Kids can be good at seeing white lies

UNITED STATES: Most parents have told their young child the occasional white lie to preserve his or her sanity. Harmless, right? Maybe not.

According to a new Stanford University study, kids as young as 4 are pretty skilled at spotting ‘‘sins of omission’’ and then judging the adults who perpetrate them.

That may be bad news for some parents, but it’s good news for child development experts.

‘‘If children are sensitive to others’ informativeness – for instance, able to distinguish less informative teachers from fully informative ones – that will be helpful for their future learning,’’ said Hyowon Gweon, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford and the study’s lead author.

‘‘Because not everyone is equally informative, this ability can help children decide ‘Who should I learn from? Who should I approach for more information?’.’’

In one experiment involving 4-year-olds, Gweon’s team taught children about two toys, one with just one function and another with four functions. Then the kids watched back-to-back videos of puppets teaching Elmo the muppet about the toys.

The puppet that was supposed to be explaining the four-function toy, however, showed Elmo only one of its functions.

The children were having none of it: 72 per cent of them liked the more informative teacher better, which suggests even children are learning which adults to trust.

So what does this mean for parents and teachers? If your kid spots a frozen yoghurt-stained napkin in your car, he or she may be less likely to buy into the story that your time away was full of boring errands. - TNS