A study shows that children become more honest when told it's okay to deceive others.
Lying, deceiving, and hiding information are common occurrences in daily life, and even children may lie to deceive their parents or friends. However, an experiment conducted with children aged 3 to 7 revealed that when children were told that it was okay to deceive others in strategic games, they actually became more honest.
The Permission Paradox: Condoning Deception Can Promote Honesty in Young Children - Tan - 2026 - Developmental Science - Wiley Online Library
Children are less likely to use deception after being given permission to deceive, study finds
https://www.psypost.org/children-are-less-likely-to-use-deception-after-being-given-permission-to-deceive-study-finds/
People lie to avoid punishment, to gain an advantage over others, or sometimes to protect someone's feelings. In some situations, lying can facilitate communication and benefit both parties, but at other times, lying can lead to a loss of trust and the breakdown of relationships.
Lying or deceiving requires not only advanced cognitive abilities to deceive others, but also a moral awareness that understands the ethical implications of deception. Therefore, when studying someone who did not lie in a given situation, it is difficult to distinguish whether that person was concerned about ethical issues or lacked the cognitive abilities to deceive others.
In this study, a research team led by Ding Xiaopan, an associate professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore, experimented to see how children in Singapore, a country with strong norms that demand honesty, behave in a 'strategic game where lying is morally acceptable.'
Approximately 280 children aged 3 to 7 participated in the experiment, randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. The children played a strategic game against a single researcher, competing to collect stickers. The game proceeded as follows:
1. The child chooses 10 stickers featuring characters such as Pokémon, Transformers, and Sanrio characters.
2. While the researcher closes their eyes, the child hides a sticker under one of the two cups.
3. The researcher opens their eyes and asks the child, 'Which one is the sticker?'
4. The child points to one of the two cups.
5. The researcher always picks up the cup that the child points to.
6. If there is a sticker under the cup that the child lifts, the researcher will confiscate it. If there is no sticker under the cup, the child gets the sticker.
In the game, the researchers always picked up the cup that the child pointed to. This meant that if the children lied when the researchers asked them, 'Which one is the sticker?', they were guaranteed to get a sticker.
After several practice sessions to learn the rules of the game, the children moved on to the main game, which involved actually exchanging stickers. Before the main game began, the children in the experimental group were told, 'Normally, it's not good to say the wrong answer, but in this game, it's okay to say the right or wrong answer. You can say anything you want to win this game,' while the children in the control group were not given such instructions.
The experiment revealed that children in both groups lied and attempted to deceive the researchers with a probability of 60-80%. Furthermore, it was found that children in the experimental group who were explicitly instructed to lie were less likely to lie than children in the control group who were not given such instructions.
This contradicts the research team's hypothesis, which they had made before the experiment: 'If children are taught that it's okay to lie in the game, they will be more likely to lie and try to deceive the researchers.' It was also confirmed that children up to the age of three are not affected by prior instructions.
The research team has attempted to explain several reasons why allowing children to lie actually increased their honesty. The first is that telling them 'it's usually not good to give the wrong answer' during the instructions unintentionally increased their awareness that 'lying is bad.' The second is that children are good at seeing what adults want, so they realized that 'this game is testing my honesty' and behaved more honestly than usual.
The third possibility is that they deliberately acted honestly in order to win a strategic game. Because adults taught the children that it was okay to lie, the children may have thought, 'The other person will think I'm lying to get the sticker, so if I deliberately tell the truth, they'll get confused and make a mistake.'
The research team pointed out that a key challenge for future research is to verify whether these results persist across cultures. They suggested that in societies with increasingly strict norms, such as Singapore, children may try to suppress immoral choices. Further research will also explore how similar instructions function in contexts other than games, and how the content of the instructions affects the results.
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