Cheating to benefit others? On the relation between Honesty-Humility and prosocial lies.

OBJECTIVE: Among basic personality traits, Honesty-Humility yields the most consistent, negative link with dishonest behavior. The theoretical conceptualization of Honesty-Humility, however, suggests a potential boundary condition of this relation, namely, when lying is prosocial. We therefore tested the hypothesis that the association between Honesty-Humility and dishonesty weakens once lying benefits someone else, particularly so if this other is needy. METHODS: In two online studies (Study 1: N = 775 in Germany; Study 2: N = 737 in the UK, preregistered), we measured self-reported Honesty-Humility and dishonest behavior in incentivized cheating paradigms in which the beneficiary of participants' dishonesty was either the participants themselves, a "non-needy" other (e.g., another participant), or a "needy" other (e.g., a charity). RESULTS: We found support for the robustness of the negative association between Honesty-Humility and dishonesty, even if lying was prosocial. CONCLUSION: Individuals high in Honesty-Humility largely prioritize honesty, even if there is a strong moral imperative to lie; those low in Honesty-Humility, by contrast, tend to lie habitually and thus even if they themselves do not directly profit monetarily. This suggests that (un)truthfulness may be an absolute rather than a relative aspect of Honesty-Humility, although further systematic tests of this proposition are needed.

Three-year-olds' spontaneous lying in a novel interaction-based paradigm and its relations to explicit skills and motivational factors.

Previous research has investigated children's lying and its motivational and social-cognitive correlates mostly through explicit tasks. The current study used an anticipatory interaction-based paradigm adopted from research with preverbal infants. We investigated 3-year-olds' spontaneous lying within interaction and its motivational basis and relations to explicit skills of lying, false belief understanding, inhibitory control, and socialization. Children interacted with puppets to secure stickers that were hidden in one of two boxes. Either a friend or a competitor puppet tried to obtain the stickers. Nearly all children helpfully provided information about the sticker's location to the friend, and about half of the sample anticipatorily provided false information to the competitor. Children misinformed the competitor significantly more often than the friend, both when the reward was for themselves and when it was for someone else. Explicitly planning to lie in response to a question occurred significantly less often but predicted spontaneous lying, as did passing the explicit standard false belief task. Thus, by 3 years of age, children spontaneously invoke false beliefs in others. This communicative skill reveals an interactional use of false belief understanding in that it requires holding one's perspective to pursue one's goal while providing a different perspective to distract a competitor. Findings support the view that practical theory of mind skills emerge for social coordination and serve as a basis for developing explicit false belief reasoning.

Differences and similarities in lying frequency, moral evaluations, and beliefs about lying among children with and without conduct problems.

The current study examined whether children (6-12 years old) with varying levels of conduct problems differ from those without conduct problems in three key areas: their perceptions of how often other people tell lies, their moral evaluations of truth- and lie-telling in different social contexts, and how often they tell antisocial and prosocial (i.e., "white") lies. Using a continuous measurement of conduct problems, we found that children with greater conduct problems believed that other people tell lies more often compared with children with fewer conduct problems. However, unexpectedly, children's moral evaluations of truth- and lie-telling in antisocial and prosocial contexts did not significantly differ based on conduct problems. Using parent-report methods, we found that children tell more antisocial lies with increasing severity of conduct problems, but they tell prosocial lies at a similar rate regardless of conduct problems. Finally, after grouping children based on level of conduct problems (none, low, or high), we found that children in the group with no conduct problems told more prosocial lies than antisocial lies, but the reverse was found for children in the group with high conduct problems. These findings highlight the importance of considering social context when examining the development of lying in children experiencing conduct problems.

Automated decoding of facial expressions reveals marked differences in children when telling antisocial versus prosocial lies.

The current study used computer vision technology to examine the nonverbal facial expressions of children (6-11years old) telling antisocial and prosocial lies. Children in the antisocial lying group completed a temptation resistance paradigm where they were asked not to peek at a gift being wrapped for them. All children peeked at the gift and subsequently lied about their behavior. Children in the prosocial lying group were given an undesirable gift and asked if they liked it. All children lied about liking the gift. Nonverbal behavior was analyzed using the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT), which employs the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), to automatically code children's facial expressions while lying. Using CERT, children's facial expressions during antisocial and prosocial lying were accurately and reliably differentiated significantly above chance-level accuracy. The basic expressions of emotion that distinguished antisocial lies from prosocial lies were joy and contempt. Children expressed joy more in prosocial lying than in antisocial lying. Girls showed more joy and less contempt compared with boys when they told prosocial lies. Boys showed more contempt when they told prosocial lies than when they told antisocial lies. The key action units (AUs) that differentiate children's antisocial and prosocial lies are blink/eye closure, lip pucker, and lip raise on the right side. Together, these findings indicate that children's facial expressions differ while telling antisocial versus prosocial lies. The reliability of CERT in detecting such differences in facial expression suggests the viability of using computer vision technology in deception research.

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.

I Like the Food You Made! Overly Positive Feedback Is Most Likely Given to Those That Want to Excel in a Task and Handle Failure Badly.

In this article, we focus on how people resolve the dilemma between honest feedback and a prosocial lie depending on the context. In a pre-registered study (N = 455), we asked participants to choose between telling the blatant truth or lying prosocially regarding a dish made poorly by a stranger. The results showed that participants were most eager to pass on overly positive feedback when the stranger cared about cooking and was very sensitive to negative feedback. Perceived harm in truth telling mediated the relationship between desire to excel in a task with high ability to handle failure and choosing a prosocial lie.

Do All Types of Compassion Increase Prosocial Lying?

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that compassion increases prosocial lying. However, in the present study, we proposed that compassion toward individuals who are frustrated in striving for minimal living conditions (named here as compassion for other's survival in suffering, abbreviated as COSS) increases prosocial lying, while compassion toward individuals frustrated in seeking development conditions (named here as compassion for other's development in suffering, abbreviated as CODS) has little effect on prosocial lying. METHODS: In Studies 1 and 2, we asked participants to evaluate the same text twice before and after experimentally experiencing emotion to test the above hypotheses. In Study 3, we created a situation with a strong moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling to investigate the potential psychological mechanisms. RESULTS: In Study 1, we show that COSS and CODS both increased prosocial lying. Notably, COSS effect on prosocial lying was significantly higher than CODS effect on prosocial lying. These findings were augmented by results from Study 2, which showed that individuals with low-trait compassion in COSS condition engaged in more prosocial lying than those with high trait compassion in CODS condition. In Study 3, we report that COSS increased prosocial lying significantly, while CODS did not. CONCLUSION: COSS and CODS are two different types of compassion as shown in Studies 1 and 2; they have different potential psychological mechanisms on increasing prosocial lying (Study 3a and 3b). This study provides additional information on the theory of compassion, which is important in exploring compassion effects.