My children don’t always wash their hands after they use the bathroom. Big surprise, right? And they don’t always tell me the truth either when I ask them if they washed their hands. Again, no surprise there.
Still, it would be nice to find ways to try to encourage greater honesty in children, and instill in them truthful habits that will stay with them as they get older. Two new studies published in the journal Developmental Psychology suggest some promising ways of doing just this. The studies, conducted by two of the leading child honesty researchers in the world, Angela Evans at Brock University and Victoria Talwar at McGill University, focused on 3 to 8 year-olds from a mostly white and middle-class sample of children in Canada.
The basic setup in both studies used the “temptation resistance paradigm.” The experimenter in charge would put a toy behind the back of the child in the study, and the child’s job was to guess which toy it was after it made a noise (like a bark or a quack). After two rounds, the third toy was put behind the child, but the experimenter said she had to leave for a moment and to not peek while she was gone. Hidden cameras monitored whether the child did in fact peek, and after one minute the experimenter returned and asked, “Did you turn around and peek at the toy while I was out of the room?” Those who did peek but then denied it were considered to be lying. Those who did peek but then admitted it were truth-tellers.
In the first study, Evans and Talwar examined two methods of promoting honesty: increasing self-awareness and promising to tell the truth. Self-awareness is related to assessing or judging ourselves using social and moral norms. As in many other studies, it can be increased by having a person look at themselves in a mirror while performing an honesty-related task.
The first study had four variations, and here they are along with their results:
Child was asked “Do you promise that you will tell me the truth?”, before being asked about peeking.
· Result for 3-4 year olds: Roughly 75% still lied.
· Result for 7-8 year olds: Roughly 58% still lied.
Child placed in front of mirror and asked to point to parts of their face and report their name and grade, before being asked about peeking.
· Result for 3-4 year olds: Roughly 30% still lied.
· Result for 7-8 year olds: Roughly 100% still lied.
Child asked to promise and child placed in front of mirror, before being asked about peeking.
· Result for 3-4 year olds: Roughly 60% still lied.
· Result for 7-8 year olds: Roughly 58% still lied.
Control condition where nothing extra was done.
· Result for 3-4 year olds: Roughly 70% lied.
· Result for 7-8 year olds: Roughly 95% lied.
These are all “rough” percentages since the study did not report exact numbers.
With all this data, it might be hard to extract the most interesting findings. One is that encouraging self-awareness was remarkably effective in reducing lying for 3-4 year olds, but completely ineffective for the 7-8 year olds. In their case, asking them to promise to tell the truth significantly reduced lying, and combining that with boosting self-awareness did not lead to any extra honesty.
Study two added two more strategies for promoting honesty to the mix. One was modeling honest behavior. In the context of the study, this was accomplished by having a child read a story after the experimenter came back into the room. The story had to do with a broken family picture, and the main character of the story, when asked by his or her mom about the picture, said: “I can’t tell a lie. I broke the picture with my bouncy ball.”
The other strategy had to do with emphasizing the good consequences of telling the truth. Evans and Talwar used the same story with the broken picture for this too, but changed what the mom said to: “Who broke the picture? No matter what happened, I would not be mad at you. If you tell me the truth, I will be really pleased with you. I will feel happy if you tell the truth.”
Using the same setup of the toy behind the back and the experimenter leaving during the third round, here were the results (age did not make a significant difference in this study):
Read about Good Role Model of Honesty in the Story – Roughly 85% still lied.
Read about Good Consequences for Honesty in the Story – Roughly 83% still lied.
Read about Both a Good Role Model and Good Consequences – Roughly 70% still lied.
Here the key finding is that combining two strategies together seemed to be a bit more effective than each of them in isolation.
There can be different takeaways from these findings by Evans and Talwar. For me, especially noteworthy is the effect of asking a child to promise to tell the truth. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have much of an effect around 3-4 years of age, when children might not yet even grasp what a promise is. But it is a different story when they are 7-8 year olds. On the flip side, greater self-awareness seems to make a significant difference in the 3-4 year old range.
I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions just yet, though. The findings need to be replicated, especially with more diverse participants. Also, the studies involved a fairly artificial setup in the sense that rarely in life do ways of enhancing honesty (a story with a good role model of honesty, a mirror, etc.) immediately precede an opportunity to lie. It would be interesting to know whether any of these enhancements would make a difference when used more than once, and when the opportunity to lie comes later in a day or week.
Still, Evans and Talwar have given us some promising directions to explore for future research. In the meantime, I think I will try out one or two of them on my 8-year old the next time I ask whether she washed her hands.
