Can Classic Moral Stories Promote Honesty in Children? [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Can Classic Moral Stories Promote Honesty in Children? [pdf]

kangleelab.com

56 pointsluu34 comments

Years ago, I read study about reducing corruption/abuse in police departments. It suggested that programs designed to promote a professional identity was more effective than more weight/manpower behind internal affairs.

Maybe for most humans a positive ideal to strive for is better than the threat of punishment.

Given that the human mind is essentially a behaviour-copy machine this is very likely true.

But keep in mind : the purpose of punishment is to remove examples of bad behaviour. Without effective punishment, bad behaviour will quickly crowd out any good examples you may set.

You can read the full paper here: http://www.kangleelab.com/articles/Psychological%20Science%2... (thanks Google Scholar!)

Thanks! We've changed the url to this from http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/11/095679761453..., which just had the abstract (which is found at the start of the paper).

>During the game, children were left alone for 1 min and told not to cheat by peeking at the toy. Because of the highly tempting nature of the situation, most children were expected to cheat (e.g., Talwar & Lee, 2002). Before confronting them with the question of whether they had cheated, an experimenter read one of three moral stories or a control story to each child.

It would have been interesting if they had another group where they primed the children with the story before walking out of the room. Test to see how the various stories effect the decision to cheat, not just the honesty after the fact.

Why would they have expected children to cheat? My family played games of all kinds regularly from a very early age, cheating was unthinkable. There's no game without honesty.

Judging from the fact that they have a citation right after that phrase, I assume that their expectation is based on a previous study that showed exactly that.

It has been long known that punishment and reward are ineffective for interpersonal influence (e.g., see French and Raven's "The bases of social power" from 1959). Fear is a big factor in children lying. And the nasty side effect of fear is that it leads to repressions of natural inclinations, and eventually a part of the true self becomes suppressed, and a false self becomes a big part of the character. You can see this in the endemic existence of narcissistic character traits in our society.

While studying these topics, the most surprising realization for me was that moral indoctrination teaches children sadistic and masochistic behavior, which then manifests in adulthood as vectors of moral indoctrination towards their children (besides other undesirable behavior in society), and the cycle continues.

Accepting a child for who they are, and not trying to influence them into what the parent wants them to be, goes a long way towards making an honest child.

Probably a rather geeky thing to say but Star Trek TNG promoted honesty, morality and a strong sense of ethics to me.

That IMHO is no different to classic moral stories as the basic premise is the same in some episodes.

Yes, it is a rather geeky thing to say.

This is a wonderful point. Star Trek, particularly TNG, has always had some very strongly moral characters. Picard, obviously, but also Sisko in DS9.

Why did you elevate Picard and Sisko morally over Kirk or Janeway?

Actually all officers on Star Trek seem to be of high moral character, I can't think of one who isn't.

Both Kirk and Janeway were much less by-the-book. They had no compunction against violating the prime directive, making unscrupulous alliances, seducing young ensigns, or reading the Constitution to a planet of Nazis (or something like that) if they felt it furthered their (usually noble if misguided) goals.

I don't want to start a Trek debate on HN :) Alliances wrt Janeway are certainly questionable, but for both where they did deviate from the book it was always as you say for noble reasons. Breaking an unjust law is not morally wrong. Snowden broke laws for noble reasons. Is he a moral character? I think so.

Sisko makes a number of morally questionable decisions, most especially in "For the Uniform" and "In the Pale Moonlight".

Agreed.

What's also been interesting to me is the more recent sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate:Universe that try and set up a Star Trek like moral dilemma, and you know exactly what a Star Trek TNG captain would do, and the writers will cause the Captain to take the opposite moral choice, often for good reasons.

It's a bit like the TNG ethics are being used as an ethical framework to bounce modern issues off of and continue the cause of sci-fi as social commentary, but in a sense the commentary is the upright TNG style morals and how desperate circumstances might make it difficult to uphold those values.

Ultima IV started my moral trek.

As a parent, this is a really interesting issue for me. In particular, I have been really disappointed and shocked with the extent to which cheating is tolerated in undergraduate schools in the U.S. I'm not naïve enough to believe that this is anything new (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/opinion/the-long-legacy-of... - in 1957, 40% of Harvard students admitted to cheating), but I think that the tools parents have at their disposal to inculcate honesty in their children are fewer in number these days.

The boy who cried the wolf is not a good selection imho. In it the boy lies just for fun, not to save his own skin, which is what the children in the experiment were trying to do by lying. In contrast George Washington knows the consequence of not lying (possible retribution from his father), yet chooses to do the right thing by sticking to truth.

IF anyone ever watched the office their was an episode where Dwight read "cautionary tales..." (2.18) but he read from a book that I always thought was fake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

Your child will, as ever, learn your true values. If you try to manipulate him into being honest then you are implicitly asserting that honesty is bad. Correct this by understanding that honesty is its own reward. The world is a beautiful and a dangerous place and honesty helps you to see it correctly.

It would be better to promote Machiavellianism in children so they are better equipped for harsh realities of life.

Morality is not an intellectual product. It is a mode of perception, like esthetics. It can be fostered and cultivated through art-appreciation, meditation, low-stress environments and stuff like that.

tl;dr: Stories focusing on the positive aspects: Good. --> i.e. George Washington and the Cherry Tree

Stories focusing on the negative consequences: BAD. (Pinocchio, The Boy Who Cried Wolf)

Strange. I find the boy who cried wolf to be a really good one. It's still something I think of from time to time. I doesn't stop me telling the odd lie but if/when I consider a big lie I definitely consider the consequences based on that story.

I suspect that the age of the children has a big impact on the results. The study was of 3-7 year olds. If you remember it well then you were at the upper end of that range, if not older.

Why was this downvoted?

Yes. The Boy Who Cried Wolf has other issues, as well, though; I remember thinking (as a child) that it was as much the villagers' fault for not believing the kid as it was the kid's fault for lying before.

I used to agree with that interpretation until I saw the DS9 episode where Garet comments on the story - and points out that the mistake was to keep telling the same lie and a lie that is easy to very is a lie.

Re Stories focusing on the positive aspects

It reminds me of this article/discussion: "Fighting in front of your children - not such a bad thing?". The positive aspect is giving the whole picture of the drama, showing that things, sometimes, can be solved in a peaceful/negotiated way.

[1] http://www.parentdish.co.uk/kids/fighting-in-front-of-your-c...

Gotta love it when morality tales are crossed with government worship. It's a twofer.

I don't doubt their measurements, but as is so common with these sorts of studies their conclusions are completely interpretive according to their own whims.

The George Washington story matches the subsequent experience of the child. The child is asked if they did the bad thing, just exactly as George Washington was asked in the story. A very young child will be able to make the connection between what is happening and the story they just heard because the exact same thing is going down.

The other stories are more abstract. They are not stories of someone doing a bad thing and then being asked if they did the bad thing.

It's a more reasonable conclusion, in my opinion, that what we are seeing is an effect of how close the story is to the experience, without having to rely on abstraction skills a very young child does not possess. And not whether the outcome was good or bad.

In general the study design is poor and more people should have seen that. There are numerous differences between these stories, hundreds of differences, not just outcome. And one of the stories being much closer to what they are testing is obviously relevant and confounding.

A better study design would be able to explore this. For example, tell the children one of the following stories:

1. George Washington does a bad thing and is asked if he did it. When he says yes, he is rewarded.

2. George Washington does a bad thing and is asked if he did it. When he says yes, he is punished.

3. George Washington does a bad thing. He is not asked if he did it, but is rewarded by fate.

4. George Washington does a bad thing. He is not asked if he did it, but is punished by fate.

5. George Washington does a good thing and is asked if he did it. When he says yes, he is rewarded.

6. George Washington does a good thing and is asked if he did it. When he says yes, he is punished.

7. George Washington does a good thing. He is not asked if he did it, but is rewarded by fate.

8. George Washington does a good thing. He is not asked if he did it, but is punished by fate.

Actual paper is unfortunately paywalled, which certainly does not promote academic honesty.

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