Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1Psychology of Moral and Emotional JudgmentChild and Animal Learning DevelopmentEmotions and Moral Behavior

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 62 of the 62 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Unmasking Moral Hypocrisy: How Preschoolers Perceive and Judge Moral Hypocrites

Open access
Myślińska Szarek, Katarzyna, Baryła, Wiesław·2025·Developmental Science
DOI 10.1111/desc.13580
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Many previous studies indicate that children are highly sensitive to the immoral behavior of others, preferring prosocial over antisocial characters. Accordingly, children avoid transgressors from a very early age. A special kind of transgressor is the moral hypocrite, who not only acts immorally but also acts in contrast to what they preach. There are very few studies establishing whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and if it impacts their moral judgment. We ran three studies with preschoolers aged 4 to 6 years on whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and how children assess moral hypocrisy. In Studies 2 and 3, we also tested false‐signaling theory as an explanation of the more negative assessments of moral hypocrites. In Study 1 (N = 133), we showed that children indeed assess moral hypocrites more negatively than nonhypocritical moral transgressors. In Study 2 (N = 115), we initially demonstrated that the assessment of moral hypocrites results from their inconsistency between words and deeds. Study 3 (N = 159) replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and, by excluding an alternative explanation, explained that moral hypocrites are perceived as less moral and liked less due to the false signals that they send.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/desc.13580

Cites

62 of 62 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. 10.1177/09567976135168 · DOI
  2. 10.1111/j.1467‐9280.2007.0196 · DOI

Cited by

See all 1

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Myślińska Szarek, K., & Baryła, W.
Affiliations
  • Department of Psychology University SWPS Warszawa Poland
  • Uniwersytet SWPS (PL)
ORCID
Venue
Developmental Science
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2024-10-16
Volume
28
Issue
1
Pages
e13580-e13580
ISSN
  • 1363-755X (ISSN-L)
  • 1467-7687
DOI
10.1111/desc.13580
OpenAlex
W4403499083
Cited by
1
References
60
Citations by year
2026: 1
FWCI
0.18
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor)
Locations
  • Developmental Science (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
Keywords
moral hypocrisy, preschool children, moral judgment, social perception, prosocial behavior, antisocial behavior, social evaluation
MeSH terms
Child, Child, Preschool, Female, Humans, Judgment, Male, Morals, Social Perception

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.