Does Fostering Children's Empathy Increase Their Prosocial Lie-Telling Behaviors?

Starting from around 3 years of age, children tell prosocial lies for politeness purposes (Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007). To understand the motivation underlying this behavior, Warneken and Orlins (2015) assessed whether children would lie prosocially out of habitual politeness, or whether they would do so in order to improve the mood of their social partners. Children told prosocial lies selectively toward a sad, as compared to a neutral partner, with this effect being more pronounced with age. This finding has been interpreted such that children tell prosocial lies to make others feel better, with older children showing a stronger effect because of their greater sensitivity toward the artist’s emotional state (Warneken & Orlins, 2015; Ceci, Burd, & Helm, 2015).
To test the causal validity of this claim, the current study aims at investigating the potential role of empathy in actuating young children’s prosocial lie-telling. Empathy has long been discussed as a developmental driver of prosocial behavior more generally (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987), as it has been found to motivate individuals to help others in distress (McDonald & Messinger, 2011). While some empirical studies have linked children's empathy and their prosociality (i.e., Roberts & Strayer, 1996; Knafo, Zahn-Waxler, Van Hulle, Robinson, & Rhee, 2008), a causal link between both phenomena has to this date only been documented among adults (Xu, Chen, & Li 2019; Lupoli et al., 2017)
To do so, we aim to test whether fostering young children's empathy (i.e., by modelling it within a short-time intervention) affects children’s tendency to tell prosocial lies to third parties. Doing so, we introduce a novel interactive paradigm for assessing and inducing young children’s empathy and link children's performance to established proxies for children's prosocial lie-telling behaviors (Warneken & Orlins, 2015).

自约三岁起，儿童出于礼貌的目的开始讲述利他谎言（Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007）。为了理解这种行为的潜在动机，Warneken 和 Orlins（2015）评估了儿童是出于习惯性的礼貌而利他地撒谎，还是为了提升其社交伙伴的情绪而这样做。儿童在向悲伤的伙伴而非中性的伙伴讲述利他谎言时，这一效应随着年龄的增长而愈发显著。这一发现被解读为，儿童讲述利他谎言是为了使他人感到愉悦，而年龄较大的儿童由于对他人情绪状态的敏感性更强，因此表现出更强烈的效果（Warneken & Orlins, 2015；Ceci, Burd, & Helm, 2015）。

为了检验这一论断的因果有效性，本研究旨在探究同理心在激发幼儿利他谎言行为中的作用。同理心长期以来被视为促进利他行为的一般性发展驱动力（Eisenberg & Miller, 1987），因为它已被发现能激励个人在他人处于困境时提供帮助（McDonald & Messinger, 2011）。尽管一些实证研究将儿童的同理心与其利他性联系起来（例如，Roberts & Strayer, 1996；Knafo, Zahn-Waxler, Van Hulle, Robinson, & Rhee, 2008），但这两个现象之间的因果关系至今仅在成人中得到了记录（Xu, Chen, & Li 2019；Lupoli et al., 2017）。

为此，我们旨在检验培养幼儿的同理心（例如，通过在短期干预中建模）是否会影响儿童向第三方讲述利他谎言的倾向。为此，我们引入了一种新颖的互动范式来评估和诱导幼儿的同理心，并将儿童的表现与儿童利他谎言行为的既定指标相联系（Warneken & Orlins, 2015）。