Children's cost–benefit assessment of lies across three cultures

Abstract

We examined 4- to 11-year-old children's evaluation of six types of lies arranged along a cost–benefit assessment scale factoring both the lie teller and the lie recipient. Children were from three distinct cultural environments: rural Samoa (n = 99), urban China (n = 49), and urban United States (n = 109). Following the simple script of six different stories involving a lie teller and a lie recipient, children were asked to evaluate the character who lied and whether it deserved reward or punishment using a child-friendly Likert scale. From the age when children produce both antisocial and prosocial lies, our results show that their evaluation of lies rests on a cost–benefit analysis of both the lie teller and the lie recipient. Such analysis varies depending on age, type of lie, and the child's cultural environment. In general, Samoan children tended to rate lies more negatively, and they were less differential in their evaluation of the different types of lies compared with both Chinese and U.S. children. We interpret these results as reflecting the differences across cultures in explicit moral teaching and children's relative experience in resource allocation.