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This research examines barriers to reporting academic dishonesty in early adulthood (Study 1; N = 92) and adolescence (Study 2; N = 137). Participants were asked to describe a recent time they observed a peer cheating and to reflect on their decision about whether to report the cheating. They also responded to hypothetical scenarios about observing typical cheating actions, and the presence of social motives (e.g., whether people who report tend to gain reputations for being snitches) was manipulated in each scenario. Even though participants judged reporting to be the morally right thing to do, doing so was rare and approval for it was low, especially in adolescence. Participants also tended to say they would rather be friends with people who do not report cheaters than with those who do. Participants reasoned about a variety of social concerns to support their judgments about reporting (e.g., concern about their relationship with the cheater, concerns for others' welfare), and the manipulated social motives in the hypothetical scenarios significantly influenced judgments about reporting. These findings inform our understanding of the social dynamics that contribute to decisions about policing academic honesty., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Academic cheating is common, but little is known about its early emergence. It was examined among Chinese second to sixth graders (N = 2094; 53% boys, collected between 2018 and 2019) using a machine learning approach. Overall, 25.74% reported having cheated, which was predicted by the best machine learning algorithm (Random Forest) at a mean accuracy of 81.43%. Cheating was most strongly predicted by children's beliefs about the acceptability of cheating and the observed prevalence and frequency of peer cheating at school. These findings provide important insights about the early development of academic cheating, and how to promote academic integrity and limit cheating before it becomes entrenched. The present research demonstrates that machine learning can be effectively used to analyze developmental data., (© 2023 The Authors. Child Development © 2023 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Behavioral economics research has revealed that our decision-making can be biased by default settings. That is, all other things being equal, adults tend to choose default options even when the effort involved in choosing other options is minimal. Extensive evidence shows that default settings can systematically influence adult decisions in a wide variety of domains (e.g., pension choices, organ donation), but little is known about their developmental origin. Of interest in the present research is whether default settings can influence young children's decisions about whether to be honest. We investigated this question in two studies of 5- and 6-year-old Chinese children (total N = 120; 60 girls; M age  = 5.81, SD age  = 0.14). Each study used a specially designed device that allowed children to play a guessing game in either a Cheating Default condition in which they would cheat by doing nothing or in an Honesty Default condition in which they would be honest by doing nothing. In each condition, they had the option of taking a trivially easy action to override the default (pushing a button in Study 1 or moving a screen in Study 2). In both studies, children decided to cheat significantly more often in the Cheating Default condition than in the Honesty Default condition. Additionally, overall cheating rates were significantly higher in Study 2 than in Study 1 (55% vs. 25%), which suggests that even though the default setting effect generalized across different actions, the specific action in question can also affect the cheating rate. Taken together, these results indicate that default setting effects that have been observed in adults have origins in childhood, and they point toward new ways to use nudges to promote positive social development and moral decision-making., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

There has been extensive research on the causes of academic cheating, but little is known about its consequences. The current research sought to fill this gap in the literature by examining how cheating by middle school children (total N = 198) affects their learning outcomes. In a naturalistic paradigm, children scored a math test they had taken previously, which gave them an opportunity to cheat by falsely scoring incorrect answers to be correct. Results from this phase showed that 54 % of the children cheated on at least one question. One week later, the children took the same test again, but this time without being given an opportunity to cheat. Among children who cheated, items they had answered incorrectly on the first round showed significantly less improvement on the second round if they had dishonestly scored them as correct rather than honestly scoring them as incorrect. This finding provides the first experimental evidence that academic cheating can interfere with children's learning., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This research examined the effectiveness of using norms to promote honesty. Participants were Han Chinese children (N = 568, 50.4% male, 3.24 to 6.00 years, collected 2020-2022). Relative to children in a control condition, children in Study 1 were more likely to confess to having cheated in a game after being presented with a descriptive norm indicating that confessions are typical, or an injunctive norm indicating that most other children approve of confessing. Study 2 showed that this finding was not due to a methodological artifact, and Study 3 replicated the effect in a context in which the norm information was conveyed by someone other than the experimenter. The findings suggest that messages about social norms can influence children's honesty., (© 2022 The Authors. Child Development © 2022 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Academic cheating is a serious worldwide problem that begins during childhood. However, to date there has been little research on academic cheating with children before high school age. The current study used a naturalistic experimental paradigm to evaluate the possibility that systematically manipulating messages about the difficulty of a test can affect whether middle school children (N = 201) would cheat by reporting a falsely inflated test score. We found that test difficulty messaging significantly affected children's cheating behavior. Specifically, telling children that a test was either easy or hard produced higher rates of cheating than telling them that the difficulty level was on par with their current skills. In addition, among the children who chose to cheat, telling them that the test was easy led to a greater degree of cheating. These findings are consistent with theories of academic cheating that point to the importance of approach and avoidance motives in achievement motivation. The findings also suggest that simple messaging can have a significant impact on children's moral behavior and that seemingly innocuous messages such as describing the difficulty of a test can influence children's decisions about whether and how much to cheat., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

People are sometimes tempted to lie for their own benefit if it would not harm others. For adults, dishonesty is the default response in these circumstances. The developmental origins of this phenomenon were investigated between 2019 and 2021 among 6- to 11-year-old Han Chinese children from China (N = 548, 49% female). Children had an opportunity to win prizes in a behavioral economics game (Experiment 1) or a temptation resistance game adapted from developmental psychology (Experiment 2). In each experiment, the youngest children showed a default tendency of honesty and there was an overall age-related shift toward a default tendency of dishonesty. These findings provide direct evidence of developmental change in the automatic and controlled processes that underlie moral behavior., (© 2022 The Authors. Child Development © 2022 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical work on children's recognition of self-other equivalences (Meltzoff, 2007) and in the default tendency to view communication as helpful (Mascaro et al., 2017). Eighty 3-year-old Singaporean children ( M = 39.36 months, 37 girls, 90.0% Chinese) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition, in which they were trained on strategic deception, or to a conservation training control condition. Findings showed that the strategic deception training was effective in promoting epistemic vigilance on a semantic task that involved object naming and no pointing, although the effect did not extend to performance on an episodic task that involved pointing to object locations. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal link between young children's reasoning about how to deceive others and their resistance to being misled by others. In doing so, they shed light on the mechanisms that come into play when children learn epistemic vigilance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).age = 39.36 months, 37 girls, 90.0% Chinese) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition, in which they were trained on strategic deception, or to a conservation training control condition. Findings showed that the strategic deception training was effective in promoting epistemic vigilance on a semantic task that involved object naming and no pointing, although the effect did not extend to performance on an episodic task that involved pointing to object locations. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal link between young children's reasoning about how to deceive others and their resistance to being misled by others. In doing so, they shed light on the mechanisms that come into play when children learn epistemic vigilance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cheating is a common human behavior but few studies have examined its emergence during early childhood. In three preregistered studies, a challenging math test was administered to 5- to 6-year-old children (total N = 500; 255 girls). An answer key was present as children completed the test, but they were instructed to not peek at it. In Study 1, many children cheated, but manipulations that reduced the answer key's accessibility in terms of proximity and visibility led to less cheating. Two follow-up studies showed that the answer key's visibility played a more significant role than its proximity. These findings suggest that subtle and seemingly insignificant alterations of the physical environment can effectively nudge young children away from acting dishonestly., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Previous research on nudges conducted with adults suggests that the accessibility of behavioral options can influence people's decisions. The present study examined whether accessibility can be used to reduce academic cheating among young children. We gave children a challenging math test in the presence of an answer key they were instructed not to peek at, and manipulated the accessibility of the answer key by placing various familiar objects on top of it. In Study 1, we used an opaque sheet of paper as a two-dimensional occluder, and found that it significantly reduced cheating compared to a transparent plastic sheet. In Study 2, we used a three-dimensional occluder in the form of a tissue box to make the answer key appear even less accessible, and found it was significantly more effective in reducing cheating than the opaque paper. In Study 3, we used two symbolic representations of the tissue box: a realistic color photo and a line drawing. Both representations were effective in reducing cheating, but the realistic photo was more effective than the drawing. These findings demonstrate that manipulating accessibility can be an effective strategy to nudge children away from cheating in an academic context. They further suggest that different types of everyday objects and their symbolic representations can differentially impact children's moral behavior., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This research presents a nudge-based approach to promoting honest behavior. Specifically, we introduce the moral barrier hypothesis, which posits that moral violations can be inhibited by the introduction of spatial boundaries, including ones that do not physically impede the act of transgressing. We found that, as compared to a no barrier condition, children cheated significantly less often when a barrier was strategically placed to divide the space where children were seated from a place that was associated with cheating. This effect was seen both when the barrier took a physical form and when it was purely symbolic. However, the mere presence of a barrier did not reduce cheating: if it failed to separate children from a space that was associated with cheating, children cheated as much as when there was no barrier at all. Taken together, these findings support the moral barrier hypothesis and show that even seemingly unremarkable features of children's environments can nudge them to act honestly., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

Although there is widespread acknowledgment that children acquire social and moral values during development via socialization processes, few plausible mechanisms have been systematically evaluated. In the present research, we examine the effectiveness of 1 potential mechanism: overheard conversations about the moral behavior of others. We examine this issue with reference to the important social value of honesty. Across 3 preregistered studies, preschool-age children in China (total N = 276) were presented with a version of the temptation resistance paradigm in which they were first given an opportunity to cheat by peeking at the answer in a guessing game and were then asked whether they had cheated. Study 1 included both 3- and 5-year-olds, and Studies 2 and 3 included 5-year-olds only. In Study 1 children were more likely to truthfully confess to peeking if they had previously overheard 2 adults say that another child's confession made them happy. An increase in truthful confessions was also seen in Study 2, even though this time the adult who asked about peeking had not been present for the overheard conversation. In Study 3, children were presented with an overheard conversation that lacked any emotion-related language, and the effect was seen once again. Taken together, these findings suggest that overheard conversations can be used to promote truth telling. More broadly, the findings suggest that children realize the attitudes adults express about others can have implications for their own behavior and can identify these attitudes, even when they are not the target of the communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Starting in early childhood, children are socialized to be honest. However, they are also expected to avoid telling the truth in sensitive situations if doing so could be seen as inappropriate or impolite. Across two studies (total N = 358), the reasoning of 3- to 5-year-old children in such a scenario was investigated by manipulating whether the information in question would be helpful to the recipient. The studies used a reverse rouge paradigm, in which a confederate with a highly salient red mark on her nose asked children whether she looked okay prior to having her picture taken. In Study 1, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark was temporary and the confederate did not know it was there. In Study 2, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark could be concealed with makeup. These findings show that for children as young as age 3, decisions about whether to tell the truth are influenced by the likelihood that the information would be helpful to the recipient., (© 2020 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Parenting by lying refers to the parenting practice of deception to try to control children's behavioral and affective states. Although the practice is widely observed across cultures, few studies have examined its associations with psychological outcomes in adulthood. The current research fills this gap by sampling 379 young Singaporean adults who reported on their childhood exposure to parenting by lying, their current deceptive behaviors toward parents, and their psychosocial adjustment. Results revealed that the adults who remembered being exposed to higher levels of parenting by lying in childhood showed higher levels of deception toward their parents and higher levels of psychosocial maladjustment. Our findings suggest that parenting by lying may have negative implications for children's psychosocial functioning later in life., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The current research examined whether young children engage in unethical behavior to a greater extent when they have a prosocial justification for doing so. Participants (3- and 5-year-olds, N = 240) played a guessing game in which they were tempted to cheat to win a prize after promising not to do so. In Study 1, children were randomly assigned to either an experimental prosocial condition in which they were told that the prize would be given to a child who was unable to play the game or a control condition in which they were told that they would get to keep the prize for themselves. The 5-year-olds, but not the 3-year-olds, were more likely to cheat in the prosocial condition than in the control condition. Studies 2a and 2b revealed that older children's tendency to engage in prosocial cheating was driven by their concern with signaling to others that they are prosocial. These findings suggest that the tendency to act unethically to benefit others emerges early in development and that this tendency may reflect children's interest in prosocial signaling., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Recent evolutionary, cultural, and economic theories have postulated strong connections between human sociality and complex cognition. One prediction derived from this work is that deception should confer cognitive benefits on children. The current research tests this possibility by examining whether learning to deceive during early childhood promotes more advanced theory of mind and executive function skills during a time when these skills are undergoing rapid development. A total of 42 children (M age  = 40.45 months; 22 boys and 20 girls) who showed no initial ability to deceive were randomly assigned to an experimental condition or a control condition. In both conditions, they played a hide-and-seek game against an adult opponent on 4 consecutive days, but only the children in the experimental condition were taught how to deceive the opponent in order to win the game. Unlike children in the control condition, children in the experimental condition significantly improved their executive function and theory of mind skills, providing the first evidence that learning to deceive causally enhances cognitive skills in young children., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3- and 5-year-old children (total N = 323) assessed this possibility. In Study 1, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: a smart reputation condition in which they were told they have a reputation for being smart, an irrelevant reputation control condition, or a no reputation control condition. Children in the smart reputation condition were significantly more likely to cheat than their counterparts in either control condition. Study 2 confirmed that reputational concerns are indeed a fundamental part of our smart reputation effect. These results suggest that children as young as 3 years of age are able to use reputational cues to guide their behavior, and that telling young children they have a positive reputation for being smart can have negative consequences., (© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

We investigated how the ability to deceive emerges in early childhood among a sample of young preschoolers (Mean age = 34.7 months). We did this via a 10-session microgenetic method that took place over a 10-day period. In each session, children played a zero-sum game against an adult to win treats. In the game, children hid the treats and had opportunities (10 trials) to win them by providing deceptive information about their whereabouts to the adult. Although children initially showed little or no ability to deceive, most spontaneously discovered deception and systematically used it to win the game by the tenth day. Both theory of mind and executive function skills were predictive of relatively faster patterns of discovery. These results are the first to provide evidence for the importance of cognitive skills and social experience in the discovery of deception over time in early childhood., (© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The observational learning approach, developed more than a half century ago, suggests that it is possible to promote desirable social behaviors through peer observation. However, this idea has yet to be put to a rigorous empirical test. The current research sought to fill this gap by examining whether honesty can be promoted in children by allowing them to observe a peer's display of honest behavior. The dependent measure was whether 5-year-old children who had cheated by peeking in a guessing game would confess to it. Study 1 showed that simply observing a classmate confess to peeking did not promote honesty. However, children who observed a classmate confess to peeking and receive praise and a small prize from an experimenter did became more honest. Study 2 replicated the effect with a weaker manipulation that involved praise for the confessing peer but no prize, which suggests that verbal feedback alone was a sufficient benefit. These findings point to new strategies for promoting honesty in young children and demonstrate that young children's observations of the social consequences of others' sociomoral behavior can help them to guide their own behavior., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Widespread cheating can undermine rules that are necessary for maintaining social order. Preventing cheating can be a challenge, especially with regard to children, who as a result of their limited executive function skills may have particular difficulty with resisting temptation to cheat. We examined one approach designed to help children resist this temptation: eliciting a verbal commitment to not cheat. We tested 4- to 7-year-olds (total N = 330) and found that starting at 5 years of age, a verbal commitment to not cheat led to a substantial reduction in cheating. The results suggest that verbal commitments can be used to help children overcome temptations and comply with rules., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The current research examined whether children consider who benefits from lies when judging the trustworthiness of liars. Across two studies (total N=214), 6- to 11-year-olds trusted individuals who lied to promote the interests of others, but not those who lied to promote their own interests. In contrast, children trusted individuals who told the truth regardless of who benefited. Trust in individuals who lied to promote the interests of others was evident even in the absence of moral approval for their actions. These results demonstrate that children take into account both the truth value of a speaker's statements and who benefits when assessing trustworthiness and that moral approval is not a prerequisite for trust., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The ability of 3- to 5-year-old children to reason about trust in relation to the honest behavior of others was examined across five studies (total N=496). Results showed that although 4-year-olds differentiated between honest and dishonest sources in their trust judgments, only 5-year-olds demonstrated a clear capacity to differentiate between honesty and a trust-irrelevant dimension (i.e., cleanliness) in these trust judgments. This was seen in their tendency to trust honest characters more than clean ones and to distrust dishonest characters more than unclean ones. This was also seen in their tendency to choose honest unclean characters over dishonest clean ones in their trust judgments. Results suggest that children use honesty as a basis for selective trust even before they appreciate which specific traits are relevant to trust., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The ability of 3- and 4-year-old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total n = 212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily due to an inability to reject specific directions that are provided by others, rather than an inability to respond in a way that is opposite to what has been indicated by a cue. In Studies 1 through 4, a puppet identified as The Big Bad Wolf offered advice to participants about which of two boxes contained a hidden sticker. Regardless of the form the advice took, 3-year olds performed poorly by failing to systematically reject it. However, when participants in Study 5 believed they were responding to a mechanical cue rather than the advice of the Wolf, they were better able to reject misleading advice, and individual differences in performance on the primary task were systematically correlated with measures of executive function. Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others., (Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

The practice of lying to one's children to encourage behavioral compliance was investigated among parents in the US (N = 114) and China (N = 85). The vast majority of parents (84% in the US and 98% in China) reported having lied to their children for this purpose. Within each country, the practice most frequently took the form of falsely threatening to leave a child alone in public if he or she refused to follow the parent. Crosscultural differences were seen: A larger proportion of the parents in China reported that they employed instrumental lie-telling to promote behavioral compliance, and a larger proportion approved of this practice, as compared to the parents in the US. This difference was not seen on measures relating to the practice of lying to promote positive feelings, or on measures relating to statements about fantasy characters such as the tooth fairy. Findings are discussed with reference to sociocultural values and certain parenting-related challenges that extend across cultures.

Reasoning about modesty was examined among adolescents and young adults in China and the U.S. Participants made moral judgments of story characters who did a good deed and either truthfully accepted credit for it, or falsely denied having done it. The social context in which statements occurred was manipulated, with some made in private and others in front of a class. Chinese participants judged accepting credit for good deeds less favorably and lying in the service of modesty more favorably than did participants from the U.S. In each country, older participants judged modesty-based lies more favorably when they were told in public. Additionally, a high collectivist orientation and low individualistic orientation was associated with higher ratings of modesty-based lying in public, which provides the first direct link between endorsement of these values and moral judgments about lie-telling., (Copyright © 2010 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This research examined how Chinese children make moral judgments about lie telling and truth telling when facing a "white lie" or "politeness" dilemma in which telling a blunt truth is likely to hurt the feelings of another. We examined the possibility that the judgments of participants (7-11 years of age, N=240) would differ as a function of the social context in which communication takes place. The expected social consequences were manipulated systematically in two studies. In Study 1, participants rated truth telling more negatively and rated lie telling more positively in a public situation where telling a blunt truth is especially likely to have negative social consequences. In Study 2, participants rated truth telling more positively and rated lie telling more negatively in a situation where accurate information is likely to be helpful for the recipient to achieve future success. Both studies showed that with increased age, children's evaluations became significantly influenced by the social context, with the strongest effects being seen among the 11-year-olds. These results suggest that Chinese children learn to take anticipated social consequences into account when making moral judgments about the appropriateness of telling a blunt truth versus lying to protect the feelings of another., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The way in which children evaluate people's claims about their own psychological characteristics was examined. Among children ages 6-11 from the United States and China (total N=243), there was an age-related increase in skepticism about self-report concerning the highly value-laden characteristics honest, smart, and nice, but not concerning less value-laden characteristics. There were also differences between the countries: children from China showed greater skepticism about value-laden characteristics, and were more likely to assume that others might lie about characteristics that lack strong evaluative implications. Older children from China were especially likely to expect individuals to act in ways that are consistent with modesty norms when communicating about themselves.