Adults deliver mixed messages to children about the acceptability of truth- and lie-telling across contexts. To probe this discrepancy, we investigated how adults evaluate children's truths and lies across various situations. Participants watched videos of children telling prosocial lies or hurtful truths that varied in their directness (blunt or…

Many social work decisions are the outcome of collaborative working with other professionals and organisations, although there is little study of these decision-making processes. In this qualitative study conducted in Poland, the frame of reference was social work practice experience rather than a theoretical model. A vignette was presented to…

Educational psychologists face challenging decisions around ethical dilemmas to uphold the rights of all children. Due to finite government resources for supporting all learners, one of the roles of educational psychologists is to apply for this funding on behalf of schools and children. Tensions can emerge when unintended ethical dilemmas arise…

This study examined the effect of a child passing or failing the UK truth and lies discussion (TLD) compared with the Canadian promise to tell the truth on mock jurors' decisions regarding witness credibility and truthfulness and defendant guilt. Ninety-two participants read a vignette that described a child witnessing his father physically…

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably…

Children's evaluations of necessary harm (acts intended to prevent a greater harm) and how "maternal disapproval" and "peer relationship" play roles in this context were examined. A total of 120 children at 6, 9, and 12 years of age evaluated scenarios depicting prototypic and necessary (physical or verbal) harm. When a mother…

In a hidden inequality context, resource allocators and resource recipients are unaware that an unknowingly advantaged recipient possesses resources. The present study presented children aged 3-13 years (N = 121) with a hidden inequality vignette involving an accidental transgression in which one resource claimant, who unknowingly possessed more…

This article examines relationships between children and youths' judgments and their justifications of truth telling and verbal deception, in situational and cultural contexts. Han Chinese, Euro-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, seven- to 17-years of age were presented competitive scenarios in which protagonists told either lies to protect, or…

This research presented 8-, 10-, and 12-year-olds (N = 120) with hypothetical situations depicting comparably aged children engaging in defiance and deception to circumvent authorities' directives that they disagreed with. The nature of the situations varied in terms of domain (personal, moral, or prudential) and type of authority figure (parent…

This study investigated the development of moral decision-making and moral emotion attributions in antisocial behavior and peer relationship dilemma scenarios. Participants were 540 school- and college-aged students, who were asked to explain their moral decision-making, subsequent emotions, and reasoning in regard to the scenarios. We combined…

Children's epistemic vigilance was examined for their reasoning about the intentions and outcomes of informants' past testimony. In a 2 x 2 factorial design, 5- and 6-year-olds witnessed informants offering advice based on the intent to help or deceive others about the location of hidden prizes, with the advice leading to positive or negative…

Children's sense and reasoning about territory and land ownership may develop differently in contexts of poverty and where narratives of dispossession are a part of daily life and are of political and historical significance, as is the case in the Palestinian refugee context in Lebanon. In this study we looked at how 3- and 5-year-old refugee…

This article addresses the question of why the emotions children and adolescents anticipate in the context of hypothetical scenarios have been repeatedly found to predict actual (im)moral behavior. It argues that a common motivational account of this relationship is insufficient. Instead, three links are proposed that connect cognitive…