Collaborative Dishonesty: Children Are More Likely to Cheat When They Benefit Together

Abstract

Collaboration, the process by which individuals work together toward mutual benefits, is a core feature of human sociality. Capacities for collaboration emerge early in development and represent an important social competence. Yet, collaborative commitments can conflict with commitments to societal norms such as honesty and rule compliance, and little is known about whether the development of collaborative proclivities can promote dishonesty in young children. In this study, we tested pairs of 6- to 8-year-old Kazakh-speaking and Russian-speaking children in Kazakhstan (N = 192), a Central Asian post-Soviet society characterized by relatively high social interdependence compared to European and North American, post-industrialized samples commonly recruited in developmental research. Children participated in a die-rolling game in which they could misreport the frequency of a specific outcome to win rewards. We found that children were more likely to cheat when they benefited together with a partner (collaboration condition) than when they benefited individually (solo condition). Additionally, across both conditions, children in Kazakh-speaking classes overreported winning outcomes more frequently than children in Russian-speaking classes. These findings demonstrate that collaborative motives and socio-cultural contexts can influence honesty from an early stage in development.

Summary

• We investigated children's tendency to cheat in a game in which they could benefit together with a partner (collaboration condition) or benefit alone (solo condition).
• We tested 6- to 8-year-old Kazakh-speaking and Russian-speaking children from Kazakhstan.
• Children were more likely to cheat when they benefited together, suggesting that collaborative goals can compromise honesty early in development.
• Russian-speaking children cheated less than Kazakh-speaking children, highlighting the role of sociocultural factors in how children resolve norm conflicts.