Developmental Psychology1985, Vol. 21, No. 6, 993-M5

Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.O012-1649/85/S0O.75

Young Children's Conception of Lying: Moral Intuition andthe Denotation and Connotation of "to Lie"

Heinz Wimmer and Silvia GruberUniversity of Salzburg

Josef PernerUniversity of Sussex

Children of age 4 and 5 years were told stories in which a protagonist with theintention to communicate truthfully nevertheless said something false because hehimself was mistaken. Subjects had to judge whether the protagonist should berewarded or punished for his false statement (moral judgment) and whether he hadlied or not (lexical judgment). Replicating an earlier finding by Wimmer et al.(1984), there was a high number of inconsistent responses when the moral judgmentwas elicited first: Frequent subjectivist reward judgments were followed by realist"lying" judgments. Such an inconsistent response pattern was nearly absent whenthe lexical judgment was elicited first. Here the frequent realist "lying" judgmentsled to subsequent realist punishment judgments. These findings show (a) that youngchildren's moral intuition about lying is quite advanced as compared to their def-inition of "to lie" and (b) that children's realist definition of "to lie" carries a strongnegative moral connotation that overrides their usual subjectivist moral intuitions.

A recent study by Wimmer, Gruber, andPerner (1984) found a remarkable develop-mental gap between young children's moralthinking and their definition of "to lie." Whenchildren had to reward or punish a speakerwho said something false despite truthful in-tention or who said something true despite de-ceptive intention, their reward and punishmentjudgments were mostly intention oriented.Nevertheless after rewarding a speaker who ingood faith said something false, the majorityof children judged this utterance a lie. Thus,in Piaget's (1932/1965) terms, but in contra-diction to his findings, young children weresubjectivistic in their moral evaluation and re-alistic in their lexical judgment.

This coexistence of moral subjectivism andlexical realism when judging one and the samecommunicative act could indicate that foryoung children "to lie" means "being false*'without any negative moral connotation. This,

This work was supported by a research grant from theStiftung Volkswagenwerk to Professor Erwin Roth, Uni-versity of Salzburg. The international cooperation of theauthors was supported by the Academic Link InterchangeScheme of British Council.

Requests for reprints should be directed to Heinz Wim-mer, Institut fuer Psychologie der Universitaet Salzburg,A-5020 Salzburg, Austria, or Josef Perner, ExperimentalPsychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, En-gland.

however, would be a truly remarkable fact inview of the standard educational maxim "lyingis naughty" underlined by Piaget's (1932/1965) finding that the youngest children's def-inition of lying is "saying naughty things yououghtn't to say" (1965, p. 140).

An alternative explanation of Wimmer etal.'s data would be that "to lie" actually has anegative moral connotation for young chil-dren. However, because of the fact that inWimmer et al.'s study the moral question al-ways was asked before the lexical question,this negative moral connotation of "to lie" maynot have interfered with children's subjectivistmoral reasoning. In order to decide betweenthese two hypotheses about the moral con-notation of "to lie," Experiment 6 by Wimmeret al. was replicated. To the original sequenceof test questions: "rnoral-before-Lexical" thereverse order of "lexical-before-moral" wasadded. If "to lie" is morally neutral, then re-sults in these two question-order conditionsshould be indistinguishable. If, however, "tolie" does have a strong negative moral con-notation, then moral evaluation should bepositive only when given before a lexical judg-ment, as in the original study, but not after ajudgment of "lying" has been made.

MethodSeventy-one 41/*-year-old children (mean age 4-8, range

4-2 to 5-2) and fifty-five S'/z-year-old children (mean age

993

994 HEINZ W1MMER, SYLVIA GRUBER, AND JOSEF PERNER

5-6, range 5-3 to 5-11) from several kindergartens inSalzburg, Austria, participated as subjects. Twenty-three4'A-year-old old children and seven SVz-year-old childrenhad to be eliminated from the main test because they gavea wrong answer to the belief question. This selection isjustified below. Forty-eight children in each age group(roughly equal proportions of boys and girls) satisfied thatcriterion and were randomly assigned to experimentalconditions.

Four stories were used, each with the same basic plot.At the beginning the story protagonist is led to a false beliefabout the location of a critical object that he intends toretrieve later on. At this point, the subject's understandingof the protagonist's false belief was tested by the beliefquestion: "Where will (protagonist's name look for the(object's name)?" After this question the story continued:Before the protagonist can retrieve the object, however,another story figure appears and asks the protagonist aboutthe object's location. The protagonist's intention to informcorrectly is explicitly stated. However, because of his ownmistaken belief, the protagonist produces a false statementunintentionally, ami, as a consequence, the listener can'tfind the object and is sad. Two test questions were asked(order counterbalanced): a lexical question, "Did (nameof speaker) He to (name of listener) or did he/she not lieto her/him?" and a moral question, "What would you giveto (name of protagonist), a golden star because he was niceto (name of listener) or a black point because he/she wasnasty to her/him?" The correct use of these symbols wasestablished before the experiment proper. The stories dif-fered according to setting, characters and critical objectNamed after the critical object, they are referred to as"chocolate" and "picture-book story." Furthermore, foreach story two different origins of the protagonist's falsebelief were realized. In one case the protagonist's false beliefwas caused by a lie of another person (intentional origin).In the other case, the false belief was produced by an un-foreseen transfer of the critical object (situational origin).For the exact wording of the situational origin version ofthe chocolate story, together with the scenarios for enactingthe stories see Experiment 3 of Wimmer et al. See Exper-iment 4 for the wording of the intentional origin version.

Half of the subjects were asked the test questions in theiexical-before-moral sequence. For the other half the orderwas moral before lexical. Type of story (chocolate vs. pic-ture book) and origin (situational vs. intentional) werecounterbalanced with question sequence. As already men-tioned above, subjects were selected by their correct answerto the belief question. This selection was necessary for anadequate interpretation of their moral and lexical judg-ments. Only children who understood that the protagonistheld a false belief could understand that his truthful in-tention must have led to an unintentionally false utterance.Such an understanding is not possible for children with awrong answer to the belief question. In all their wronganswers, children attributed knowledge to the protagonist,that is, they predicted that the protagonist would look forthe critical object where it actually was. For these children,the subsequent false statement of the protagonist must bean intentional deviation from the truth. If these childrenrespond with a punishment judgment to the moral ques-tion, it cannot be deckled whether their judgment is realisticor subjectivistic. The same is the case with "lying" judg-ments. Because of this problem, the procedure was ter-

Table 1Contingency Between Lexical andMoral Judgment

Questionsequence

Moral-lexical

Lexical-moral

Lexicaljudgment

"Didn't lie""lied"

Total

"Didn't lie""Lied"

Total

Re-ward

1222

34

193

22

Moral judgment

Punish-ment

014

14

026

26

Total

1236

1929

minated when a child gave a wrong answer to the beliefquestion.

Results and Discussion

The number of children with a correct lex-ical judgment (that the speaker had not lied)was subjected to stepwise logistic regressionusing the BMDP statistical software package(Dixon et al., 1981). A saturated model in-cluding all main and interaction effects wastested for Age (2) X Question Sequence (2).Only main effects were tested for belief origin(2), story content, (2) and sex (2). The onlyfactor that led to a significant improvement inthe prediction of cell frequencies was age, x2(UW - 96) = 5.86, p = .015. Only 20% of the4f/2-year-olds but 44% of the 546-year-olds gavea correct answer to the lexical question. Forall other effects p > . 15.

The same analysis was carried out for thenumber of children with correct moral judg-ments. It showed that question sequence wasthe only significant effect, x2( 1, W = 96) = 6.25,p = .012. When the moral judgment was givenfirst, 71% (34 of 48) children correctly re-warded the protagonist, whereas only 46% (22of 48) did so when their moral judgment fol-lowed their lexical judgment. For all other ef-fects p > .09. This effect of question sequenceon moral judgment is also evident from thecontingencies between moral and lexical judg-ments in Table 1. The contingency table forthe moral-before-lexical question sequenceshows again a high incidence (22 of 48 chil-dren) of lexical realism combined with moralsubjectivism as observed by Wimmer et al.

LYING 995

(1984, Experiment 6). However, when the lex-ical question was asked first, only three chil-dren showed such an inconsistent responsepattern. The proportion of this pattern was re-liably different between the two question se-quences, x2( 1, A" = 96) « 17.52, p < .001.

From Table 1 it is evident that considerationof speaker's intention was easier for moral thanfor lexical judgments. There was not one childwho gave a realist "punish" response to themoral question and a subjectivist "didn't lie"response to the lexical question. These resultscontrast strongly with the 25 children (22 inthe moral lexical, 3 in the lexical-moral se-quence) who showed the opposite pattern, thatis, a subjectivist "reward" decision togetherwith a realist "lied" judgment, McNemar'stest:x2U, N= 96) = 23A,p < .001.

The difference between children's moraljudgments in the two sequence conditions sug-gests that two separate sources of moral judg-ments were operating. One source was subjec-tivist moral reasoning, which was used in themoral-before-lexical sequence. Here children'smoral judgments were based primarily on thespeaker's truthful intention and not on thefalsity of his statement. The same subjectivistmoral reasoning was observed in Experiments5 and 6 of Wimmer et al. (1984), where notonly the present case of an unintentionally falsestatement was tested but also the inverse caseof a speaker who despite deceptive intentionproduced a true statement.

In the lexical-before-moral sequence, how-ever, moral judgments were mediated by therealist "lying" judgments. Once children hadjudged the protagonist a liar, the negative moralconnotation of "to lie" led to a realist moraljudgment in contradiction to their subjectivistmoral reasoning.

The inconsistency between these twosources of moral judgments might serve some

useful function in constraining the too broadrealist definition of "to lie." In the case of"truthful intention resulting in a false state-ment" the moral intuition of innocence clasheswith the negative moral evaluation implied bythe realist lexical judgment of "lying." Reso-lution of this contradiction is achieved by re-fining one's definition from "saying somethingfalse" to "saying something false intentionally."

This assumed influence of advanced sub-jectivist moral thinking on the definition of"to lie" has an intriguing parallel in the historyof law and theology. According to the usualdefinition of "to lie" as "intentionally sayingsomething false" a statement that is made withdeceitful intention but happens to be true cannot be called a lie since it fails to be false. Thisconflicts with the subjectivist moral intuitionabout such an act. Earlier the medieval scholarSaint Augustinus (cited in Falkenberg, 1982)proposed as a solution to redefine "to He" as"saying something which is believed to befalse." In our century this definition wasadopted in some legal systems (Siegler, 1966).

References

Dixon, W. J., Brown, M. B., Engelman, L., Frane, J. W.,Hill, M. Jennrich, R. I,, &Toporek, J. D. (1981). BMDPstatistical software. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Falkenberg, G. (1982). Luegen. Tuebingen: Max NiemeyerVerlag.

Piaget, J. (1965). The moral judgment of the child. NewYork: Free Press. (Original work published 1932)

Siegler, F. A. (1966). Lying. American Philosophical Quar-terly, 3, 128-136.

Wimmer, H., Gruber, S., & Perner, J. (1984). Young chil-dren's conception of lying: Lexical realism—moral sub-jectivism. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 37,1-30.

Received September 25, 1984Revision received February 26, 1985