Chinese Children's Evaluations of White Lies: Weighing the Consequences for Recipients (2024)

Abstract

This research examined how Chinese children make moral judgments about lie telling and truth telling when facing a “white lie” or “politeness” dilemma, in which telling a blunt truth is likely to hurt the feelings of another. We examined the possibility that the judgments of participants (age 7 to 11years; total N = 240) would differ as a function of the social context in which communication takes place. The expected social consequences were manipulated systematically in two studies. In Study 1, participants rated truth telling more negatively and lie telling more positively in a public situation, in which a blunt truth is especially likely to have negative social consequences. In Study 2, participants rated truth telling more positively and lie telling more negatively in a situation in which accurate information is likely to be helpful for the recipient to achieve future success. Both studies showed that with increased age children's evaluations became significantly influenced by the social context, with the strongest effects seen among the 11-year-olds. These results suggest that Chinese children learn to take anticipated social consequences into account when making moral judgments about the appropriateness of telling a blunt truth versus lying to protect the feelings of others.

Philosophical debates about whether lying is ever morally acceptable have a long history (see Bok, 1978). Some philosophers have argued for a deontological position in which lying is always unacceptable (e.g., Kant, 1797/1949), while others have taken a more utilitarian perspective, in which the moral implications of lying are highly context dependent (e.g., Mill, 1869). The present study focuses on the ways in which children's developing beliefs conform to or diverge from these two philosophical positions. We examine this issue within the context of what are often called “white lie” or “politeness” situations, in which telling a lie is likely to result in more positive social consequences for the recipient than is telling a blunt truth.

Although many parents explicitly teach their children that lying is wrong in all cases (), there is evidence that children tend to reject it. Perkins and Turiel (2007) found that adolescents judged lying to be wrong when it was done to cover up misdeeds, but they considered it acceptable under a number of other circ*mstances, such as in response to parental directives that were seen as violating moral precepts (e.g., a parent telling a child not to interact with a friend of another race). Other research suggests that younger children make distinctions among different types of lies, and do not consider all lies to be morally objectionable. For example, children as young as 4 years old believe that white lies are sometimes appropriate and can help to protect the feelings of others (). By this age, children also judge white lies less negatively than antisocial lies (Bussey, 1999). With increased age, children will not only increasingly value white lies for politeness purposes (; ) but also use such valuation to guide their actual actions in politeness situation (Xu et al., 2010).

Of interest in the present research is the possibility that children might make distinctions among different kinds of white lies. We sought to examine whether children's judgments of white lies would vary as a function of the consequences that are expected. If so, it would suggest that children's reasoning about communicative acts is not merely determined by their concerns for honesty but also affected by the social contexts in which communication takes place.

We selected China as a starting point for addressing children's context sensitivity in reasoning about white lies because of the emphasis on social context in East Asian cultures. There is evidence that people in East Asian cultures tend to place a high value on adjusting one's behavior to the role requirements of a range of social situations (Gao, 1998; Heine, 2001; ). A number of situational influences on behavior and self-perceptions have been seen in East Asian cultures that are not seen in North American cultures (; ). For example, Kanagawa et al. (2001) found that Japanese adults wrote more modest self-descriptions in public than in private, but that American adults showed no such difference across the two contexts.

There is evidence that children who grow up in East Asian societies are also sensitive to whether communication takes place in a relatively private versus a public setting, at least in context where issues of modesty are involved. Yoshida, Kojo, and Kaku (1982) presented Japanese children ages 7 to 11 with a set of self-enhancement statements such as “I am good at drawing pictures,” and also a set of self-critical statements such as “I am not good at running.” When children were asked to select the statements that best described themselves, they chose more self-enhancing statements when their responses were made privately on a questionnaire as compared to verbally in the presence of ten classmates. These effects also extend to the evaluation of other people's behavior. Heyman, Itakura, and Lee (in press) found that Japanese children ages 7 to 11 judged the truthful acknowledgment of one's own good deed more negatively when it was made in front of an audience of classmates rather than in private due to their concerns for public display of immodesty. In contrast, there were no such effects of setting within a control group of children from the U.S. Other research suggests that Chinese children, like Japanese children, view immodest behavior as less acceptable in public than in private (Fu et al., 2010).

The present research examines whether Chinese children might show a similar kind of context sensitivity in politeness situations, by examining their evaluation of prosocial lies and blunt truths. In Study 1 we began by asking whether these statements are evaluated differently as a function of whether communication takes place in a relatively private one-on-one setting versus a more public setting. We predicted that children would evaluate white lies told in a public setting more favorably. This prediction is based on evidence that by age 5, children already have some understanding of “face” and its implications for self-presentation (; ). For example, Fu and Lee (2007) found that 5 and 6 year old Chinese children give higher ratings to drawings when the adult illustrator of the drawing was present rather than absent. Because blunt truths told in public have higher risk to cause the recipient to lose “face” (Bond, 1986) than blunt truths told in private, the former may be viewed more negatively than the latter. By the same token, prosocial lies told in public are likely to have a greater potential to be face-saving for the recipient than are prosocial lies told in private, those told in public may be viewed more favorably.

In Study 2 we examined children's evaluation of prosocial lies and blunt truths with reference to two situations. In one situation, white lies actually have a high risk of causing the recipient to lose face in the long run. In contrast, in the other situation, no such positive consequences could reasonably be expected and thus white lies are less likely to cause the recipient to lose face in the future. With these two situations, we examined whether participants would consider telling a blunt truth to be more acceptable if it helped the recipient to identify weaknesses that if corrected could improve future performance and produce a favorable reception from future audiences. We predicted this pattern of response in light of evidence that Chinese children place a high value on helping others to improve their performance (; ).

We examined these issues with children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years of age. This age range was selected because by age 7 children think about white lies primarily in terms of how they might impact others (Broomfield et al., 2002; ). Additionally, it is clear that children in this age range have the basic capacity to take the social context of communication into account when making judgments about the types of communication that are appropriate, and that this capacity undergoes substantial development across this time period (Aloise-Young, 1993; Banerjee, 2002; ; ; ). Finally, the types of measures included in the present study have been validated for children of this age (; ; Xu et al., 2010). Given evidence that children younger than 7 show some sensitivity to context when reasoning about communication that has evaluative implications (Banerjee, 2002; ; Fu and Lee, 2007), one might expect to see an effect of context even in the youngest age groups. However, it would also be reasonable to predict that no such effects would emerge until around age 11, when children develop nuanced views of the role of interpersonal process goals in communication (). There is also evidence suggesting that in East Asia children develop increased sensitivity to the public/private distinction at about early adolescence (; Fu et al., 2010).

Study 1

The objective of Study 1 was to examine the way 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds make moral evaluations of children's truth telling and lie telling in a politeness context. Of interest was whether children make distinctions between statements made in public versus a private one-on-one context.

Study 2

Study 1 was designed to examine the way 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds make moral evaluations of truth telling and lie telling in public politeness contexts, where the blunt truth is likely to have higher negative consequences for recipients than it has in private. The objective of Study 2 was to examine whether moral judgments are influenced by the potential of the blunt truth to have positive consequences, and that of a white lie to have a negative consequence, for the recipient in a long run. We compared children's reasoning about a situation in which accurate feedback could be expected to make a positive contribution to the future performance of the recipient and in which white lies may have a high risk for the recipient to lose face in the future (a high recipient consequence situation) to a situation in which there would be no such expectations (a low recipient consequence situation).

General Discussion

This research examined children's moral evaluations of lying and truth telling in situations in which telling the truth or a lie is likely to have short- or long-term consequence for the recipient. Of interest was whether children's judgments would be consistent with a utilitarian philosophical perspective, in which the moral implications of lying are highly context dependent (e.g., Mill, 1869). Chinese children were asked to make moral judgments about lying and truth telling in situations that varied in the expected social consequences for recipients. We examined this issue in China because there is a strong emphasis on the social context in which communication takes place (Gao, 1998; Bond, 1986). In Study 1 we examined whether children's moral evaluations of truth telling and lie telling would vary based on whether telling the truth could be expected to cause recipients to lose face. In Study 2 we examined whether children's evaluations would vary based on whether telling a blunt truth could be expected to help the recipient to succeed in the future.

The older children in each study showed the predicted sensitivity to social context. In Study 1, older children, particularly 11-year-olds, considered telling the blunt truth to be more acceptable in private than in public, and telling a white lie telling as more acceptable in public than in private. These findings suggest that in making their judgments, older children took into account the potential for recipients to lose face. In Study 2, 11-year-olds viewed telling a blunt truth more favorably and telling a white lie less favorably if offering accurate feedback could help the recipient to achieve future success and avoid losing face in the long run, which suggests their reasoning extends beyond the immediate situation. The expected consequences included helping the recipient to save face in front of future audiences, or helping the recipient to make better decisions about trying harder and adopting new strategies.

It should be noted that although the younger children's evaluation did not vary depending on the contexts in which the truth or a lie was uttered, they clearly differentiated lies and truths in politeness situations and those in which lies were told to conceal a transgression and truths were told to confess about it. This is evidenced by the fact that they rated lies in the experimental stories less negatively than the control harmful lies and truths in the experimental stories less positively than helpful truths. This is consistent with the existing findings about children's moral evaluations of blunt truths and white lies (Broomfield et al., 2002; Bussey, 1999; Xu et al., 2009; Xu et al, 2010).

The present results, taken together with the existing findings, suggest that children may begin to show differentiation in their moral evaluations regarding large situational differences such as politeness and non-politeness related lie- and truth-telling at preschool ages (e.g., Bussey, 1999). With increased age, they become increasing sensitive to more nuanced differences regarding the settings of lie- and truth-telling within the politeness situation. Our results show that by 11 years of age, children clearly show the understanding that telling white lies or the blunt truth may have differential consequences on the recipient and thus entail differential moral values. One possible explanation for the age difference is that the older Chinese children have had more experience being socialized to attend to contextual factors relating to how communication affects recipients. Alternatively, older children may be better able to notice or attend to contextual factors due to their relatively greater cognitive sophistication. Yet another possibility is that children of different ages may interpret the same contextual factors differently. For example, older children might consider the consequences of failing in a competition to be more severe than do younger children.

There may also be individual differences in how children of the same age interpreted the consequences of specific situations. For example, some participants may have expected recipients to respond to the blunt truth in the high consequence experimental situation of Study 2 by taking further action to insure success. In contrast, others may have expected recipients to respond to the blunt truth in such situations by deciding not to enter the competition because there was no meaningful chance to win. In future research, it will be important to assess these kinds of perceived consequences, and any association they may have with children' evaluative judgments (see ).

Because the present study only included Chinese children, further research will be needed to determine how the results will extend to other populations, including Western children. Previous research suggests that when evaluating truth telling and lie telling, Western children may be less sensitive to certain aspects of the social context than are children in East Asia (Wang, 2006). For example, Western children do not always make public/private distinctions in contexts in which East Asian children do (Heyman et al., in press). However, it is also the case that Western children sometimes show sensitivity to this distinction when the public and private distinctions are made highly salient () and there are cases in which Western adults communicate differently in public versus private settings (e.g., ; ).

Previous research suggests that the same evaluative feedback can have different implications within different cultures (Heyman et al., 2008). Consequently, it is not clear whether what we defined as a high recipient consequence story in Study 2 would be viewed by children in the West as has having similar consequences for recipients. It is possible that the benefits of telling the blunt truth in high consequence situations rests on a cultural belief that negative value-laden feedback often serves to motivate recipients to undertake new strategies or increased effort. The evidence to date suggests that this cultural belief is substantially stronger in China than in the U.S. (Heyman et al., 2008; Heyman, Fu et al., 2009).

It is possible that people in the West are also highly sensitive to social context, but in different ways. For example, one important distinction concerning lying and truth telling in the West involves the closeness of the relationship between communication partners (). It may also be that people in the West have a greater tendency to focus on individual personality. For example, the blunt truth may be seen as less acceptable when the recipient is thought to be highly sensitive.

The present paper focuses on how children's moral evaluations are influenced by the consequences for recipients. However, it is important to note that truth telling and lie telling also carry potential consequences for other individuals, including the speaker. Consequently, it will be important to examine how children learn to assess and weigh the consequences for different individuals in such situations. Additionally, although prior research suggests that reasoning in lying and truth telling situations is predictive of children's real world behavior (Xu et al., 2010), the extent to which this is true in politeness situations in particular will be an important topic for future research.

Appendix

Footnotes

Contributor Information

Fengling Ma, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University.

Fen Xu, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University.

Gail D. Heyman, University of California, San Diego.

Kang Lee, University of Toronto.

References