The Emergence of Lying for Reputational Concerns in 5-Year-Olds

Research suggests that even young children engage in strategic behaviors to manipulate the impressions others form of them and that they manage their reputation in order to cooperate with others. The current study investigated whether young children also lie in order to manage their, or their group’s, reputation in front of ingroup and outgroup members. Five-year old children (n=55) were randomly assigned to an individual reputation condition or a group reputation condition. Then, they played a mini dictator game in which they could share privately any number of their or their group’s stickers with an anonymous child. Participants then met ingroup and outgroup members, established through a minimal group design, via a pre-recorded, staged Skype call. Group members asked the participant how many stickers she, or her group, had donated. Results revealed that children stated to peers to have donated more than their actual donation, with no differences between conditions and no difference toward ingroup and outgroup members. Findings suggest that by 5years of age, children use lying as a strategy to manage their reputation.

Delay of Gratification as Reputation Management

Although delay-of-gratification tasks have long been used as measures of self-control, recent evidence suggests that performance on these tasks is also driven by rational decision processes. The present research examined whether the effects of rational decision processes extend beyond costs and benefits embedded in the task itself to include anticipated consequences for the child’s reputation. Across two studies, 3- and 4-year-olds from China ( N = 273) were assigned to a standard delay-of-gratification condition or to a reputation condition in which they were told that their teacher or a peer would find out how long they had waited. Children waited longer in the reputation conditions and longer in the teacher condition than in the peer condition. This is the first evidence that children’s performance on a delay-of-gratification task is sensitive to reputational concerns and to the identity of potential evaluators of their behavior.

Children are sensitive to reputation when giving to both ingroup and outgroup members

Previous studies establish that reputation concerns play an important role in outgroup giving. However, it is unclear whether the same is true for ingroup giving, which by some accounts tends to be motivated by empathic concerns. To explore this question, we tested the extent to which 5 to 9-year-old children (Study 1: N=164) and adults (Study 2: N=80) shared resources with ingroup and outgroup members, either when being watched by an observer (where we expected reputation concerns to be salient) or in private (where we expected no effect of reputation concerns). We also assessed whether children and adults differ in their beliefs about which form of sharing (ingroup or outgroup giving) is nicer. Although we found that both children and adults exhibited an ingroup bias when sharing, there was no evidence in either group that reputation concerns were greater for outgroup members than for ingroup members. We also found that, in contrast to adults, children shared more resources when observed than in private. Additionally, children evaluated ingroup giving as nicer across different sharing scenarios, whereas adults identified outgroup giving as nicer when the two forms of giving were contrasted. These results are the first to suggest that reputational concerns influence children’s sharing both with ingroup and outgroup members, and that children differ from adults in their reasoning about which form of group sharing is nicer.

(Not) alone in the world: Cheating in the presence of a virtual observer

We conducted an experiment in a high-immersive virtual reality environment to study the effect of the presence of a virtual observer on cheating behavior. Participants were placed in a virtual room and played 30 rounds of a cheating game without a chance of their cheating being detected. We varied whether or not a virtual observer (an avatar) was present in the room, and, if so, whether the avatar was actively staring at the decision maker or passively seated in a corner watching his smartphone. Results display significantly less cheating with an active than with a passive avatar, but not less cheating than in a control condition without an avatar. This suggests that an active (virtual) observer can intensify reputational concerns, but that the presence of someone passive and uninterested may actually alleviate such concerns.

Most People Keep Their Word Rather Than Their Money

Promises are crucial for human cooperation because they allow people to enter into voluntary commitments about future behavior. Here we present a novel, fully incentivized paradigm to measure voluntary and costly promise-keeping in the absence of external sanctions. We found across three studies ( N = 4,453) that the majority of participants (61%–98%) kept their promises to pay back a specified amount of a monetary endowment, and most justified their decisions by referring to obligations and norms. Varying promise elicitation methods (Study 1a) and manipulating stake sizes (Study 2a) had negligible effects. Simultaneously, when others estimated promise-keeping rates (using two different estimation methods), they systematically underestimated promise-keeping by up to 40% (Studies 1b and 2b). Additional robustness checks to reduce potential reputational concerns and possible demand effects revealed that the majority of people still kept their word (Study 3). Promises have a strong normative power and binding effect on behavior. Nevertheless, people appear to pessimistically underestimate the power of others’ promises. This behavior–estimation gap may prevent efficient coordination and cooperation.