Does helping now excuse cheating later? Kids don't seem to think so

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-07-14 09:01

Australia; QLD

Young kids don’t use their past good behaviour to justify being bad, according to Aussie researchers who tested this concept of ‘moral balancing’ in four and five-year-olds. As adults, we’re well-practiced at moral balancing, but researchers wanted to find out if kids do the same. So they recruited 96 kids to engage in activities where they had a chance to help (or not help) a puppet, then played a game where they were given the chance to cheat. They found no differences between kids who helped or didn’t help the puppet and cheating behaviour. This suggests kids don’t develop these ‘moral balancing’ behaviours until they’re older, the researchers say, or at least the tests they performed didn’t produce the effect.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Does helping now excuse cheating later? An investigation into moral balancing in children
Royal Society Open Science

The moral balancing effect, often observed in adults, describes how moral behaviour is often followed by immoral behaviour, and vice versa. We investigated whether children also show this effect. Four-to-five year old children were prompted to either help or not help a puppet, and then played a game during which they had a chance to cheat. We found no differences between the children who helped and did not help in terms of cheating behaviour, suggesting that children do not display this behaviour until they are older, or that the tasks we used were not able to produce the effect.

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Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Queensland

Funder: No outside funding was used for this project.

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