Hearing about a story character's negative emotional reaction to having been dishonest causes young children to cheat less

Abstract

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3–6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.

Beyond enjoyment: Young children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement when attributing happiness

“…Most existing research on children's emotion understanding has been conducted with children from Western cultures, and it is important to examine how cultural values shape children's emotion perceptions. Regardless of the mechanism, children's attributions of happiness may guide them to act on their normative values, because anticipated emotion can be a powerful motivation for action (Dweck, 2017;Zhao et al, 2022). Consistent with this possibility, adults were capable of stronger self-control for not engaging in certain activities when they anticipated the negative affect associated with the harmful effects of those activities (Giner-Sorolla, 2001).…”

Being Good and Feeling Good: What Happiness Means to Children

“…However, an intriguing question arises: Can children's ability to anticipate happiness from prosocial actions help them focus not only on obtaining immediate rewards for themselves but also on promoting other-oriented and long-term interests? In one study, exposure to others' negative emotions resulting from dishonesty led children to engage in less cheating (e.g., Zhao et al, 2023).…”

An epidemic context elicits more prosocial decision-making in an intergroup social dilemma

“…The rationale for these additional manipulations was to gain insight into the processes underlying different responses to epidemic and non-epidemic contexts, given that decisions made in social dilemmas are shaped by behavior of other people, including their emotional reactions (e.g. [18][19][20][21] ). Because decision-making in social dilemmas is influenced by both expectations of how others will behave [18][19][20][21][22] and by perceived social norms 9 , all studies measured expectations of how the ingroup and the outgroup would behave, and perceptions of how the ingroup should behave.…”

“…[18][19][20][21] ). Because decision-making in social dilemmas is influenced by both expectations of how others will behave [18][19][20][21][22] and by perceived social norms 9 , all studies measured expectations of how the ingroup and the outgroup would behave, and perceptions of how the ingroup should behave.…”

“…We then directly compared the neighborhood improvement context with the epidemic context to investigate whether the epidemic context increases participants' allocations to the collective account in Study 3. We speculated that the context in which the NSD is presented might also affect expectations about outgroup allocations [18][19][20][21][22] . We therefore manipulated outgroup behavior, by providing information that a member of the 'other' subgroup had made a small allocation to the collective account, and felt either good or bad about doing so.…”