We found that 5‐year‐olds, but not 3‐year‐olds, cheated significantly more often if they overheard the classmate praised for being smart

Young Children are More Likely to Cheat After Overhearing that a Classmate is Smart. Li Zhao  Lulu Chen  Wenjin Sun  Brian J. Compton  Kang Lee  Gail D. Heyman. Developmental Science, December 6 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12930

Abstract: Research on moral socialization has largely focused on the role of direct communication and has almost completely ignored a potentially rich source of social influence: evaluative comments that children overhear. We examined for the first time whether overheard comments can shape children's moral behavior. Three‐ and 5‐year‐old children (N = 200) participated in a guessing game in which they were instructed not to cheat by peeking. We randomly assigned children to a condition in which they overheard an experimenter tell another adult that a classmate who was no longer present is smart, or to a control condition in which the overheard conversation consisted of non‐social information. We found that 5‐year‐olds, but not 3‐year‐olds, cheated significantly more often if they overheard the classmate praised for being smart. These findings show that the effects of ability praise can spread far beyond the intended recipient to influence the behavior of children who are mere observers, and they suggest that overheard evaluative comments can be an important force in shaping moral development.

Discussion

We investigated the effects of overheard evaluative comments on young children’s moral behavior. After asking participants to promise not to cheat in a guessing game, we assessed the extent to which they would break this promise across two conditions: an overheard praise condition in which  children overheard that a classmate who was no longer present is smart, or a control condition in which they overheard comments that involved non-social information. We found that the effects of overhearing ability praise differed by age: 5-year-olds cheated significantly more frequently in response to overheard ability praise than to overheard non-social information, but the 3-year-olds’ cheating rate was not sensitive to this manipulation. These results extend prior findings (Zhao et al., 2017) by showing that, at least for 5-year-olds, ability praise can promote cheating without it being conveyed to children directly. It is noteworthy that Zhao et al. (2017) found direct ability praise promoted cheating even among 3-year-olds, with 62% of 3-year-olds and 58% of 5-year-olds engaging in cheating in response to direct ability praise, as compared to 40% and 68%, respectively, in the overheard praise condition of the present study.

Why might these contexts have a differential effect for 3-year-olds but not 5- year-olds? We believe this difference may be due to the information processing demands of overhearing a multi-party communication. In the present research, the overheard communication involved three other individuals (the two adults who were speaking, and the classmate who was being praised), as compared to one other individual (the experimenter) in the prior work on direct praise. One might expect this cognitive complexity to affect 5-year-olds as well, but this does not appear to be the case. This may be because by age 5, children have the cognitive capacity to be able to understand complex multi-party interactions, and because they have the relevant social experience to know that they can learn a great deal from overheard conversations about other people.

An alternative explanation is that 3-year-olds are only sensitive to information about their own abilities, and thus the developmental transition concerns gaining the ability to see the behavior of others as relevant to the self. This is plausible because the direct praise study differed from the overheard praise condition in the present study not only in the form the communication took (direct versus overheard), but also in the target of the praise (the participant versus another child). However, the preliminary results of an ongoing study we are conducting suggest that this target effect cannot account for this difference: we are finding that after overhearing that they themselves are smart, 3- year-olds are cheating at a level that is close to the 40% rate that was seen in the present study.

However, this does not rule out the possibility that processing information about others is inherently more complex than processing information about the self, and that it may add to the complexity of processing overheard information in third-party contexts. This possibility would be generally consistent with theories suggesting that children use the self as a starting point for social cognition (Meltzoff, 2007). Consequently, future studies will be needed to disentangle the effects of the type of communication, versus the target of the evaluative comments. Further research will also be needed to more fully understand the effect of overheard ability praise that was observed among 5-year-olds in the present study. As noted previously, overheard ability praise may elicit concerns with social comparison. It may also lead to the inference that the experimenter places a high value on being smart, or that being smart is highly valued more generally.

These possibilities could be explored by examining whether there are similar effects on cheating when concerns with social comparison are elicited in other ways, or when the social value of being smart is communicated in other ways. An additional finding from the present study was that among 5-year-olds, boys cheated more than girls, which is consistent with gender differences in dishonesty among adults (e.g., Alm et al., 2009; Bucciol et al., 2013; Tibbetts, 1999). However, it is somewhat surprising that no gender by condition interaction was found within either age group, given the three-way interaction observed for participants overall. This might be due to the fact that our sample size for this age group was not large enough to reveal a significant two-way interaction.

This possibility is supported by a power analysis based on the results of our three-way interaction for participants overall, which revealed that a required sample size of 107 would be needed to detect a significant interaction, just 7 participants more than the current sample size of 100 (However, we made similar power analyses based on the results of the condition and gender effects for 5-year-olds. Both analyses yielded a required sample size of 220, which is more than twice the current sample size of 100). Given that our sample size was predetermined on the basis of existing findings of condition differences, future research with larger sample sizes will be needed to look more closely at this issue. The present research significantly extends previous work on the effects of overheard conversations.

This prior work has primarily focused on how overheard interactions might promote children’s learning about language, objects, and emotions (e.g., Akhtar et al., 2001; Akhtar, 2005; Floor & Akhtar, 2010; Phillips et al., 2012; Repacholi & Meltzoff, 2007). Our work shows that overheard conversations can have unintended consequences for children’s moral behavior. Our findings also extend previous work on gossip (e.g., Eder & Enke, 1991; Gottman & Mettetal, 1986; Hill, 2007; Ingram & Bering, 2010), given that overheard ability praise can be considered a form of gossip, which is commonly defined as “the sharing of evaluative information about an absent third party” (e.g., Dunbar, 1996; for a review, see Foster, 2004). Previous work has suggested that it is not until about 8 years of age that children begin to use gossip to help them navigate social situations such as inferring social norms (e.g., Aikins, 2015; see also, Hill, 2007). The current findings suggest that even 5-year-olds have some capacity to use gossip in a similar way, and it raises questions about other ways in which young children might use gossip to make sense of the social world.

Future research will be needed to examine the effects of overhearing other forms of praise, such as praise for being honest. Another important topic to address will be the effects of overheard criticism, although addressing this question raises challenging ethical issues. The results of this research will help us to better understand the effects of overheard evaluative comments on children’s moral socialization. Our findings have broad practical implications for parents, teachers, and other caregivers. Given that evaluative comments such as ability praise are often made in public contexts, more attention should be paid to minimize the potential negative effects on children who may be listening.

In summary, the present research is the first to demonstrate that children as young as age 5 are more likely to engage in cheating after overhearing praise of another child for being smart. Our findings suggest that the negative implications of ability praise can spread outward, beyond the intended recipient, to affect the behavior of children who are mere observers. More broadly, our findings identify overheard evaluative information, a ubiquitous aspect of children’s social environment, as an important force in shaping moral development.