Development of children’s moral evaluations of modesty and self-promotion in diverse cultural settings

Abstract

This cross-cultural study of the moral judgements of Mainland Han-Chinese, Chinese-Canadian, and Euro-Canadian children aged seven to 11 examined the evaluations of narrative protagonists’ modest lies and self-promoting truthful statements in situations where they had done a good deed. The story characters had thus either lied or told the truth about a prosocial act that they had committed. Chinese children judged modest lies more positively and boastful truths less positively than Euro-Canadian children. Chinese and Chinese-Canadian children rated immodest statements more negatively than did Euro-Canadian children. The cultural differences were greatest with the oldest children. Chinese children rated modest lies significantly more positively than either Canadian group who did not differ from each other but an interaction between age and culture revealed the three groups to be significantly different at age 11 with Chinese children most positive, followed by Chinese-Canadian children, and with Euro- Canadian children evaluating modest lies least positively. Cultural strictures and acculturation factors respecting modesty and self-enhancement are reflected in these differences.

The roles of liar intention, lie content, and theory of mind in children’s evaluation of lies

“…Hence, if a rating above 4 is taken as a positive evaluation, then we may conclude that Chinese children start to see prosocial lies as morally good from around 9 years of age. This is consistent with the findings reported by Ma et al (2011) and Cameron et al (2012), who respectively showed that Chinese children's ratings on white and modest lies begin to shift from negative to positive at around 9 years of age. Cameron and colleagues argued that Chinese children pay more attention to modesty than their European counterparts in lie evaluation, and it may also be the case that a similar cultural difference exists concerning liar intention.…”

Children’s understanding of depreciation in scenarios of envy and modesty

“…They were Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 01:56 25 June 2016 able to clearly distinguish between truths and falsehoods (Cameron, Lau, Fu, & Lee, 2012;Lee et al, 2001). Banerjee (2000) found that from eight years of age, children begin to choose the self-deprecating or modest response with the goal of obtaining social acceptance.…”

Decision Makers Use Norms, Not Cost-Benefit Analysis, When Choosing to Conceal or Reveal Unfair Rewards

“…For example, the modesty norm is substantially stronger in some collectivist cultures [25], [26], and the effects of this cultural stricture can be detected early on. For example, Chinese children judged modest lies more positively and boastful truths less positively than Euro-Canadian children, a cultural difference which was shown to increase with age [27].…”