A Pilot Study Examining Children’s Evaluations and Reasoning About Concealment and Instrumental Forms of Antisocial Lying

Children as young as 4 years of age judge self-benefitting lies (i.e., antisocial lying) as wrong. Although this has traditionally been interpreted as evidence that young children view honesty as a moral obligation, contemporary moral development theory and research suggests that right/wrong judgments fail to capture important aspects of children’s social cognition. Research from a perspective known as social domain theory (Smetana et al., 2014; Turiel, 1983) has shown that children’s understanding of morality (i.e., norms concerning others’ rights and wellbeing) is distinct from their understanding of other types of socially unacceptable behaviour. While children judge many social events as similarly wrong, their reasoning draws on different moral (e.g., harm, fairness) and non-moral concepts (e.g., rules and authority), depending on the context and perceived consequences of the event. Thus, from the perspective of SDT, to understand whether children view lying as a moral or non-moral issue, it is necessary to assess their reasoning. Prior lying research has also focused primarily on children’s judgments of concealment lies, even though more opportunistic, instrumental forms of lying are also common in childhood. Thus, the goal of the present study was to develop and pilot a novel semi-structured interview procedure to assess how children reason about concealment and instrumental forms of antisocial lying. The study was conducted in two phases, each with samples of children ages 4 to 8 years. In the initial phase (n = 26), eight broad themes were identified and used to develop a novel coding system and semi-structured interview protocol. In the subsequent application phase, (n = 33), this system was used to classify children’s responses to hypothetical vignettes depicting concealment and instrumental lying. Nearly all children judged lying as wrong, but their reasoning focused on a range of different moral and non-moral concerns. Social-conventional concerns were the most common category of concern overall, but there were differences in reasoning by condition and age. Prudential reasons (i.e., concerns for the liar’s wellbeing or social reputation) were more common in the instrumental condition than the concealment condition. Moral reasons (i.e., concerns for harm or fairness) were commonly used by older children but almost never used by younger children. These results indicate that right/wrong judgments alone do not adequately capture children’s full understanding of antisocial lying. The coding system and interview protocol developed in the present study will be a valuable resource in future research.