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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 18, 2025

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

Published on: April 6, 2018

Children can consider social relationships when evaluating liars.

Rodney Tompkins¹, Vanessa Chao², Zoe Liberman²

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

|June 23, 2025

Summary

Children and adults judge lies more harshly when told to friends in comparative contexts. Evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies consider social obligations, especially in close relationships.

Keywords:

Emotional harm Lying Moral judgment Social cognition Social relationships

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Developmental Psychology
Moral Psychology

Background:

Understanding the social and moral evaluation of deception is crucial in developmental psychology.
Previous research has explored children's and adults' judgments of lies, but less is known about the role of social relationships in evaluating "emotionally hurtful lies".

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether children and adults evaluate "emotionally hurtful lies" differently based on the relationship with the recipient (friend vs. distant social partner).
To examine if social relationship context influences judgments of lies in independent versus comparative evaluations.

Main Methods:

Two preregistered experiments involving 456 children (3-12 years) and 120 adults from the United States.
Study 1: Independent evaluation of a single "emotionally hurtful lie" told to a friend, classmate, or enemy.
Study 2: Comparative evaluation of the same "emotionally hurtful lie" told by two individuals to different social partners.

Main Results:

In independent evaluations (Study 1), "emotionally hurtful lies" were judged negatively regardless of the target's relationship.
In comparative evaluations (Study 2), a friend's "emotionally hurtful lie" was judged more negatively than a classmate's lie.
The impact of relationship on lie evaluation was comparable to that of "failures to help".

Conclusions:

Social relationships influence the evaluation of "emotionally hurtful lies" in comparative, but not independent, contexts.
Children and adults recognize that close relationships involve obligations, making breaches of these obligations more blameworthy.
Moral judgments of antisocial behavior are sensitive to the relational context.