The Influence Of Awards On Children's Honesty And Lying

As a development of the market economy, some scholars are starting to explain vast phenomena of spiritual culture from the aspect of economics. And moral behaviors of human beings are drawing more attention in the field of economics. This research explored the moral behaviors of children on the view of economics.A "toy-guessing" task in "temptation resistence" paradigm for investigating children's lying was used. 810 valid participants at the average age of 6.47 were included in this research. The aim was to explore how and why the number of children who were honest or dishonest varied under different conditions of awards, and most importantly, the mechanism of psychological processing underlying the moral behaviors of children. Three experiments in total were conducted: Experiment 1 mainly discussed the pattern of variations in children's honesty and lying under two different categories of awards, (material awards or spiritual awards), and also children's attribution of honesty. Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of monetary awards for being honest with amounts of 2 RMB being awarded for successfully guessing. It also examined the number of children being honest or dishonest when facing different monetary lures. Experiment 3 examined whether children weighed the gain from being honest against successfully guessing with a certain rule of psychological arithmetic, and then chose their moral behaviors. This further revealed the psychological mechanism underlying the variations of children's honesty and lying on the view of economics.The results of the experiments were as follows:(1) Lured by awards for successfully guessing, most of the children peeped at the toy.(2) Spiritual awards had a significant influence on children's choice of being honest or dishonest. The influence of spiritual awards was significantly stronger than material awards.(3) Children's attribution of honesty differed with various conditions of awards. When the profit from successfully guessing was larger than that from being honest, most of the children who admitted peeping attributed their behavior to "honesty rules", which meant being honest for the sake of honesty. When the profit from being honest was larger, most of children acclaimed that they were honest for the sake of the awards. However, there were always some honest children who attributed their confession to "honesty rules". (4) Monetary awards significantly influenced the variations in children's honesty and lying. As the monetary awards gradually increased, the number of honest children was observed to increase curvedly and continuously, This phenomenon described as "a tendency of non-uniform curvedly increasing" manifested itself as follows: when the awards for successfully guessing were increased from no award to 1RMB, and then to 2 RMB(awards for honesty equaled that for successfully guessing), the number of honest children gradually increased. However, even when the two awards were equal, only 33.3 percent were being honest. From the condition of 2 RMB awards to 3 RMB awards for honesty (awards for honesty were higher than that for successfully guessing), the proportion of honest children increased the fastest. After that, the tendency slowed down but never stopped, as the amount of awards for honesty continued to increase. The relationship between monetary awards and children's honesty closely fitted a logarithmic equation.(5) The variations of children's honesty essentially depended on the relative difference between the amount of awards for successfully guessing and for being honest, which was decided by rules of ratio. However, children's choosing of moral behaviors proved not be affected by their abilities at arithmetic.The twist of the research: the regular pattern of how children choose moral behaviors when facing lures of different benefit was empirically investigated from the view of economics. Children have the ability to make decisions according to their loss or gain of economic benefit, which means they behave as a result of internal psychological mechanism, but not impulse at a time. The results supported, to some extend, the "Economic man" and the "Utility theory". Under different experimental conditions, children might unconsciously perform mental arithmetic with rules of ratio to decide whether to be honest or not. This implicit "abilities of economic arithmetic" was surprisingly not affected by children's abilities at actual arithmetic. According to the results, we then infer that children may have an inborn, naive instinct for economy, which could perhaps be the origin of adults' decision-making with regards to economy. The research also provided a potential economic explanation for the occurrence of and decision-making in moral behaviors.