Truth In Children's Honesty

Dr. Victoria Talwar is a Canada Research Chair (II) and an Associate Professor at McGill University. She has been working for over fifteen years in the area of developmental psychology and she emphasis on social-cognitive development. Her research interests include children’s verbal deception, children’s moral development, theory-of-mind understanding and behavior; children’s expressive display rule knowledge and behavior. This research carried by Victoria Talwar*, Cindy Arruda, Sarah Yachison is about effects of punishment and appeals for honesty on children’s truth-telling behavior. The aim of this research is to examine how appeals to tell the truth influence children’s honesty and whether expectation of punishment for a transgression attenuates

According to Oxford English Dictionary honesty is the quality of being honest which it is free of deceit. Being honest is being truthful and sincere. Punishment is defined as the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offence. The research of Talwar & Lee (2011) has shown that the potential of children’s telling lie is influenced by their perceptions of expected punishment. Talwar and Lee (2011) stated that children in a punitive environment were better at maintaining their lies. Besides, Talwar & Lee (2011) also stated that children who could expect corporal punishment for their transgressions or fault were more likely to lie and were better able to conceal or hide their lie compared with children who had no expectations of corporal punishment. Corporal Punishment is defined as physical punishment, such as caning, smacking or punching. Physical punishment is classifying as positive punishment which means presenting the thing that someone dislike to that person. The honesty of

It is very important to let children know that we are more emphasis on their honesty than the punishment. Positive consequences resulting from truth telling should be emphasized and negative consequences for transgressing should be avoided in order to promote honesty in young children. If children fear and worry about the potential negative outcomes for disclosing information, they may be more reluctant to disclose. All of this stems back to operant conditioning which the consequence of telling truth lead the changes in the probability that the children telling