Young children's conception of lying: Lexical realism—Moral subjectivism

JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

37,

(1984)

I-30

Young Children’s Conception of Lying: Lexical RealismMoral Subjectivism HEINZ Max-Planck-Znstiture

for

Psychological

WIMMER

Research,

Munich,

and University

of S&burg

SILVIA GRUBER University

of Salzburg

AND JOSEF PERNER University

of Sussex

Four- to twelve-year-old children’s use of the verb “lying” and their moral judgment of true and false assertions was tested. Two types of stories were used in which a speaker was led to a false belief and therefore mistakenly produced either a false statement despite his truthful intentions or a true statement despite deceptive intentions. It was first tested whether children understood that the speaker held a false belief. As a test of moral judgment children were then asked to reward the speaker. Even 4-year-olds tended to reward according to the speaker’s intentions and showed little sign of “moral realism” by rewarding according to the truth value of the assertion. As a test of the lexical definition of lying, children were first tested as to whether they understood that the falsity of the assertion by the well-meaning speaker was unintentional. Then they were asked whether this speaker had told a lie or not. Of those children who had given correct answers to the control questions (i.e., who understood that the This work was supported by a research grant from the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk to Professor Erwin Roth, University of Salzburg. Parts of the manuscript were prepared while Heinz Wimmer was supported by a research scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The international cooperation of the authors was supported by the Academic Link Interchange Scheme of the British Council. We gratefully acknowledge the friendly cooperation of the “Amt fuer Kindergaerten und Horte der Salzburger Landesregierung (Frau Kirchdorfer),” the “Stadtjugendamt Salzburg (Herr Artner),” and staff and children in various kindergartens in Salzburg. Requests for reprints should be directed to either Heinz Wimmer, Institut fuer Psychologie der Universitaet Salzburg, A-5020 Salzburg, Akademiestrasse 22, Austria, or Josef Perner, Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BNl 9OG, England.

0022-0965/84

$3.00

Copyright 0 1984 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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speaker entertained a false belief and that the falsity of his assertion was therefore unintentional) most 4-year-olds, a fair proportion of 6-year-olds, but practically no 8-year-olds showed a realist concept of lying. They called the well-intended, mistakenly false statement a lie. This conceptual realism persisted even in children who just before had rewarded this speaker for his truthful intentions.

In the last few years substantial methodological objections have been raised against research on children’s moral judgment carried out in P&et’s (1932/1965) tradition (e.g., Grueneich, 1982a; Grueneich & Trabasso, 1980; Karniol, 1978; Keasey, 1978; Leon, 1980; Stein & Trabasso, 1982). These authors submit that young children’s peculiar moral judgments which have been collected within the Piagetian tradition (Lickona, 1976) may not be evidence for “moral realism” but a reflection of young children’s inability to identify subtle problems of intentionality or of a mere memory problem. This type of criticism has been raised only in connection with one of the areas of moral judgment studied by Piaget, namely the judgment of accidental damage. Investigations have been carried out into whether this criticism was justified (e.g., Feldman, Klosson, Parsons, Rholes, & Ruble, 1976; Grueneich, 1982b: Leon, 1982; Nelson, 1980; Surber, 1982; Wimmer, Wachter, & Perner, 1982). The present study investigated Piaget’s claim in the other area studied by Piaget, namely children’s judgment of lies. The question is whether moral realism can be found in young children’s judgment of informative speech acts as lies when all known methodological precautions are taken. Piaget’s (1932/1965) more specific claim was that children up to the age of about 9 years use a different criterion than older children and adults in their judgment of informative speech acts as lies. While older children and adults use as their main criterion the speaker’s intention to truthfully inform or to deceive (subjectivism), the younger children are claimed to judge whether a speaker has lied (concept of lie) and whether the speaker was naughty (moral judgment) only on the basis of whether the speaker’s message was true or false (realism). Piaget claimed to have detected this realism also in children’s judgment of accidental damage, where children judged by the amount of damage caused and not by the perpetrator’s intention. Young children’s orientation toward the truth or objective outcome is, according to Piaget, the expression of a special kind of moral thinking called moral realism or objective responsibility, which can also be found in the legal systems of earlier societies. To substantiate his claim about young children’s realism in their judgment of informative speech acts Piaget (19324965) reported two studies. In the first study he investigated children’s use of the label “lie.” He first asked children what a lie was. This rather blunt approach was not very informative since not only 6-year-olds but also much older children, who already had a clear idea about the role of intentions, answered that lying was saying something that was not true. In the rest of the interview,

LYING

3

therefore, either a story was told in which a speaker ignorant about some true state of affairs said something wrong, or subjects themselves were trapped into saying something wrong by being asked to estimate the experimenter’s age. Some 6 and 7-year-olds called these wrong statements lies, even though they were mere mistakes of ignorance without any deceptive intention. However, this demonstration of children’s realism was backed by only four protocols (Piaget, 1932/1965, pp. 143-144). The only other published evidence for an intention independent meaning of the word “lie” in young children are observations by Stern and Stern (1909/1931) of their children. For instance, at one occasion their 5-yearold son had told his aunt that he planned to become a surgeon and then accused himself seriously of having lied to her when he changed his mind about his future a few days later. Although of illustrative value Piaget and the Sterns’ anecdotal observations do not provide us with a firm empirical basis for the general claim that young children’s meaning of the word “lie” lacks all reference to the speaker’s intention to misinform. Piaget’s second study on “lying” was directly concerned with children’s moral judgment. Children were told moral-dilemma stories in which two characters were contrasted. One of them had no intention to misinform but produced a severe distortion of the truth because of, e.g., wishful thinking, whereas the other character wanted to deceive but deviated from the truth only to a minor degree. Children were asked which of the two characters was naughtier and 6- to 7-year-olds judged the one who deviated further from the truth,as naughtier, while at 10 years they judged the one with deceptive intentions as naughtier. With the exception of a study by Carlson (1973) on 6-year-old Lao children, a series of follow-up studies confirmed the developmental trend observed by Piaget (Boehm & Nass, 1962; Caruso, 1943; Lickona, 1971; Mahaney & Stephens, 1974; McKechnie, 1971; Nass, 1964; Weiner & Peter, 1973), but failed to improve on any of the methodological shortcomings that have been identified in the last years (e.g., Grueneich, 1982b). The central question of this paper is whether the “realism” in children’s meaning of the word “lie” and in their moral judgment is a genuine phenomenon, i.e., whether it can still be detected when appropriate controls for divergent interpretations of intentionality and for memory limitations are introduced. Besides the use of such systematic controls the stories used for the present series of experiments differed from P&et’s stories also in the way in which the unintended falsity of the critical message was created. In the Piagetian studies the falsity of the utterance was due to either wishful thinking, exaggeration out of fear, or ignorance about the true state of affairs. For the adult listener, these situations share the common feature that although the speaker did say something wrong one does not want to conclude that his intentions were bad. What

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the speaker’s actual intentions were is left in the open. The stories would be a much clearer test of realism if the speaker’s intention was clearly described as honest, which in certain circumstances could nevertheless lead to a false statement. This situation of a speaker being “wrong in good faith” occurs naturally when the speaker himself is misinformed (not just ignorant) about the true state of affairs. If the speaker has no reasons to doubt his own information then he will inevitably pass on false information to another person when he wants to honestly inform that person. In this situation the contrast between speaker’s intention and the truth of his message is maximized. The first four experiments investigate whether children do or fail to take into account speaker’s intention in their use of the verb “lying.” In the first two experiments the critical test case “wrong in good faith” is created in a situation in which the speaker has been intentionally misinformed by another person and the speaker passes his false information on to a third person. This chain of information is characterized by the fact that the first person actually intended to lie. In the third experiment this feature was abolished. Instead, the speaker was put into a false belief by an unexpected change in state of affairs which he did not witness. The fourth experiment contrasted these two methods of creating a false belief in the speaker. The results of these experiments confirmed Piaget’s claim that young children do not consider speaker intent in their use of the verb “lying.” The remaining two experiments were intended to show that the same failure to take speaker intention into account could also be observed in children’s moral evaluation of the speaker. In the fifth experiment 6year-old children were given all four combinations of truthful vs deceptive intentions and true vs false messages. Children’s moral evaluation of the speaker in each situation was, quite surprisingly, almost totally governed by speaker’s intention regardless of the truth of the message. The sixth experiment confirmed this result also for 4-year-olds and investigated the connection between moral judgment and the use of the verb “lying.” Although 4- and 6-year-olds based their moral judgment predominantly on speaker’s intention, this intention did not seem part of 4-year- and many 6-year-olds’ meaning of “lying.” EXPERIMENT

1

The aim of the first experiment was to provide a larger and more systematic data base for Piaget’s claim that 6- to IO-year-old children have a realist concept of lying. A situation in which the speaker was “wrong in good faith” provided the critical test case besides several control situations. All situations were created within a playful scenario involving an information chain of three characters: A, B, and C. Subjects were provided with sufficient information about the truth of each statement

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5

and each speaker’s beliefs. Subjects’ understanding of each step was tested. In the crucial condition, false information was passed from the first character A to the second character B in the chain, who then in good faith passed this information on to the third character C. Since the situation was to be playful the false statement is better referred to as a “fib” rather than a lie. (N.B.: All experiments were carried out in Austrian German. The critical word was “schwindeln” which we translated as “fibbing.” For children, particularly in a playful context, “schwindeln” is much more frequently used than “luegen” which is the standard adult equivalent of “lying.” It is important to note, that “schwindeln” still includes the same intentional component as “luegen,” i.e., the speaker wants to induce a wrong belief in the hearer.) Method

Subjects Thirty children from several kindergartens in Salzburg, Austria, participated in this study. There were 10 subjects in each of the following three age groups: 48 years (4-4 to 4-8; 7 girls, 3 boys); 54 years (5-4 to 5-7; 5 girls, 5 boys); and 64 years (6-4 to 6-8; 6 girls, 4 boys). Design and Procedure Five different belief patterns for the three characters A, B, and C were used in order to create appropriate controls for each step in the chain. The theoretically interesting pattern is one in which the first character in the chain knows “X” but conveys “Y” to the second character who then believes “Y” and passes “Y” on to C who then also believes “Y”. This pattern can in short be given as “XYY,” each letter symbolizing the respective character’s belief. The leftmost column in Table 1 shows all five possible belief patterns, where X denotes knowledge of the true state of affairs, and Y and Z false beliefs. The fifth pattern in the table has a special status because it results from an improbable coincidence of an intended fib and the truth. This pattern was included because it incorporates the theoretically interesting case of being accidentally right despite deceptive intentions. Because of its accidental nature, however, it can lead to potential confusions. In order to prevent such confusions from influencing the rest of the data, pattern (5) was presented only once at the end of a session. The first four patterns were presented twice to each subject, one in the context of “naming fibs” and once in the context of “factual fibs.” Five subjects in each age group were given tasks involving first naming fibs and then tasks involving factual fibs; for the other five the order was reversed. For both types, four tasks corresponding to the first four belief patterns in Table I were given in a randomized sequence. Different

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AND

PERNER

material was used for each task. The material was assigned to the belief pattern condition individually for each subject. In each task three dolls were used representing an older girl, a younger girl, and a young boy. The older girl was portrayed as possessing knowledge or information which she passed on to the young girl who later passes it to the young boy. In one type of task (factual Jibs) the old-girl doll was walking along a path perpendicular to a high garden wall. On her approach she saw an object or animal, e.g., a lion in front of the wall which was only partly visible to the young-girl doll in a garden behind the wall. As the old girl passed by the garden the young girl asked her, e.g., what this animal was whose tail she could see around the corner of the wall. Depending on the belief-pattern condition the older one told her the truth (e.g., “a lion”) or a fib (e.g., “a dog”). At this point in the story subjects were asked three probe questions: Ql: “Is it true what the big girl told the small girl?” Q2: “Did the big girl fib?” and Q3: “What does the small girl now think is behind the wall?” The story then continued. After the older girl had passed, the young-girl doll was joined by her small brother who also wanted to know what was behind the wall. According to belief-pattern condition he was either told “a lion,” “a dog,” or “a cat.” Subjects were then asked the critical question: Q4: “Did the small girl fib?” Ql, Q2, and Q3 are to be considered as comprehension control questions. In the other type of task (naming Jibs) the old girl was portrayed as being knowledgeable about the names of things, and thus was regularly consulted by the young girl who was looking through a picture book. For each picture the young girl passed on her newly acquired knowledge to her young brother. The truthfulness of transmission of knowledge was determined by the belief-pattern condition. Materials

Two sets of materials were used. For naming fibs there were five different pictures of objects and animals (together with their false names): Apple (pear, plum), fire engine (ambulance, police car), bus (locomotive, aeroplane), telephone (radio, turntable), and rabbit (deer, monkey). For factual fibs a platform with a 20-cm high wall to symbolize the garden wall was used. Subjects were seated next to the experimenter so that both could see both sides of the wall. Five different objects or animals were used (together with the false information): Smoke from a house (fire, locomotive), top of a ladder with no one on it (boy, girl on it), front of a car (aeroplane, bicycle), top of an apple tree (pear, plum tree), tail of a lion (dog, cat). Results Inspection of the data showed that the type of task (naming vs factual fibs) and the order of presentation had no discernible effect and data

7

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from the two tasks were collapsed for further analysis. Thus the number of correct answers to each probe question can be either 0, 1, or 2 for each child. Table 1 shows the mean percent correct answers to each probe question. (The percentages were computed as the number of correct responses over the total number of 20 responses, i.e., 2 responses by each of 10 children per age group.) The first three probe questions, Ql to Q3, were mere controls for children’s comprehension of the communication between first and second character. All of the older children answered these three questions correctly and hence their data on these questions were omitted from Table 1. The table does show the data on all questions for the 4-year-olds since they made some, although still relatively few, errors. On the whole almost all children understood for XX-belief patterns that the first character informed correctly and did not fib and for the XY-patterns that this character informed wrongly and did fib. Also, with the exception of some 4-year-olds, children correctly determined what the middle character was made to believe (i.e., Q3). Despite this good performance on control questions the critical fibbing question Q4 was answered wrongly with “yes” by a majority of children in the critical XYY-belief pattern: Combined over the three age groups 23 children responded two times with “yes,” 6 responded affirmatively once, and one child responded two times with “no.” The distribution of yes-no responses to the fibbing question Q4 in the XYY-belief pattern is not reliably different from the distribution of yes-no responses to Q4 in the XXY-belief pattern, x’(2) = .16, p > SO. This means that “wrong in good faith” (XYY) led to about the same responses to the fibbing question as “wrong by intention” (XXY). The high frequency of “yes” responses to the fibbing question in the belief patterns XXY, XYY, and XYZ cannot be explained as a simple response bias because nearly all

MEAN

PERCENTAGE

TABLE 1 OF CORRECTANSWERSTO PROBE QUESTIONS IN EXPERIMENT

1

Age and question

44 Belief patterns XXX XXY XYY XYZ XYX (coincidence)

54

Ql + 2

Q3

Q4

Q4

64 Q4

100 100 85 95 100

90 95 80 65 80

loo 100 15” loo 20”

loo 100 5 loo 0

95 95 20 loo 0

a The apparently better performance of the youngest subjects on these questions is probably due to guessing, since none of these children gave correct answers on both occasions.

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children responded two times with “no” in the XXX- and in the XYXbelief pattern. For the evaluation of answers to question Q4 in pattern XYY as indication of a realist conception, it is essential to establish that subjects appreciated the falsity of the middle character’s belief. If subjects wrongly attributed their own knowledge to the middle character then the character’s false statement should have been judged a lie even from an intentionbased conception. Table 2, therefore, shows the response to question 44 for the XYY-belief pattern of only those children who showed a good understanding of the young girl’s false belief by correctly answering questions Ql, Q2, and Q3 on both occasions (naming and factual fibs). At all ages most children answered Q4 incorrectly on both occasions (0 correct). They judged the middle character’s false assertion a lie even though they had confirmed an instant before that this character believed what she said. Contrasting those children who gave at least one correct answer with those who gave consistently wrong answers, no reliable improvement with age could be detected: x2(2) = 2.68, p > .10. The total distribution for all three age groups combined (Table 2) shows that a vast majority of children gave consistently wrong answers to Q4. This distribution differs significantly from the proportions one would expect had children been independently guessing on the two occasions: x’(2) = 17.6, p < ,001. A realist conception of lying seemed to be evident also in the XYXbelief pattern. Of the 28 children who answered questions Ql, Q2, and Q3 correctly, 26 responded negatively to Q4 “Did the young girl fib?” Some of the older children, however, made an interesting distinction between the speaker’s intention and its accomplishment, e.g., “No, she did not fib, but she wanted to.” These answers indicate that the verb “to lie” is understood as an “accomplishment verb” (Dowty, 1972, p. 62, e.g., “to kill”). Such verbs entail not only intentionality but also TABLE NUMBER

2

OF SUBJECTS GIVING CORRECT OF LYING (Q4)

JULXMENTS

^. _._~~~_~~ Number answers

- ~~~ correct to Q4

4s

N

2

1

0

4$ 54 6;

5 IO 10

0 0 1

0 1 2

5 9 7

Total

25

1

3

21

Note. control

Only subjects correct on the comprehension questions are included.

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successful accomplishment. Since in belief pattern XYX the middle character’s intention to lie was accidentally thwarted one could legitimately answer Q4: “No, she did not lie, because she did not succeed.” Children’s “realist” answers to this question might therefore not differ from adults. In summary, answers to Q4 in belief pattern XYY support Piaget’s (1932/1965) claim that young children’s definition of a lie is based on the factual falsity of statements. EXPERIMENT 2

The evidence for young children’s factual definition of lying in Experiment 1 depended crucially on subjects’ understanding of the middle character’s false belief. Although most 5$- and 6&year-old children made correct belief attributions to characters right after they were informed about what the particular person had been told, it could be that their representation of false beliefs was too volatile. By the time they came to judge whether this character was fibbing they may have already confounded beliefs with the truth. If such a confusion occurred then the incorrect judgment of the middle character (young girl) as liar in the critical belief-pattern condition XYY would not be a mistaken judgment but a mistake in belief attribution. Children’s mistakes in belief attribution may have two sources. Children may tend to make the tacit assumption that sooner or later a character gets to know the truth even if this was not mentioned in the cover story. The material used in Experiment 1 is open to such rationalization, e.g., the lion briefly peeked around the corner, or the young girl happened to remember the true name of the picture. The other source may be that children tend to confuse their owlt knowledge (they know the truth) with the character’s beliefs. In order to exclude these features of Experiment 1 which may have led to wrong belief attributions, the paradigm was slightly modified and a new condition was introduced. In this modified version the first character entered the scene with a box containing an unknown object. This character tells the second character what is in the box, but the true content is not shown to either the subject or the character. The second character then passes the information given by the first character on to a third character. Finally the content is revealed and the subject is asked the probe questions. In this manipulation the subject concretely experiences the fact that the middle character had no way of knowing the truth at the time of passing the information to the third character. In one experimental condition (“Other”) the middle link in the chain is a story character, in the other condition (“Self”) this role is taken by subjects themselves. This new condition minimizes role-taking difficulties since subjects have to judge their own behaviour in the role of the middle link.

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Method Subjects Children of three different ages participated in this experiment. There were 4 girls and 6 boys of age 44 (4-2 to 4-7); 7 girls and 3 boys of age 64 (6-3 to 6-8); 4 girls and 6 boys of age 8f (7-10 to 8-9); and 4 girls and 5 boys of age lOi (9-7 to 11-8). Design and Procedure Only two tasks, both with the XYY belief pattern, were used. In one task (Other condition) the same three story characters as in Experiment 1 were employed. In the other task (Self condition) the three characters consisted of the experimenter as A, the subject as B, and a small-boy doll as C. The order of task presentation was counterbalanced within each age group. The cover stories for the two tasks were with minor exceptions identical. In the Other condition involving three story characters the following scene was enacted: A big-girl doll has a box and the small-girl doll asks about the content of the box and is told that there is a piece of chocolate (or toy car) in the box. At this point subjects were asked the first probe question Ql : “What does the small girl now think is in the box?” Then the small-boy doll enters the scene and asks the small girl about the owner and content of the box. The small girl tells him that it belongs to the big girl and that there is a piece of chocolate (or toy car) in it. Then the true content is revealed, namely nothing, and another probe question was posed: Q2: “Did the small girl fib?” After reminding subjects of what the big girl had told the small girl the final probe question was given: Q3: “Had the big girl already been fibbing?” In the Self condition involving the subject him- or herself as a link in the chain, the experimenter presented a box and told the subject a fib about the content and the subject was then asked what he or she believed was in the box (Ql). Then a story character was produced who asked the subject about the content of the box. After the subject’s answer the true content was revealed and probe questions Q2 and Q3 were posed. Results Table 3 shows that questions Ql (belief of middle character) and Q3 (fibbing of first character) were answered with high accuracy at all ages. Answers to Q2 about the fibbing of the middle character remained consistently wrong even among the oldest age group. An apparent improvement over age in Table 3 did not reach statistical reliability, which was tested by contrasting children who gave one or two correct answers with those who gave two incorrect answers: x’(3) = 7.42, p < .lO. What is of particular interest is that, against expectations, subjects at all ages were

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LYING TABLE NUMBER

OF SUBJECTS GIVING

3

CORRECT ANSWERS TO PROBE QUESTIONS IN EXPERIMENT

What does B think? (correct in both conditions) Did B fib? (correct in both conditions) (correct in only one condition) (incorrect in both conditions) Did A fib? (correct in both conditions)

2

44

:

84

(N = 10)

(N “- 10)

(N = 10)

9

10

10

9

0 3 7

2 2 6

3 2 5

4 4

9

10

10

9

(N

104 = 9)

1

Note. B (second character): story character in Other condition, subjects in Self condition. A (first character): story character in Other condition, experimenter in Self condition.

equally bad in the Self condition (13 correct answers) as in the Other condition (16 correct answers). One would have expected that in the Self condition subjects would have objected to even the slightest insinuation that they were lying (fibbing) when they themselves were led to a wrong belief by the experimenter. Instead, most of them even showed embarrassment when they saw that they had said something wrong in good faith. EXPERIMENT 3

The surprising result of Experiment 2 was that even some S- and loyear-old children still judged a speaker who said what he believed as lying because his message was actually false. The fact that children ignored speaker’s intention at such an old age suggests that they may have been susceptible to the way in which the speaker’s false belief was created. In the critical belief pattern XYY the first character actually lied to the second character. Let us assume that the older children identified the first character’s statement correctly as a lie on the basis of its intentional falsity and not just because it was wrong. The middle character then repeated the message from the first character. At the beginning of the chain this message had already been identified by subjects as a lie because it was intended as such by the first character. Giving a correct answer to Q4 whether the middle character had told a lie required reinterpretation of the status of the message which had formerly been judged a lie. This reinterpretation was made necessary because the message was now passed on by an innocent believer whose intention was quite different from the first person’s deceptive intention. It may be possible, therefore, that children who answered Q4 incorrectly may have understood

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that the use of the word lie requires a deceptive intention but that they did not realize that their judgment had to be updated for each speaker who passed the message. If that assumption is correct then the difficulty should be alleviated in a situation where no prior identification of the speaker’s false message as a lie has been made. Experiments .3 and 4 test this assumption with an experimental paradigm in which the speaker’s false belief was not created by somebody else’s lie but by an unforeseen change in state of affairs. The paradigm used was taken from a study by Wimmer and Perner (1983) who investigated 4- to g-year-old children’s understanding of false beliefs. Subjects are told a story about a protagonist who is led to a false belief about the location of an object by the unexpected transfer of this object into a new location during the protagonist’s absence. For instance, the protagonist Maxi puts some chocolate into the blue cupboard in the kitchen. In his absence his mother transfers the chocolate to the green cupboard. Then, the subject, who knows the real location of the chocolate, has to indicate where Maxi will look for the chocolate upon his return to the kitchen (BELIEF-question). After this assessment of subjects’ understanding of Maxi’s wrong belief, the story continued in either a cooperative or competitive version. In the cooperative version Maxi was described as wanting to truly convey the chocolate’s location to a third person. In the competitive version Maxi wanted to “tell something wrong” to this other person. Subjects had to predict Maxi’s utterance to this person. Results showed that hardly any 3-year-olds, about half of the 4-yearolds, and nearly all 6-year-olds gave consistently correct answers to the question about where Maxi will look for the chocolate. Independently of age, 80% of those subjects who answered this question correctly were also able to predict Maxi’s truthful (cooperative version) and deceitful utterance (competitive version) correctly. Young children’s good performance showed that this paradigm is successful in making children understand how somebody can be put into a wrong belief by an unexpected change in the situation and how he will act on the basis of this belief (“Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?“). Even more important, the results from the cooperative version showed that children understood that a person (Maxi) with a stated truthful intention will produce a false assertion under the given circumstances. For the present study a slight modification of the cooperative story version was used. Instead of asking children to predict the protagonist’s assertion, an intentionally truthful but wrong assertion corresponding to the protagonist’s wrong belief was given and children were asked whether the protagonist had lied (LYING-question). Unlike Experiments 1 and 2, no message is being passed on which has been intended as a lie by a previous informant. Hence the LYING-question can be answered cor-

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rectly without having to reinterpret the message from being a lie when uttered by a first person, to not being a lie, when it is passed on by a second person. An alternative explanation for the wrong identification of speakers’ mistakenly false message as lies in Experiments 1 and 2 is possible. Children may have failed altogether to correctly infer the speaker’s truthful intention from the match between her belief and the content of her message, but it is difficult to imagine that 8- and lo-year-old children could have failed to make this obvious inference. In order to control for this possibility that children fail to correctly infer speaker’s intention, two relevant manipulations were carried out. One of them consisted of varying the explicitness of speaker’s cooperative motive. In the Motiveexplicit Version it was made clear that Maxi would have liked to let his sister know where the chocolate was, so that they could eat it together. In the Motive-implicit Version the explicit mention of Maxi’s goal was omitted. He simply conveyed to his sister what he himself believed. The other relevant variation consisted in the order of asking two test questions. The LYING-question was asked either before or after an INTENTION-question, in which subjects were asked whether Maxi had told something wrong intentionally or unintentionally. Should young children’s difficulty in answering the LYING-question be due to failure of having spontaneously inferred the speaker’s intention, then asking the INTENTION-question first should help them to make this inference before having to answer the LYING-question. Bearison and Isaacs (1975) and Brandt and Strattner-Gregory (1980) have already shown that asking first about an actor’s intention improves children’s subsequent moral judgment. Method

Subjects Forty-two 4&year-old kindergarteners (4-3 to 4-l l), twenty-six 6-yearold kindergarteners (5-7 to 6-6), and twenty-four &year-old (7-9 to 9-1) second graders from kindergartens and an elementary school in Salzburg participated in this study. None of these children had participated in any of the other experiments. Only subjects who gave correct responses to the BELIEF-question in both of the stories used were selected to complete the experiment. This selection was necessary because only when subjects can correctly ascribe a wrong belief to the protagonist does the story become an instance of the critical case that a false statement was produced in good faith. Testing continued until 24 subjects in each age group satisfied that criterion. Among these subjects there were 11 boys and 13 girls of 44 years, 10 boys and 14 girls of 6 years, and 11 boys and 13 girls of 84 years. A roughly equal proportion of boys and girls of each age group were tested in each of the two experimental conditions.

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AND

PERNER

Material A 25cm-wide and 15cm-high polyester wall was erected across a 45 cm long and 25 cm wide platform. One side of the wall represented a kitchen with a small model stove and a blue and green cupboard (two matchboxes glued to the wall). The other side represented a nursery playroom with a toy car and a red and yellow cupboard (matchboxes glued to the wall). An 8 cm tall boy doll and girl doll were used to represent the absence and presence of the story protagonist. Two stories were used, each in two different versions. Both versions of Story 1 are fully described in Table 4. Story 2 had essentially the same structure. It was set in a kindergarten where a little girl shelved her favorite book away. When all children were on a walk a caretaker reshelved the book. Upon returning from the walk the girl wanted to retrieve her book. “Where will she look for it?” However, before she could get it one of her friends expressed interest in the book and asked her where it was. In the explicit-motive version it was added that she would like to look at it together with him and that she wanted him to get it. Procedure and Design Each child was told the same version of both stories. Half the children in each age group were told the motive-explicit versions, the other half the motive-implicit versions. As a control for order effects the presentation sequence of the two stories was counter-balanced within groups. Also, the order of the two test questions was counterbalanced across the two stories for each subject, in order to test whether explicit questioning of subjects about the protagonist’s intentions prior to their judgment of lie helps them to take the protagonist’s intention into account in their judgment. The stories were tape-recorded and played to subjects while the experimenter carried out the stage instructions. The test questions were asked by the experimenter. Results

Only subjects who gave correct answers to the BELIEF-question in both stories completed the experiment. There were eighteen 4f-year-olds and two 6-year-olds who gave wrong responses to at least one BELIEFquestion. This proportion of children in each age group who gave wrong responses is comparable to the proportion found by Wimmer and Perner (1983). For the 24 subjects in each age group who showed perfect understanding of the protagonist’s wrong beliefs the answers to the other two test questions were analyzed in a 3 (age) x 2 (explicitness of motive) X 2 (stories) x 2 (questions: Intention vs Lying) analysis of variance. There were three significant effects. Performance improved with age: F(2, 66) = 19.45, p < .OOl. Answers to the intention-question were

15

LYING

IMPLICIT-MOTIVE

VERSION

OF STORY VERSION

TABLE 4 1 WITH ADDITIONAL PASSAGE AND STAGE INSTRUCTIONS

M)R EXPLICIT-MOTIVE

(Boy doll present; representing Maxi waiting for his mother.) Mother returns from her shopping trip. She bought chocolate for a cake. Maxi may help her put away the things. He asks her: “Where should I put the chocolate?” “In the blue cupboard”, says the mother. Maxi puts the chocolate into the blue cupboard. (A toy chocolate is put into the blue matchbox.) Maxi remembers exactly where he put the chocolate so that he could come back and get some later. He loves chocolate. Then he leaves for the playground. (The boy doll is removed.) Mother starts preparing the cake and takes the chocolate out of the blue cupboard. She grates a bit into the dough and then she does not put it back into the blue cupboard but into the green one. (Toy chocolate is thereby transferred from the blue to the green matchbox.) Maxi is not present. He doesn’t know that the chocolate is now in the green cupboard. After a while Maxi returns from the playground, hungry, and he wants to get some chocolate. (Boy doll reappears.) He still remembers where he had put the chocolate. BELIEF-question: “Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?” (Subject has to point to one of the 2 boxes.) However, before Maxi gets to look for the chocolate his sister comes into the kitchen. She says to Maxi: “I heard that mother has bought some chocolate. I would like to have some now; do you know where the chocolate is?” (Addition for Explicit Version: “Yes,” says Maxi, “I am glad to tell you. You can fetch the chocolate and we’ll eat it together. The chocolate is in the cupboard.” The sister asks: “In which one?“) Maxi answers: “The chocolate is in the blue cupboard.” TEST questions (order counterbalanced): LYING-question”: “Think hard! Did Maxi lie to his sister or did he not lie to her?” INTENTION-question? tentionally?”

“Did

Maxi

say something wrong intentionally

or unin-

(In case that children responded with an uninformative answer, e.g., “Maxi said something wrong”, the question was rephrased: “Did Maxi say something wrong intentionally or did he make a mistake?“) LI In the original version the German equivalent of “lying” (“luegen”) was used. This differs from Experiments 1 and 2 where the more playful “schwindeln”, i.e., “fibbing” was used. b The original German version of this question employed the expressions “absichtlich” and “nicht absichtlich” which are part of colloquial usage unlike their somewhat stilted English lexical equivalents “intentionally” and “unintentionally.” In common usage the German words might correspond to “on purpose,” and “not on purpose,” but which carry a slightly different lexical meaning.

better than to the lying-question: F(1, 66) = 38.72, p < .OOl. These two factors of age and question also interacted reliably (F(2, 66) = 7.76, p < .OOl); the younger children answered the Intention-question much better than the Lying-question whereas this difference was diminished by a ceiling effect for the older children. Table 5 shows these results in terms of the number of subjects who gave correct answers to these two

16

WIMMER,

GRUBER, TABLE

NUMBER OF

SUBJECTS TO THE

WHO GAVE CORRECT LYING-QUESTION IN

AND 5

RESPONSES BOTH,

PERNER

ONLY

TO THE

ONE,

Number correct answers to

Age Explicitness of Motive Total

AND

Level

2

1

0

Number correct answers to LYINGQuestion .~. ..2 1 0

44 6

84

15 18 24

5 3 0

4 3 0

5 10 23

1 1 0

18 13 1

Explicit Implicit

31 26

2 6

3 4

20 18

1 1

15 17

57

8

7

38

2 ~..-

32

INTENTION-

Experimental factor

INTENTION-QUESTION STORY

OR NEITHER

Question

questions in both, only one, or in neither of the two stories. The total frequencies for all three age groups in the last row of Table 5 show that most subjects answered the INTENTION-question correctly on both stories. A majority of correct responses were elicited immediately. For five 4f-year-olds and one 6-year-old the additional prompt (cf. Table 4: “Did Maxi say something wrong intentionally or did he make a mistake?“) was necessary to which two children responded: “A mistake” and four: “Maxi didn’t know that he said something wrong.” These responses were scored as correct for the subsequent analyses but the result of these analyses would not change in any substantial aspect had these responses been scored as wrong. The remarkable result of this analysis is that almost two-thirds of the 4f-year-olds and three-fourths of the 6-year-olds identified the unintended nature of the falsity of the protagonist’s assertion. This result contrasts sharply with the younger subjects’ identification of this unintentionally false statement as a lie. Three fourths of the 4$-year-olds and over half of the 6-year-olds did identify it consistently as a lie, while practically all &year-olds thought that it was not a lie. Table 6 shows the interrelation between the two test questions for all those subjects who consistently gave the same response pattern in both stories. The second response pattern column (+ -) shows that the majority of 4&year-olds and a substantial proportion of 6-year-olds acknowledged consistently that the falsity of the assertion was not intended (INTENTION-question +) but still called this assertion a lie (LYINGquestion -). Altogether, 19 subjects showed this response pattern while not a single subject showed the opposite response pattern. This is reliable evidence (McNemar’s test: p < .OOl) that wrong identification of unin-

17

LYING TABLE NUMBER

6

OF SUBJECTS WHO CONSISTENTLY IN BOTH STORIES SHOWED THE SAME PATTERN RESFQNSES TO THE INTENTIONAND LYING-QUESTION

Correctness of responses to INTENTIONLYING-Questions +-

++

-+

OF

and --

Age

n

4t 6 sg

19 20 24

5 9 23

10 8 1

0 0 0

4 3 0

Total

63

37

19

0

7

tentionally false assertions as lies persisted after the lack of intentionality had been correctly inferred. Since these 19 subjects also gave correct answers to the BELIEF-question in both stories the data provide strong evidence that a majority of 4$-year-olds and a substantial proportion of 6-year-olds followed a realist definition of lying. The data from those nine subjects who gave a different response pattern in the two stories point in the same direction. In 39% of cases they gave a correct response to the INTENTION-question and an incorrect response to the LYING-question while in only 6% of cases did they show the opposite pattern. The center part of Table 5 (rows 4 and 5) details the results according to the two story versions. Responses to both test questions tended to be better when the protagonist’s cooperative motive was spelled out explicitly. However, the motive-implicit version must already have been quite clear since explicitness of motive was not a reliable effect: F(1, 66) = 1.06, p > .30. The last row of Table 5 shows that only two subjects gave a different answer to the LYING-question in the two stories. Since the two stories differed as to the order of the two test questions there is not much evidence that this order inlluenced their responses very much. Furthermore, these two subjects who did give different responses correctly denied that the false assertion was a lie in that story where the LYING-question was asked first and identified it incorrectly as a lie right after they had answered that the incorrectness of the assertion was not intended. Thus, there is no evidence for what was expected on the basis of the studies by Bearison and Isaacs (1975) and Brandt and Strattner-Gregory (1980), namely that subjects would base their judgment of a lie on the speaker’s intention if their attention had been drawn to it. Discussion

The main result of Experiment old children identified mistakenly

3 was that a majority of 4- to 6-yearfalse statements as lies, as they did in

18

WIMMER,

GRUBER,

AND

PERNER

Experiments 1 and 2. This erroneous tendency persisted even when the speaker’s intention to truthfully inform was stated explicitly and when children’s attention was drawn to speaker’s intention by asking the INTENTION-question first. Furthermore, the mostly correct answers to the INTENTION-question show that children understood perfectly well that the falsity of the message was not intended. Therefore, the wrong identification of mistakenly false statements was not caused by a lack of understanding or failure to activate the knowledge of the speaker’s intention. The results of Experiment 3 differed from results of the previous experiment for 8-year-olds, who now responded almost perfectly to the LYING-question. As argued in the introduction to Experiment 3, this improvement may have been brought about by the way in which the speaker’s false belief was created. Unlike Experiments 1 and 2 the speaker did not pass on innocently a message which was intended as a lie by his informant. Hence subjects were saved the effort to reassess their evaluation of the message for the speaker. However, this was not the only difference between Experiments 2 and 3. The respective cover stories differed in several important ways. Thus, Experiment 4 was designed to allow manipulation of how the false belief is created within the same experimental paradigm. EXPERIMENT

4

In order to test whether the origin of the speaker’s false belief has an effect on children’s judgment, a modified version of the cover story in Experiment 3 was introduced. In the original story (Table 4) the origin was situational. The protagonist’s knowledge about the location of an object turned into a wrong belief because of an unexpected transfer of the critical object. The protagonist then passed his wrong belief on to another person. This type of story is now contrasted with a different type in which the origin of the speaker’s false belief is intentional. The protagonist’s brother knows the location of the critical object, but he wants to prevent the protagonist from finding the object and lies about its location. The protagonist passes this “lie” on to a third person, i.e., it is a case of “passing on a lie” just as in Experiments 1 and 2. As a check whether two different surface forms of the LYING-question might influence children’s answers, two different formulations are used. The one used in the last experiment, i.e., “Did Maxi lie?” asks about the speaker’s act. This speaker-related formulation is contrasted with a message-related “Was that a lie?” formulation: Method Subjects

Thirty-five g-year-old (6-10 to 8-9; mean age 7-l 1; 15 boys and 17 girls) and twenty-four la-year-old children (9-O to 12-9; mean = 10-7; 13 boys

19

LYING

and 11 girls) were recruited from different elementary and secondary schools in Salzburg. (Three 8-year-olds gave wrong answers to either the BELIEFor the INTENTION-question and were dropped from the study.) Material

and Procedure

The same two stories (cf. Table 4) as in Experiment 3 were used in their explicit-motive versions for the situational origin conditions. For the intentional origin conditions the first part of the stories was changed. For the example given in Table 4 this change reads as follows: (Boy doll present; representing Kurt waiting for his mother.) Mother returns from her shopping trip. She has bought some chocolate. Kurt may help her put away the things. He puts the chocolate into the blue cupboard (a toy chocolate is put into the blue matchbox) and leaves for the playground (boy doll is moved to playground and joins another doll representing his brother Maxi). There he meets his brother Maxi who asks Kurt: ‘Mother said she would buy some chocolate for us. Do you know where it is?’ Kurt answers Maxi: ‘The chocolate is in the green cupboard’, because he doesn’t want Maxi to find the chocolate. Maxi goes home to have some of the chocolate (Maxi doll moved to the kitchen). BELIEF-question: “Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?” (Rest as in original story.)

To enact the stories the same equipment was used as in Experiment 3. The meeting of the two boys was enacted on an imaginary playground beside the kitchen model.

Subjects’ analyzed by vs assertion origin: F(1, giving 2, 1,

Results number of correct responses to the LYING-question were a 2 (age) x 2 (origin) x 2 (kind of question: speaker related related) analysis of variance. The only reliable effect was 48) = 9.74, p < .Ol. Table 7 shows the number of subjects or no correct responses. The data of the 8-year-olds in the TABLE

NUMBER

7

OF SUBJECTS WHO GAVE CORRECT ANSWERS TO THE LYING-QUESTION ONLY ONE, OR NEITHER OF THE Two STORIES OF EXPERIMENT 4

IN BOTH,

Origin and number correct Situational

Intentional

Age

2

1

0

2

1

0

8 104

13 12

1 0

2 0

6 8

4 1

6 3

Total

25

1

2

14

5

9

20

WIMMER,

GRLJBER,

AND

PERNER

situational-origin condition replicated the results of the 8-year-olds in Experiment 3 who gave consistently correct answers. Half of the 8-year-olds in the intentional-origin condition, on the other hand, gave consistently wrong answers to the LYING-question. This tendency persisted among some of the IO-year-olds. Discussion

The remarkable outcome of Experiment 4 was that one and the same mistakenly false message was judged differently by some 8- and lo-yearold children depending on the origin of the speaker’s false belief. When the speaker had been intentionally led to a false belief by a lie of his informant, then the speaker’s innocent passing on of this “lie” was also judged an act of lying. On the other hand, when his false belief was the result of a change in situation which could not have been foreseen then almost all 8- and lo-year-olds were convinced that one cannot speak of lying. It is therefore clear that for this age group the use of the word “lie” or “lying” implies the speaker’s intention to misinform. However, the finding from the intentional-origin condition suggests that for some children at this age it does not matter that it was the intention of a previous speaker and not of the one whose statement is to be judged. It seems that for them a message which was intended as a lie stays a lie even when it is passed on by an innocent believer. Younger children, however, must have had more fundamental difficulties in integrating speaker’s intention into their meaning of “lie.” For, a good half of the 6- and most 4-year-olds judged a mistakenly false message a lie even when it was not a case of passing on someone else’s “lie.” In summary, the results of Experiments 1 to 4 substantiate Piaget’s (1932/1965) and Stern and Stern’s (1909/1931) observations that young children define “lie” as any false assertion. Piaget, however, not only made claims about children’s lexical definition of lying but he also claimed that their realist definition parallels their realism in moral evaluation of lying. The following two experiments will investigate this claim. EXPERIMENT

5

A study on moral realism vs subjectivism has to test whether children base their moral judgment on the subjective intentions behind an action or on the objective result of this action. To investigate this, most studies on moral realism followed Piaget’s (1932/1965) lead and tended to use moral dilemma stories in which a character with good intentions who produces great damage is contrasted with a character who has bad intentions but produces only minor damage. In the context of lying, the dilemma has to be between communicative intention and the truth of the resulting message. The clearest case of such a dilemma is a contrast between a speaker who intends to say the

LYING

21

truth but produces a false message and another speaker who intends to lie but produces a true message. Such a clear dilemma has never been used for the study of children’s moral evaluation of lies. Piaget and his followers (Boehm & Nass, 1962; Carlson, 1973; Caruso, 1943; Lickona, 1971; McKechnie, 1971; Nass, 1964; Weiner & Peter, 1973) used weaker dilemmas only. Usually an intentionally false statement which deviates from the truth to a minor extent was contrasted with another false statement which deviated from the truth substantially but for which there was not explicit intention to deceive (e.g., exaggeration resulting from fear or wishful thinking). Existing studies of moral realism in lying were modeled after Piaget’s original dilemma stories and did not incorporate the necessary methodological improvements. In order to investigate children’s moral judgment of speech acts in well-controlled situations, the stories of Experiment 3 were adopted. Children were told the four stories that result from combining truthful vs deceptive intentions with true vs false statements. For each story children were asked whether the speaker deserved a reward of 1, 2, or 3 stars or ought to be punished with 1, 2, or 3 black marks. If young children are moral realists then they should evaluate the speaker according to the truth of his statement, whereas otherwise they should evaluate the speaker by the truthfulness of his intention. In order to enhance the saliency or the truth of the speaker’s assertion it was linked in one condition to an important emotional consequence, e.g., the listener was either delighted about finding the chocolate or sad about not finding it. This manipulation can be expected to elicit a stronger moral realist orientation. In order to avoid the criticism that outcome and truth oriented responses could be the artifactual result of presenting this information last, intention information was repeated prior to asking the moral judgment question. Method

Subjects Eighteen 6-year-old children (5-10 to 6-5) attending kindergarten in Salzburg participated in this study. None had participated in any of the other studies. Two children were eliminated for giving wrong answers to the BELIEF-questions. There were three boys and one girl in each of the four experimental groups who completed the experiment. Material

and Procedure

The stage equipment and the two explicit-motive stories of Experiment 3 were used. In order to produce the four different story types by varying the speaker’s intentions and the truth of his assertion independently the original stories (e.g., Table 4) were modified in the following ways. The original stories depict the case in which a truthful intention leads to a

22

WIMMER,

GRUBER, AND PERNER

false assertion on the basis of a false belief (truthful-false story). By omitting the unexpected transfer of the chocolate Maxi always knows the true location of the chocolate and so his intention to tell the truth results in a true assertion (trurhful-true story). Maxi’s intention to deceive was realized by verbalizing Maxi’s thoughts about his sister’s request to tell her where the chocolate is: “Good grief,” thinks Maxi, “now my sister wants to eat all the chocolate. But I want to keep it all to myself. I must tell her something completely wrong so that she won’t find it.”

Depending on whether the transfer episode was included or not Maxi’s deceptive intentions led to a true assertion (deceptive-true story) or to a false assertion (deceptive-false story). In all four story types the test questions of the original story (Table 4) were replaced by a request to reward or punish the protagonist: MORAL-JUDGMENT question: “What would you give to Maxi, a golden star because he was nice to his sister or a black point because he was nasty to her?” After subject’s choice it was asked how many (1, 2, or 3) stars or points should be given to Maxi. These moral test questions were followed by two MEMORY-CONTROL questions: (1) “Maxi said the chocolate is in the blue (or green) cupboard. Is the chocolate in there?” (2) “Why did Maxi say that the chocolate is in the blue (or green) cupboard? Did he want his sister to find the chocolate or did he not want her to find it?” The BELIEF-question was asked as another test question at the same point in the story as indicated in Table 4. For that group of children for whom the consequences of Maxi’s statement were made explicit, one of the following two passages was inserted before the MORAL-JUDGMENT question. When Maxi’s statement was true children were told: “His sister looks into the green cupboard. She finds the chocolate and is very happy about it.” When the statement was false they were told: “She looks in the blue cupboard but there is no chocolate. She is sad because she doesn’t get to eat any chocolate.” For half the children in each condition Maxi’s intention was repeated by inserting the passage relating Maxi’s intentions prior to asking the MORAL-JUDGMENT question. Half the children in each experimental condition were told the chocolate story (Table 4) and the other half the picture book story (Experiment 3). Each child was told all four versions of the story in a random sequence. For each version a different set of names was used for the story characters. Before starting the experiment proper, subjects were familiarized with the symbols standing for reward (golden stars) and punishment (black marks).

23

LYING

Results All 16 children who completed the experiment gave correct answers to all the control questions. Their responses to the MORAL-JUDGMENT question were scored from 1 for an allocation of three black dots to 6 for three golden stars. These scores were subjected to an analysis of variance with 2 Between-Subjects Factors: 2 (Repetition of Motive Information) x 2 (Explicitness of Consequence), and 2 Within-Subjects Factors: 2 (Speaker’s Intention) x 2 (Truth of Statement). Speaker’s Intention was the only statistically reliable effect: F(1, 12) = 91.0, p < .OOl. The row totals in Table 8 show that children tended to reward truthful intentions on the average with about two golden stars (score of 5.28) and punish deceptive intentions with about two black points (score of 1.97). The column totals of Table 8 show that the actual truth of the assertion produced a remarkably small effect of a difference of only 0.25 scorepoint in the expected direction: F(1, 12) = 1.81, p > .20. Even more remarkable, the truth of the statement produced only a difference of 0.38 when the social consequences of the statement’s truth were strongly emphasized in the explicit-consequence condition. In summary, 6-year-old children’s moral evaluation of informative speech acts depended surprisingly little on the actual truth and consequences of the message but was mainly guided by the speaker’s intentions. EXPERIMENT

6

The almost total lack of moral realism in the group of 6-year-olds in Experiment 5 raises the question whether younger children are moral realists in their judgment of informative speech acts. To investigate this question the two crucial stories (truthful intention-false message vs deceptive intention-true message) which plot the truthfulness of intention against the truth of the message were used in this experiment. Furthermore, the lack of moral realism in 6-year-olds contrasts with the realism in the identification of lying shown by a fair proportion of TABLE MEAN

REWARD

8

ALLOCATION

IN RESPONSE

SCORES

TO MORAL-JUDGMENT-QUESTION EXPERIMENT 5

IN

Truth of statement Speaker’s Truthful Deceptive Total

intention

True

False

Total

5.50 2.00 3.75

5.06 1.94 3.50

5.28 1.97

24

WIMMER,

GRUBER,

AND

PERNER

6-year-olds in Experiments 1 to 3. The relationship between children’s moral judgment of informative speech acts and their identification of such speech acts as lies was explored further. In the “truthful intention-false message” story the MORAL-JUDGMENT question (Experiment 5) was followed by the LYING- and the INTENTION-questions as used in Experiment 3. In the “deceptive intention-true message” story the LYING-question cannot be sensibly posed. Since the deceptive effort is not successful, answers to the “Did Maxi lie?” question would be ambiguous (cf. discussion of responses to XYX belief pattern in Experiment 1). Method Subjects Twenty-eight 4&year-old (4-O to 4-7; 14 boys, 14 girls), twenty-one 5tyear-old (5-O to 5-7; 12 girls and 9 boys), and seventeen 6&year-old children (5-l 1 to 6-8; 10 boys and 7 girls) from kindergartens in Salzburg participated as subjects. None had participated in any of the other studies. Children who gave a wrong answer to the BELIEF-question in at least one of the two stories were eliminated. Sixteen subjects in each age group completed the experiment. Material

and Produce

The same material and stories as in Experiment 5 were used except that only two of the four story versions were used, i.e., the (truthful intention + false message) and the (deceptive intention + true message) stories. The control questions in all stories were slightly changed. In the “truthfulfalse” story the two control questions were replaced by the INTENTIONquestion followed by the LYING-question of Experiment 3. In the “deceptive-true” story the two control questions were omitted. Each child was told both story versions, one in form of the chocolate story, the other in form of the picture book story. The assignment of story to version was counterbalanced. There were four children in each age group in each of the four experimental conditions which were formed by the two factors: Explicitness of Consequence and Repetition of Motive Information. Results Moral Judgment Reward allocation responses were scored as in Experiment 5. The scores were subjected to an analysis of variance with 3 Between-Subjects factors: 3 (Age) x 2 (Motive Repetition) x 2 (Explicitness of Consequence), and 1 Within-Subjects factor: 2 (Story Version).

LYING

25

Only two effects were statistically reliable. One factor was story version: F(1, 36) = 19.59, p < .OOl. Children at all ages tended to reward according to intention. On the average they rewarded the speaker with truthful intention (4.65 score points, i.e., roughly l$ golden stars) and punished the speaker with deceptive intention (2.92 score points, i.e., roughly I black point). Story Version interacted significantly with Explicitness of Consequence: F(1, 36) = 4.33, p < .05. This interaction indicates that children’s tendency to reward according to intention was less pronounced (4.08 score points for truthful intention and 3.17 score pdnts for deceptive intention; t(48) = 2.33, p < .05) when the consequence of the truth or falsity of the message was emphasized than when it was kept implicit (5.21 vs 2.67 score points). It is worth noting that Motive Repetition did not have any significant effect either in this or in the previous experiment. This is surprising since several authors (Austin, Ruble, & Trabasso, 1977; Feldman et al., 1976; Nummedal & Bass, 1976; Parsons, Ruble, Klosson, Feldman, & Rholes, 1976) have found that children’s responses are governed by the information presented last. However, in the present experiments children gave subjectivist responses, i.e., motive oriented, regardless of where the motive information was presented. A plausible explanation for this finding is that the experimental stories were fully comprehended by the subjects. Under these conditions children have no difficulty remembering relevant information given at the beginning of the story. A more qualitative analysis of children’s reactions to the two speakers is also quite informative. Only seven children (two in the implicit, five in the explicit-consequence condition) gave exactly the same reward to both speakers. The remaining children rewarded differentially. Their responses can be subdivided as to whether they were more influenced by speaker’s intention or by the truth of the message (and its consequence). A dominant influence of speaker’s intention could manifest itself in two ways: (a) Truthful intention was rewarded (with 1, 2, or 3 stars) and deceptive intention was reprimanded (with 1, 2, or 3 black marks), or (b) Truthful intention was either more highly rewarded or less severely punished than deceptive intention. When responses were dominated by the truth of the message (and its consequence), two corresponding types of manifestation can be discerned: (c) True message rewarded, false message punished, or (d) true message rewarded more or punished less than false message. Of the 22 children who gave differential responses in the consequence-implicit condition 21 were dominated in their moral evaluation by speaker’s intention and only 1 by the truth of the message: x*(l) = 18.2, p < .OOl. Of the 19 differential responders in the consequenceexplicit condition, 12 were governed by speaker’s intention and 7 by the truth of the message. This difference was not statistically reliable: x*(l) = 1.32, p < .30.

26

WIMMER,

GRUBER,

AND

PERNER

If one categorizes children’s responses in Experiment 5 in a similar way then the following frequencies emerge for Experiments 5 and 6 combined: 48 children governed by intention, 8 no preference, and 8 governed by truth of message and its consequence. Hence, a large majority (75%) of 4- to 6-year-old children based their moral judgment on speaker’s intention and only a minority (13%) was governed by the truth of the message, i.e., showed signs of moral realism. Almost all of these cases were observed when the emotional consequences of the message were emphasized. When the emotional consequences were not stressed then practically no trace (only 1 of 32 children) of moral realism could be detected. Concept

of Lying

One 4-year-old and two 6-year-olds gave wrong answers to the INTENTION-question. They judged the falsity of the truthful speaker’s assertion as having been intended. These subjects were dropped from further analysis. The two experimental factors of Repetition of Motive and Explicitness of Consequence had no discernible effect on children’s identification of lying. There was a reliable improvement with age from 1 (of 15) to 7 (of 16) to 10 (of 14) correct at ages 4, 5, and 6 years, respectively: x*(2) = 12.8, p < .Ol. These data replicate the finding of Experiment 3 that children between the ages of 4 to 6 years define lying as any false assertion without taking the speaker’s intention into account. Table 9 shows the relationship between answers to the LYING-question and reward vs punishment decision in response to the MORAL-JUDGMENT question for the story version with the truthful speaker making a false statement. This direct comparison of moral and conceptual judgments confirms the findings across Experiments 3 vs 5 and 6. Four- to sixyear-old children show little moral realism but a strong lexical realism in their judgment of lying. Table 9 shows that 20 subjects called the truthful speaker’s false assertion a lie even though they had just given TABLE

9

MORAL JUDGMENT AND ANSWEIUTO LYING-QUESTION IN THE STORY VERSION WITH TRUTHFUL SPEAKER OF EXPERIMENT 6 CONTINGENCY

BETWEEN

Answer to LYINGQuestion Moral judgment Reward (stars) Punishment (black marks)

“Didn’t lie” (correct)

“Lied” (incorrect)

14

20

4

8

LYING

27

the speaker a reward for his truthful intentions. Only four subjects showed the opposite tendency: McNemar's test: i = 10.7, p < .01. Four of the children (two 4-year-olds, one 5-, and one 6-year-old) who first rewarded the speaker for his good intentions and then referred to his assertion as a lie spontaneously developed doubts about their reward and expressed the desire to add some black marks. GENERAL DISCUSSION

A major finding of the present study was the surprisingly small incidence of moral realism in children's judgment of informative speech acts. A few cases of realism were observed only when good or bad emotional consequences of the message were emphasized above and beyond its truth. This emphasis on the emotional consequence of the speech act for the listener was designed to increase the moral realist tendency and was a much stronger manipulation than Piaget (1932/1965) has thought necessary in most of his stories. It is therefore even more surprising that so little realism was detected in even this condition. The present experiment differed from Piagetian studies of lying in that comprehension and memory problems were controlled. This required elimination of those children who were not able to appreciate the falsity ofthe speaker's belief, because these children would not have understood that the mistakenly false message was not intended as false. Assuming that all the eliminated children had given realist responses then the present results become somewhat more comparable to previous studies, because almost half of the 4!-year-old and about one-fourth of the 5!-year-olds would have shown "moral realism." However, it must be emphasized that their responses could not have been interpreted as showing true moral realism because their mistake in belief attribution would have destroyed the intended paradigm opposing truth values with intentions. For instance, from these subjects' point of view the truthful-false story, i.e., "being wrong in good faith" (Story Version 1 of Experiment 6) would have turned into "being intentionally wrong" since the speaker's wrong belief would have been egocentrically replaced by the subject's knowledge of the truth. For such subjects the critical paradigms can simply not be realized and there is no point in assessing their moral judgments. Also one cannot argue that young children's intention oriented responses were caused by overemphasizing the speaker's intentions at the cost of the truth value of the assertion since children's lexical judgment of lying was dominated by the truth value up to the age of 6. The finding that with appropriate controls for memory and comprehension little sign of moral realism was detected supports the methodological criticism raised against traditional Piagetian investigations of moral judgment in children (e.g., Grueneich, 1982a; Feldman et aI., 1976; Karniol, 1978;

28

WIMMER,

GRUBER,

AND

PERNER

Keasey, 1978). However, one should not conclude from the present findings on children’s evaluation of informative speech acts that moral realism does not exist in other domains. Despite methodological precautions, more recent studies on the moral judgment of actions resulting in bodily harm (Rybash, Roodin, & Hallion, 1979) or in damage (Surber, 1982) and on moral judgments of achievement (Wimmer et al., 1982) found a relatively strong outcome dominance in 4- to 6-year-old children. As an interesting speculation one could point out that the stories in these studies share a possibly important feature with the consequenceexplicit condition of Experiments 5 and 6. In all these stories outcomes were intrinsically good or bad: e.g., bodily harm (Rybash et al., 1979) is bad because it hurts, broken cups (Surber, 1982) are bad because one cannot use them any more, unfinished painting (Wimmer et al., 1982) is bad because it does not look good and someone will have to finish it, and a sad sister (consequence-explicit condition) is bad because nobody likes to be sad. In contrast to this list, a false message by itself (consequenceimplicit condition) does not seem particularly upsetting unless, of course, it leads to a negative consequence (e.g., the parents get upset and scold you for lying). The second major finding of the present study concerned young children’s meaning and use of the word “lying.” Although children were tested only if they understood what the speaker believed and although it was checked whether they also understood that he did not intend to say anything false they nevertheless called the speaker’s mistakenly false message a lie. This finding that children identify lies with false assertions supports not only Piaget’s (193211965) claim but also Stern and Stern’s (1909/1931) own observations and their interpretation of data from developmental diaries. Stern and Stern concluded that children of about 5 years develop almost into “fanatics of truth.” They attributed this development to insufficient parental explanations of what a lie is, which are usually given as simplified admonitions of the form: “You shouldn’t lie. You must always say things as they really are.” From such advice, the Sterns thought, children will generate the inverse inference that any assertion which does not represent things as they are must be a lie (Stern & Stern, 1909/1931, p. 241). Children’s realist orientation in their use of the communication verb “to lie” corresponds to a similar tendency in their use of various mental verbs (Johnson & Wellman, 1980; Miscione, Marvin, O’Brien, & Greenberg, 1978; Richards, 1982; Wellman, in press; Wellman & Johnson, 1979). For instance, adult’s distinction between “know” and “guess” is in certain situations based on the presence vs absence of prior information (Richards, 1982). Young children, however, impose a fact-oriented distinction (Miscione et al., 1978). For instance, they refer to the content of a guess that turns out to be correct as having been known. As in the

LYING

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the acquisition of the correct adult usage of mental case of “lying,” verbs falls somewhere between the ages of 4 and 7 years. This parallelity between the acquisition of the correct meaning of mental verbs and the communication verb “to lie” suggests a general developmental trend. Verb meaning is first based on objective facts and, progressively, mental states and intentions of the actor become integrated. In any case it cannot be argued that children’s neglect of the speaker’s intention in their use of “to lie” is indicative of moral realism. The same children (Experiment 6) who ignored in their use of “to lie” the speaker’s intention were dominated in their moral judgment just by the speaker’s intention. REFERENCES Austin, V. D., Ruble, D. N., & Trabasso, T. Recall and order effects as factors in children’s 1977, 48, 470-474. moral judgements. Child Development, Bearison, D. J., & Isaacs, L. Production deficiency in children’s moral judgements. Developmental

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Piaget, J. The moral judgemen? of zhe child. New York: Free Press, 1965. (Originally published, 1932.) Richards, M. M. Empiricism and learning to mean. In S. A. Kuczaj II (Ed.), Language development. Synrax and semantics. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1982. Vol. 1. Rybash, J. M., Roodin, P. A., & Hallion, K. The role of affect in children’s attribution of intentionality and dispensation of punishment. Child Development, 1979, 50, 12271230. Stein, N., & Trabasso, T. Children’s understanding of stories: A basis for moral judgment and dilemma resolution. In C. Brainerd & M. Pressley (Ed.), Verbal processes in children: Progress in cognitive development research. New York: Springer, 1982. Stem, C., & Stem, W. Monographien iiber die seelische Entwicklung des Kindes. 2. Band: Erinnerung. Aussage und Liige in der ersten Kindheit. Leipzig: Barth, 1931. (Originally published, 1909.) 4th ed. Surber, C. F. Separable effects of motives, consequences, and presentation order on children’s moral judgments. Developmental Psychology, 1982, 18, 257-266. Wellman, H. M. A child’s theory of mind: The development of conceptions of cognition. In S. R. Yussen (Ed.), The growth of rejection. New York: Academic Press, in press. Wellman, H. M.. & Johnson, C. N. Understanding of mental processes: A developmental study of “remember” and “forget.” Child Development, 1979, 50, 79-88. Weiner, B., & Peter, N. A cognitive-developmental analysis of achievement and moral judgments. Developmental Psychology, 1973, 9, 290-309. Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 1983, 13, 103-128. Wimmer, H., Wachter, J., & Pemer, J. Cognitive autonomy of the development of moral 1982, 53, 668-676. evaluation of achievement. Child Development, RECEIVED:

August 31, 1982;

REVISED:

January 24, 1983. March 17, 1983.