According to two new studies, children as young as preschoolers were more likely to cheat if they were praised, as opposed to simply being ...
According to two new studies, children as young as preschoolers were more likely to cheat if they were praised, as opposed to simply being told they performed well.
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| Preschool students play on their first day at a public school in the shanty town of Ticlio Chico, Villa Maria del Triunfo, on the outskirts of Lima, March 10, 2014. Photo: Reuters/Mariana Bazo |
By Himanshu Goenka, International Business Times
If you tell a child as young as three years old that he or she is
smart or even has a reputation for being smart, the child is more likely
to cheat, two new studies
have found. The studies were conducted by researchers in Canada, China
and the United States and considered behavior of preschoolers.
One
of the studies’ four co-authors (both studies have the same four
authors) Kang Lee, who is a professor at the University of Toronto, said
in a statement Tuesday that praise for children is one of the most
common forms of reward used by parents and teachers, but it can backfire
when used wrongly.
“Giving children (the) wrong kind of praise makes them dishonest,” Lee said in the statement.
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One of the studies,
published Tuesday in the journal Psychological Science, is titled
“Praising Young Children for Being Smart Promotes Cheating.” In the
study, researchers looked at 300 preschool children in eastern China, of
which 150 were between 3 and 4 years old (71 boys, 79 girls) and the
other 150 were between 5 and 6 years of age (78 boys, 72 girls).
The
children were made to play a simple guessing game using cards, in which
the participants had the opportunity to peek at the cards and cheat. On
guessing correctly, there were one of three responses — praise for
being smart (“You are so smart”), being told they performed well (“You
did very well this time”) and no sort of praise whatsoever. Each of the
three responses was given to 50 children each, all of whom had been
instructed not to peek at the cards.
The experiment was designed
such that every child would guess correctly on the first two of the five
attempts, and get the remaining three wrong. During the sixth attempt,
the experimenter left the room for one minute, after reminding the
children not to peek and the children’s behavior was remotely monitored
using a concealed camera.
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Over 60 percent of all children who had
been praised earlier were found to have cheated, with a higher number of
3-year-olds cheating than 5-year-olds. Boys who had been praised were
also found to be more likely to cheat than their girl counterparts. And
breaking up the numbers by age or gender didn’t yield much difference
between the two groups that were either mildly praised or weren’t
praised at all.
In the other study,
titled “Telling young children they have a reputation for being smart
promotes cheating” and appearing in the journal Developmental Science,
the researchers performed similar tests on 323 children aged three and
5. Except, in this study, the children were either told they had a
reputation for being smart, or a reputation that had nothing to do with
being smart or otherwise, or nothing about their reputation.
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| First lady Michelle Obama watches a performance by pre-school students at the Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School ahead of her upcoming trip to China, in Washington, D.C., March 4, 2014. Photo: Reuters/Yuri Gripas |
The
results they found were strikingly similar to the first study. A higher
number of 3-year-olds were found to be cheating from the first group
than the corresponding 5-year-olds, and boys cheated more than girls
did.
[post_ads]“Praise is more complex than it seems. Praising a child’s ability
implies that the specific behavior that is commented on stems from
stable traits related to one’s ability, such as smartness. This is
different than other forms of praise, such as praising specific
behaviors or praising effort,” Lee said in the statement.
Li
Zhao, a professor at Hangzhou Normal University in China and a
co-author of the papers, said children who are praised for being smart
“feel pressure to perform well in order to live up to others’
expectations, even if they need to cheat to do so.” She added that
adults needed to learn praising children in a way that didn’t promote
dishonest behavior.
“We want to encourage children, we want them
to feel good about themselves. But these studies show we must learn to
give children the right kinds of praise, such as praising specific
behavior. Only in this way, will praise have the intended positive
outcomes,” she said.
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