January 14, 2025
Showing faith and trust in children nurtures integrity
A new study which explores the development of trust and integrity in children has found that expressing trust in young children encourages them to behave honesty. The research team, including our researcher of the month, Professor Li Zhao, studied whether children were less likely to cheat in a simple test of counting accuracy if the adult administering the test had previously conveyed trust in them. They found that children who were trusted cheated less than those who were not trusted. These findings provide novel evidence about the causal effect of trust on the development of children's honesty.
Summary
The researchers conducted a series of five experiments with 328 kindergarteners. In the first experiment, they capitalised on a frequently occurring classroom situation, where children are taken by teachers to perform a task or test elsewhere in the school setting. On the way there, the experimenter asked the child to help them by holding an important item - an envelope with the answers for the upcoming test - because their hands were full. The student was praised for their help and reminded that they were trusted not to cheat. The teacher also said they would continue to trust the student in the future. Once they got to the room, the experimenter administered a counting test to the children. On the surface, this was assessing their maths skills, but in reality, they were assessing spontaneous cheating.
The test consisted of five questions, with each depicting a set of animals, fruits or geometric shapes. The children were asked to count the number of things in each question and then circle the correct answer from nine possible numerical options. The first four tasks were easy. The fifth was extremely difficult and it was impossible for children of this age to answer it correctly without peeking at the correct answer on the answer sheet.
Before finishing the test, the experimenter stepped out of the room supposedly to deal with an important matter outside, leaving the test answer sheet on a table near where children were seated. The researchers then assessed (via a hidden camera) whether or not the children looked at the answers whilst they were out of the room.
The four subsequent experiments were variations on this test, leaving out one or more elements — the teacher didn’t praise the student or didn’t say they were trusted not to cheat, for example. In the fifth experiment, the person administering the test wasn’t the teacher.
The results showed that when the adult trusted children to help with small tasks and conveyed that they would trust them in the future, the children were significantly less likely to cheat when compared to children who were not given such trust messages. In fact, when students received the maximum level of trust messages, the cheating rate was 34%. When they were told they were trusted not to cheat but were not told they were trusted to be helpers, more than half cheated.
Implications
“We were surprised by how powerful an effect a simple expression of trust had on children's subsequent honesty. It seems that even at a young age, children understand the value of trust and are willing to behave more honestly in response to feeling trusted by others. Fostering an ethos of trust rather than distrust could be pivotal for supporting children's character development in their formative early years.”
The researchers recommend that teachers and parents should intentionally entrust children with tasks and responsibilities, no matter how small, and explicitly tell them, "I trust you to do this". Realising the power that trust, rather than threats or punishment, can have in cultivating a sense of integrity is valuable.
You can find out more about this study here.
Professor Li Zhao
Professor of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, China
Professor Li Zhao was made Professor of Psychology at Hangzhou Normal University, China in 2018. Between 2019 and 2020, she was also a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University in the US. Her research focuses on the development of children’s moral behaviour and academic dishonesty in children and adolescents.
Professor Li Zhao
Professor of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, China
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