Several behaviors are contagious - hey, even the humble yawn is thought to be an unwitting demonstration of empathy. But a new study from University of California, San Diego researchers shows that not all shared habits are the warm-and-fuzzy kind, with fibbing a learned behavior that kids acquire when they've been lied to themselves.
While it's no surprise that children learn from imitation, the study is the first of its kind to attempt to gauge whether or not telling tall tales to kids has a direct impact on their own honesty. The study looked at 186 children aged 3 to 7, each of whom played a sound association game, matching trademark sounds to popular toys and characters, such as a Tickle Me Elmo and Sesame Street's Cookie Monster. While most of the sound samples proved simple for the children to match, one - Beethoven's Fur Elise - was more difficult. The tester left the room at this point, imploring the children not to peek at the answers left behind. The catch? Half of the children had been lied to earlier - being promised a bowl of non-existent candy - with the testers admitting dishonesty before the exercise began. Around 60 percent of the kids who hadn't been lied to peeked at the answers, and 60 percent of those lied about it. The children that had been lied to saw a sharp jump in numbers, with around 80 percent peeking - of that, around 90 percent lying about their actions.
Findings also suggested that children under the age of five were not affected by the adult's lies, though the five to seven age group was adversely effected.
The study's leaders, Leslie Carver and Chelsea Hays, cautioned that the study was not intended to find the cause of dishonest behavior among children, but indeed to verify that the learned phenomenon does in fact exist. "The actions of parents suggest that they do not believe that the lies they tell their children will impact the child's own honesty," the study read. "The current study casts doubt on that belief." Further, the study suggested that the children didn't place as high a premium on the truth when speaking with an adult who had already lied. "Perhaps the children did not feel the need to uphold their commitment to tell the truth to someone who they perceived as a liar," said the researchers.
The study was published in Developmental Science.
