Young children's willingness to deceive shows in-group bias only in specific social contexts.

The ability to deceive others is an early-emerging and socially complex skill, but relatively little is known about when and how a social partner's identity affects young children's willingness to lie. To understand how group membership affects children's lying, we used a minimal group paradigm to examine children's willingness to deceive in-group and out-group members across varied contexts that systematically varied in their costs and benefits. A total of 69 children aged 4 to 7 years played three versions of a sticker-hiding game: a Self-Benefit scenario (child could lie for personal gain), an Other-Benefit scenario (child could lie to help someone else), and a No-Benefit scenario (child could lie to spite someone else). Children lied the most in the Self-Benefit scenario, lying equally to in-group and out-group members in this context. When the potential for self-gain disappeared, however, in-group bias emerged. In the Other-Benefit scenario, children lied more to out-group members in order to help in-group members. Even when the potential to help another was removed (the No-Benefit scenario), children still engaged in more lie telling to out-group members. Results suggest that children's lying is sensitive to group membership, but only in certain social situations, as children's desire to benefit themselves may outweigh in-group bias. Future research should examine alternate contexts, such as lying to avoid punishment, to determine when group membership is most salient. Overall, results indicate that young children are able to flexibly apply a complex social cognitive skill based on group membership and contextual demands, with implications for social behavior and intergroup relations throughout development.

Everyone's a Critic (Sometimes): Young Children Show High Awareness of, But Lower Adherence to, Prosocial Lying Norms.

From an early age, children are taught norms about socially-acceptable behaviors; however, children's ability to recognize these norms often predates their tendency to follow them. This conflict between understanding and action has been predominantly studied in cases when enacting the norm would be costly for the child (i.e. when sharing would result in forgoing resources), but is underexplored in more low-cost scenarios. The current study examined the gap between children's knowledge and behavior in a context with a low personal cost: telling a prosocial, or white, lie. Children (N = 46) evaluated objectively poor drawings in three contexts: in one context, children were asked how a third-party character should act in a story (to assess knowledge) and in the other two contexts, children were asked to provide real-time feedback to another person and to a puppet (to assess behavior). Results indicated that children endorsed prosocial lying norms (i.e. said the story character should give the drawing a good rating) at a significantly higher rate than they demonstrated through their own lie-telling behaviors (i.e. their willingness to give social partners good ratings). These data indicate that the discrepancy between children's knowledge of social norms and their actual behaviors cannot simply be attributed to the personal costs of enacting social norms. Instead, this competence-performance gap may be due to the fact that children are often taught social rules via hypothetical situations but enacting behaviors in real-world situations may require additional skills, such as inhibition and the processing of complex, multimodal social cues.

Disentangling relations between attention to the eyes and empathy.

Social interactions involve an interplay between lower-level social perceptual biases and higher-level cognition and affect. One particularly important building block of social interaction is attention to others' eyes. Previous research has found links between individual differences in eye-looking and complex social capacities, including empathy. Such research, however, has predominately used nonnaturalistic stimuli and has not addressed the directional relation between these processes. In this study, a large sample of adults (N = 164) were eye-tracked while watching naturalistic videos of complex social interactions. Additionally, participants completed measures of empathy and spontaneous and explicit mentalizing. To disentangle relations between variables, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: first, a baseline condition with no instructions; second, an eye-looking condition, where participants were told to look at the eyes of the characters; and, third, an empathy condition, where participants were told to become involved with the characters' thoughts and feelings. In the baseline condition, we found no relation between mentalizing and eye-looking, yet found that eye-looking and empathy were positively related. Inducing one behavior, however, did not affect the other. That is, participants in the eye-looking condition showed increased eye-looking but not increased empathy, and participants in the empathy condition scored more highly on empathy and mentalizing measures with no corresponding changes in eye-looking. These results suggest that the relations between visual attention and social cognition are complex and difficult to manipulate. Future research should examine the developmental links between these behaviors, as understanding their emergence has implications for social disabilities and interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).