Parents recognize the importance of honesty in their kids. In fact, in a recent survey by Character.org, parents listed honesty as their top priority for building their children’s character, even beating out responsibility and respect for the number-one spot.
Yet children continue to lie…a lot. Even children as young as three years old may cheat or lie when given the chance. There are strategies for nudging kids toward more honesty, such as reading them stories about honest people or making sure they witness the effects of lying or telling the truth. Now, a new study suggests another tool for encouraging more honesty in very young kids: Sharing your feelings about honesty and dishonesty.
Honesty and emotions
Researcher Li Zhao of Hangzhou Normal University and her research colleagues had three- to six-year-old children do a task where cheating could help improve their performance. Individual children were asked to identify a toy animal placed behind their back based solely on the sound it made. For example, the children might hear a bark and guess the animal was a dog.
Before being tested, the kids were told to try to do well, but not peek at the toy behind them unless given permission. After a couple of easy trial runs, the experimenter played a non-animal sound (like the sound of a leaf blower) then made an excuse to leave the room, reminding the child not to peek.
In some cases, nothing more was said; in others, the child was told that an adult (either a stranger, their teacher, or their mother, depending on the round) would be happy if they followed the rules or be sad if they didn’t. In all cases, the adult wasn’t actually present; the experimenter simply described how the adult would feel about cheating.
After the experimenter left, a hidden camera recorded the children’s actual behavior, and the researchers saw how cheating varied under different conditions. They found that a high percentage of children cheated in this situation, no doubt wanting to do their best. Not a very encouraging sign, but not unexpected.
However, children cheated significantly less when they were told that either their teacher or their mother would be unhappy if they peeked. For example, in one study with three to four year olds, the children cheated 80% of the time if given no information, but only 55% of the time when told their mother would be unhappy with them. (Sharing a stranger’s reactions made no difference.)
Dampening dishonesty
That may seem surprising, given that the adults weren’t even present. But it fits in with some previous research by Zhao and her colleagues. Their work has found that reading about negative reactions to cheating expressed by storybook characters can have a dampening effect on children’s dishonesty, suggesting how powerful emotions can be in encouraging moral action.
“The present results suggest that those earlier findings can be extended beyond a story character to real people and can involve the future emotional reactions of those people toward children’s future actions, not just their past behaviors,” she and her colleagues write.
Perhaps surprisingly, sharing an adult’s potential positive reaction to honesty with five to six year olds generally didn’t affect cheating significantly, despite prior research showing it could. But with the younger three to four year olds in this study, being told their mother would be happy with them following the rules was just as effective as telling them she’d be sad if they didn’t. Both reduced peeking.
This may be explained by how parents socialize their kids differently at different ages, say the authors. Very young children tend to receive more positive reinforcement for good behavior than older children.
“As children age, mothers shift their focus and emphasize rule-breaking rather than rule-following,” they write. “This shift is particularly evident when parents seek to socialize their children to respect social and moral norms.”
These findings suggest a new way for parents to encourage more honest behavior in their very young kids. Rather than trying to create barriers to cheating, trusting kids to help, or imploring kids to tell the truth—all of which can be effective according to research, but may not work as well with younger kids—parents can share their emotional reactions to honesty and dishonesty and affect their child’s moral development in positive ways.
They may not even need to be present for it to be effective. As the researchers write, “Evoking a familiar adult’s potential emotional reactions is another feasible and flexible way to promote honesty in early childhood and can be added to the honesty-promoting toolbox that parents and teachers use.”
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