Children can detect ‘sins of omission’ at young age, study finds

Children as young as 4 years old can identify when they are presented with misleading but technically accurate information – a so-called ‘sin of omission.’

Stanford psychologists recently found that children age 6 to 7, and even as young as 4 years old, can under certain conditions identify when they are presented with information that is misleading but technically true. Their study did not focus on young children’s capacity to detect dishonesty or falsehood, but rather young children could discern ‘sins of omission.’

“We, as adults, frequently omit information to children when something is unnecessary, redundant, too hard, and even when we want them to know ‘the truth, but not the whole truth.’ Because omission can either be useful or misleading depending on the context, parents and educators should be mindful of children’s sensitivity to ‘informativeness’ and understand when omitting information is helpful and when it can be a ‘sin,'” Hyowon Gweon, assistant professor of psychology, said.

According to Stanford University’s News Service, the study included four experiments, beginning with children age 6 and 7. First, the participants learned about two toys: one had only one function while the other had four functions. They then viewed corresponding videos with puppets demonstrating those toys’ functions to Elmo, the Sesame Street character.

Both ‘puppet teachers’ demonstrated only one of the toy’s functions, making one teacher fully informative and the other under-informative, because it demonstrated just one of four functions. The important detail is that the under-informative puppet technically did not lie, it just did not show the additional three functions of the toy.

The children participating in the study were then asked to rate the puppet teachers based on how helpful they were to Elmo and how good a job they did teaching him. Replicating an earlier study, researchers found that the 6- and 7-year-olds gave lower ratings to the under-informative teacher. The effect on the children was the same regardless of which video – informative or under-informative – they viewed first.

But when the psychologists conducted the same experiment on 4- and 5-year-old, the order made a significant difference. Only the children who viewed the informative teacher first noticed the under-informative teacher’s sins of omission. Further experiments ruled out alternative explanations, with researchers saying it showed that younger children (4-5 years old) are limited in evaluating teachers when they do not have a good comparison in mind.

Hyowon Gweon, the study’s lead author, says the order is a necessary element for younger children either because it sets a standard that the under-informative teacher must reach or that for 4- and 5-year-olds’ the meaning of what ‘helpful’ is might be many things, such as being nice, fun, smart. That could explain why 4- and 5-year-olds who saw the under-informative teacher first were unable to distinguish between the two types of teachers.

The study’s final experiment, however, showed promise for the youngest participants. Testing only 4-year-olds this time, participants were asked to rate the teachers after viewing them back-to-back—not as in the earlier experiments where the teachers were rated in separate trials. In this context, 72 percent of children preferred the informative teacher regardless of the order they were viewed.

“One might have concluded that the 4- and 5-year-olds do not have this ability yet. But by asking children to evaluate two teachers in sequence, we were able to find this limited, yet remarkable ability in young children,” Gweon, principal investigator at Stanford’s Social Learning Lab, said.

The study could provide a more holistic view of how children learn to communicate with others.