Noemi Thiede 1, Roman Stengelin 1,2, Astrid Seibold 3, Robert Hepach 4, Daniel B. M. Haun 1,2 1 Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany 2 Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University, Germany 3 Independent Researcher, Leipzig, Germany 4 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford United Kingdom
Empathy is a causal driver of prosocial behavior. We here ask whether it also fosters prosocial lie-telling in politeness contexts (henceforth: polite lie-telling). Polite lies are an adaptive strategy for navigating complex social environments as they help uphold social relationships and maintain social norms. The current study investigates whether empathy drives polite lie-telling among 96 German children aged 5.0-8.5 years. Half of the children participate in a picture-story-based intervention in which we aim to foster children’s empathy by modeling empathy with the respective story character. The other half partakes in a closely matched control condition lacking empathic content. Children’s empathy is assessed with a novel empathy measure before and after the experimental manipulation. Finally, we observe children’s behavior in a politeness situation in which they are asked to rate an artist’s drawing of bad quality. Data collection is currently ongoing but will be completed in 2021. Preliminary results based on a third of the final sample suggest that participating in the empathy condition promotes children’s empathy as indicated by the pre-post-intervention assessment. However, the promotive effect of the intervention on children’s empathy does not foster lie-telling. If this finding prevails further data collection, our study will raise doubt on causal claims regarding the link between empathy and prosocial lie-telling. This research is a first step towards investigating empathy’s causal impact on children’s polite lie-telling. Lastly, the novel empathy measure and intervention may be applied in future research to study causal effects of children’s empathy on their (pro)social behaviors more generally.