Story Situations For Children To Understand The Impact Of White Lies

Being a special kind of lie, white lie is ubiquitous in routine life. It is often adopted to achieve social interaction goals and served to establish, maintain and promote interpersonal relations. White lie is both deceptive and altruistic. The seeming inconsistent qualities put people in a great quandary: Shall we choose justice or care? The answer of this question reflects our viewpoint of moral judgment.In this paper, we followed the concept suggested by Broomfield, K.A. et al., that is white lie refers to speaker's false statement against the fact in the interest of the listener when he is full understanding that truth telling would cause a negative emotion and false telling would cause a positive emotion for the listener.Through story-situational method, we examined the effects exerted by different story-situation on normal and mental retardation children by means of accomplishing "disappointing gift". These stories represent three factors: giver's age (adult/child), authority effect (parental authorities were present/absent) and friendship familiarity (best friend/non-friend). In addition to pre-experiment and repeated experiment, our research was mainly carried out by two experiment series, both including three sub-experiments: one for normal children of 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old and one for normal and mental retardation children of 9-year-old.The result indicates:(1) The repeated experiment shows a consistency between Chinese and English children in brief, except that Chinese children hold more multiform reasons in comparison with English children in explaining their behavior. (2) To normal children of 5-. 7-. And 9-year-old, false response increases along with the age. The factors of giver's age and friendship familiarity influence children's (especially the 9-year-old) response choices evidently. In other words, children suggested more false response for best friend of the same age than those who are adults or non-friends. Noremarkable authority effect was found in our research. (3) To 9-year-old children of different IQ, there is a distinctive difference between the normal and the mental retardation, that is, the normal suggested far more false response than the mental retardation in all situations. The factors of giver's age and friendship familiarity have conspicuous impact on the normal, while the mental retardation almost behave the same in all situations. We suggest that the IQ difference be the root of this consequence.