resource allocation.