Previous research on nudges conducted with adults suggests that the accessibility of behavioral options can influence people's decisions. The present study examined whether accessibility can be used to reduce academic cheating among young children. We gave children a challenging math test in the presence of an answer key they were instructed not…

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3- and…

It is well established that children lie in different social contexts for various purposes from the age of 2 years. Surprisingly, little is known about whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain, how self-benefiting lies emerge, and what cognitive factors affect the emergence of self-benefiting lies. To bridge this gap in…

Two studies with preschool-age children examined the effectiveness of perceptual individuation training at reducing racial bias (Study 1, N = 32; Study 2, N = 56). We found that training preschool-age children to individuate other-race faces resulted in a reduction in implicit racial bias while mere exposure to other-race faces produced no such…

Lying is a pervasive human behavior. Evidence to date suggests that from the age of 42 months onward, children become increasingly capable of telling lies in various social situations. However, there is limited experimental evidence regarding whether very young children will tell lies spontaneously. The present study investigated the emergence of…

The present study compared the lie-telling behavior of 3- and 4-year-old West African children (N = 84) from either a punitive or a nonpunitive school. Children were told not to peek at a toy when left alone in a room. Most children could not resist the temptation and peeked at the toy. When the experimenter asked them if they had peeked, the…

Prior research has documented that Japanese children's performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task can be influenced by their observation of another person completing the task, which is referred to as social transmission of disinhibition. The current study explored whether Canadian children would also show a social transmission…

This study examined adults' evaluations of likeability and attractiveness of children's faces from infancy to early childhood. We tested whether Lorenz's baby schema hypothesis ("Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie" (1943), Vol. 5, pp. 235-409) is applicable not only to infant faces but also to faces of children at older ages. Adult participants were…

Young children's ability to tell a strategic lie by making it consistent with the physical evidence of their transgression was investigated along with the sociocognitive correlates of such lie-telling behaviors. In Experiment 1, 247 Chinese children between 3 and 5 years of age (126 boys) were left alone in a room and asked not to lift a cup to…

The present study examined children's use of behavioural outcome information to make personality attributions in social and non-social contexts. One hundred and twenty-eight 3- to 6-year-olds were told about a story actor who engaged in primarily successful or primarily unsuccessful interactions with several different people (social context) or…

The present study examined the use of consensus information in early childhood. Ninety-six three- to six-year-olds watched a demonstration that depicted the positive or negative behavior of one or several actors toward a recipient (low vs. high consensus, respectively). Subsequently, participants made behavioral predictions and personality…

This study examined whether children recognize that when there is a discrepancy between what is expressed in public versus what is expressed in private, the private expression is more indicative of the true state of affairs. Participants (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) were shown a video in which a girl expressed that she liked the refreshments her…

The relation between children's lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children (3-8 years) were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children's subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their…

Grice ("Syntax and semantics: Speech acts", 1975, pp. 41-58, Vol. 3) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. Three types of maxims were explored in the current study: 1) Quality, to be truthful; 2) Relation, to say only what is relevant to a conversation; and 3)…

The present study examined whether young children's behaviors in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task can be influenced by their observation of another person performing the task. Experiment 1 showed that after children watched an adult sorting cards according to one rule, although the children were instructed to sort the cards according to a…