Children Can Consider Social Relationships When Evaluating Liars

Two preregistered experiments investigated whether children (3–12-year-olds; n = 456) and adults (n = 120) from the United States more negatively evaluate child characters who tell “emotionally hurtful lies”—lies explicitly told knowing that it will make another person feel bad—to a friend than to a more distant social partner. When children and adults judged one independent emotionally hurtful lie (Study 1), they evaluated it negatively regardless of whether the liar was lying to a friend, a classmate, or an enemy. However, when comparatively evaluating two people who told the same emotionally hurtful lie (at the same time), participants judged a friend’s lie more negatively than a classmate’s lie (Study 2). Interestingly, relationship impacted evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies to a similar extent as evaluations of failures to help. Taken together, people’s evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies take social relationships into account in comparative but not independent contexts. More broadly, school-aged children and adults appear to understand that close relationships entail certain obligations, and breaking these obligations is more condemnable than engaging in the same antisocial interaction with a more distant social partner.