Increasing Honest Statements in Young Children through Presentation of Social Contingencies and Emotionally Evocative Stimuli

Abstract Honesty is fundamental to interpersonal relationships and civil society. Although immediate contingencies often favor lying, many individuals respond honestly even when lying would be more efficient for contacting reinforcement. Across two experiments, we evaluated strategies for increasing honest responding by young children through exposure to social contingencies and emotionally evocative stimuli when material contingencies continued to reinforce lying. The stimuli were pictures of faces of children displaying happiness and sadness. The first experiment found that presession pairing of happy faces with honesty and sad faces with lying did not affect behavior; however, pairings combining verbal rule statements and faces contingent upon honesty during sessions resulted in increased honesty. In the second experiment we examined pairing emotionally evocative images with honesty and lying, with increasing intensity of providing a verbal rule linking emotions with honesty. Pairing was effective only when combined with the presentation of a rule linking honesty and emotions. For two participants it was possible to fade treatment with a return to baseline, during which honesty persisted. These results suggest that it may be possible for behavior analysis to develop new interventions to support honesty that do not require changing immediate environmental contingencies.