Researchers, led by Victoria Talwar of the educational and counseling psychology department at McGill University, wanted to know how a child’s moral understanding develops. They studied the behaviour of close to 100 children, ages 6 to 12.
The researchers showed the children a series of short videos in which childlike puppets either told the truth or lied. The variable was the outcome of the puppets’ words: Sometimes what they said caused harm to someone else (e.g., blaming an innocent person for their own misdeeds).
In other scenarios, the speaker’s words harmed themselves while helping someone else (e.g., a false confession to a misdeed in order to spare the real perpetrator from punishment). The videos also portrayed puppets telling truths, such as “tattling,” could harm someone else. After watching the videos, the children were asked to decide whether the characters were being honest or deceitful. They were also asked to decide whether the puppets’ behaviours should be rewarded or condemned.
“Looking at how children see honesty and deceit is a way of gaining insight into different stages of moral and social development,” explains Talwar. “Children get a lot of messages from their parents saying that lying is always bad, but at the same time they see their parents telling ‘white’ lies to make life easier. Depending on their age, this is likely to be a bit confusing for children. “We were interested in gaining a more nuanced picture of children’s perceptions of truth and lies — since not all lies have negative consequences for the other person, and not all truths have positive consequences for someone else. We were curious to know at what age children start to understand this.”
As reported in the International Review of Pragmatics, the researchers discovered that the children had no difficulty, no matter what their age, in distinguishing truth from lies. They were also adept at deciding which behaviours to reward or condemn — with two notable differences between younger and older kids. False confessions to help someone else were difficult to assess; younger children saw these as being more negative than older ones did. Tattling was also problematic. Younger children were less concerned by truth-telling that had negative consequences for someone else, whereas older children were more conflicted about tattling.
“What we were seeing is children’s confusion around particular kinds of truths and lies,” says Shanna Mary Williams, who recently completed her PhD at McGill and did much of the research in this study.
