Mirror, mirror on the wall: Increasing young children's honesty through inducing self-awareness

Previous studies have shown that in older children, promising to tell the truth increases truth-telling rates; however, in preschool-aged children, this has not been found to be effective. The current study compared promising with a novel technique of increasing children's self-awareness (by asking children to look at themselves in a mirror). It was predicted that inducing self-awareness would encourage children's honesty given that self-awareness increases adherence to social and moral norms. Children aged 3 or 4 years (N = 135) completed a modified temptation resistance paradigm where they were asked to not peek at a toy in the absence of an experimenter. Next, children were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Self-Awareness, Promise, or Control. When questioned about whether they peeked at the toy, children in the Self-Awareness condition were significantly more likely to tell the truth about peeking compared with those in the Promise condition. There was no significant difference between the Promise and Control conditions.