Post No.: 0685
Furrywisepuppy says:
Even for adults, sharing doesn’t always come easily, even if a sense of fairness does. People can differ in what they consider as fair but everyone will have an opinion on what’s fair. However, whether with children or adults, a consistent pattern is that fairness depends highly on whom we’re with – sharing comes more easily amongst those who are like us or are in our ingroups (e.g. in nationality, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, age group, gender, or even according to randomly-assigned groupings) i.e. our intuitions regarding fairness and sharing are shaped by our own feelings of personal identity or which group(s) we feel we belong to (ingroup biases).
Most of us notice that 2 year-olds can be incredibly selfish and unashamed for it! It’s a common trait at this age thus parents shouldn’t feel that it’s a reflection of their parenting. But maybe adults aren’t much less selfish? It could be that things like biscuits or marbles have little value to adults compared to perhaps dividing one’s money up with a homeless person, or equally splitting one’s car with another person, ‘because it’s mine’(!) Like a young child giving just the tiniest crumb of a biscuit to someone else in a token act of sharing – adults often feel that they deserve enormous praise for sharing or giving anything away at all! Hence grownups need to put themselves in the shoes of kids, who see things like toys as being equivalent in value as adults regard their cars, before coming down too hard on them. (Maybe make it clear to them that there’ll always be more biscuits or that they’ll get their toys back?) Children not sharing may still not be right but it may also be not as different to how adults behave. Woof!
Everyone cares about their reputation though – sharing resources is done not only out of a concern for other people’s welfare but due to the concern of how we look in front of others. Both children and adults tend to be kinder the more people there are to witness an act of sharing or kindness compared to when given the chance to share anonymously. We want others to like us, as well as want others to reciprocate and share with us in the future.
Children care about their reputations too but what they think makes for a good reputation is different to what adults think. Adults understand that someone who’s kind despite seeking and receiving no public attention for their kind act is nicer than a person who’s only kind if they seek and receive public attention for it. Helping a person who needs help is nicer than just seeking to enhance one’s reputation – the thought does count. Meanwhile, children under ~9 are indifferent in this regard. Adults believe that it’s important that motives are clear and pure, and that actions done with ulterior motives (like seeking credit) aren’t as nice – but only after age ~9 do children start to distrust people who act with ulterior motives.
Children under ~9 also tend to be more explicit in expressing their honest reasons for sharing – whereas adults might try to hide their biased attitudes that members of their own ingroups are more likeable, trustworthy, etc. and that they’d more likely share with strangers associated with their ingroup than strangers associated with an outgroup. Children under ~9 won’t try to hide this ingroup bias.
It’s not because adults are generally more refined and less prejudiced than children – implicit attitude tests arguably reveal that adults do feel these ingroup biases too but try to suppress them in front of experimenters for the sake of protecting their own reputations. One interpretation is that everyone is essentially innately groupist (e.g. sexist, racist). Another interpretation is that children as young as 3 already learn about pernicious stereotypes from culture. Either way, these biases are inherent and/or get implanted from very young.
However, the way children can form group associations on their own (e.g. naturally grouping people with red shirts and their generalised traits together, and people with blue shirts and their generalised traits together i.e. something as arbitrary as shirt colour to an individual’s assumed stereotype) suggests that children will innately bin/assign people into groups; although the particular traits that become associated with particular groups could still be completely cultural and learnt (e.g. whatever traits become more associated with people who wear red compared to blue shirts).
Therefore parents may need to explicitly notice and broach the subject of stereotypes with their children, and the human tendency to create groups and discriminate even when these groups don’t really mean much in reality or are misleadingly oversimplified. It’s still uncertain whether implicit biases are inevitable and whether teaching children about their dangers can shield them from unintentionally unfair behaviours or treatments. For sure though, some adults are more prejudiced than others, and whether it’s because some people implicitly feel it less in the first place or are able to override their implicit biases better than others – we can create a more fair and just society. Being raised with more convivial exposures to diversity is certainly a factor.
In tests of ‘fairness versus familiarity’ – infants will tend to rather play with adults who are familiar but unfair (based on these infants witnessing these adults not sharing a set of balls for two people equally in an earlier task) rather than adults who are fair but unfamiliar (people who were clearly of a different ethnicity to whom the infants were accustomed to seeing). So, for an infant, a fear of the unfamiliar is more aversive than the unfairness of a person, although there’s typically a very close conflict i.e. most infants will toil at the decision before settling on their choice. Nonetheless, individuals can grow up to experience more diversity and therefore grow accustomed to people of different ethnicities.
This does though support the evidence that, in societies, ethnic minorities will overall face discrimination for appearing less familiar in the eyes of the majority in a particular country, hence will find it harder to secure jobs, do business, etc. than ethnic majority members, even if they may be the better candidates and are trustworthy. It highlights again that experiencing ample diversity (e.g. people with different skin colours, disabilities – both in real life and on screen) as young as possible is vital for the development of children.
Children exhibit some seeds of morality quite early, but they’re not fully adult-like in important ways until much later. Children tend to rely on rules and conventions to guide their judgements (e.g. what the school rules say) and only relatively late in life are able to reason about murky grey areas (e.g. breaking a small rule might result in the greater good).
Yet in other ways, kids may actually be more virtuous than grownups because kids are terrible at lying, which makes sense according to when they develop a theory of mind! (Before this develops, they’ll assume that what they know is what everyone should know, like what their favourite colour is.) Many won’t even attempt to lie early in life. And even when they start, they’re quite obvious. Young children struggle to inhibit their actions, and often do things they were directly told not to do, hence their strategy is to try to conceal their transgressions, which they don’t do very well yet.
Children start to tell lies from the age of ~2. They might blame things on others or lie about cheating – as most parents will figure out if they capture the evidence, or at least suspect if they don’t!
Having said that, parents are poor at detecting their own children’s lies – doing no better than detecting the lies of other people’s children (which is, on average, no better than flipping a coin).
Children can tell white lies to spare other’s feelings, but they seem to gradually learn this behaviour as they grow rather than it coming naturally. Some types of lies are cultural (e.g. modesty lies to conceal one’s accomplishments because one doesn’t want to appear too different from the other ingroup members, and blue lies to conceal the transgressions of one’s ingroup members to help one’s own ingroup). Children can sometimes lie on the instruction of others too. (There exist cases where innocent adults have been accused of crimes all because another adult told a child to lie.)
Socio-economic status, religion, nationality, temperament and parenting style do not predict how much someone will lie. One is equally likely to tell lies on average whether one is ‘working class’ or ‘upper class’, Christian or atheist, North American or African, boisterous or quiet, received strict or permissive parenting, etc..
What do predict lying are the development of a theory of mind (exploiting the ability to know that one could know something that someone else doesn’t know one knows is the basis that encourages lies to be attempted), which arguably begins development at ~2 years old; and executive functioning (relevant here, the ability to control one’s facial expressions, body language and speech so that one can tell a convincing lie). Read more about EF in Post No.: 0674. These two abilities are important for children to function well in society – yet the earlier they develop these abilities, the better liars they’ll possibly become!
So one shouldn’t be worried if one’s child lies abundantly because it’s not unusual. (The majority of kids lie after age 4, so if they don’t by then, this might even be a cause for alarm?)
Notwithstanding, parents should still promote honesty in children as young as possible because children who lie frequently (and poorly) tend to develop conduct problems including aggression and stealing, and other children typically don’t like hanging around with children who lie or cheat.
When it comes to children at least, we can encourage more honesty by accompanying it with a positive experience, whether they themselves receive a positive experience for being honest or witness others receive a positive experience for their honesty. We can, to a lesser extent, also discourage dishonesty by accompanying it with a negative experience, again whether they themselves receive a negative experience for being dishonest or witness others receive a negative experience for their dishonesty.
If the converse were true i.e. they receive or witness a positive experience after lying or receive or witness a negative experience after telling the truth – then this will encourage more dishonesty or discourage honesty. It all seems pretty logical – reward the behaviour you want to reinforce. It’s also rational – children will factor in the cost-to-benefit of telling the truth versus lying; although there are other motivations, and people aren’t always rational.
Yet too many parents punish confessions of wrongdoing. So if a child does come forward to confess a misdeed – praise them for that honesty rather than bark at or disparage them. They may still need to make amends for their misdeed but it shouldn’t be harsh.
There isn’t always a need to talk about the importance of honesty or the negative consequences of lying – model honesty in your own behaviours (e.g. confess to your own transgressions), don’t punish your child severely if you discover that your child has lied, and do ask them to promise you to tell the truth.
Use storybooks that illustrate the courage and positive consequences of honesty (e.g. George and the Cherry Tree – albeit this story is ironically a myth/lie if taken as something that George Washington actually did!) more than stories that convey the immediate or delayed negative consequences of lying (e.g. Pinocchio or The Boy Who Cried Wolf). Since we can learn vicariously or socially by observing others, children can learn about honesty via stories about furry honesty if parents spend a moment reflecting on these moral messages after reading these stories with them. Story times aren’t about just going through the motions of reading the words but reflecting on the messages contained in the stories.
Woof.
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