Development of Social Desirability in Children

Social Desirability

• The term "social desirability" comes from the field of psychological testing. Researchers noticed that many respondents in research surveys tended to give what they thought was the most socially acceptable answer rather than the honest answer. Tests such as the Crowne-Marlowe Social Desirability Scale are supposed to measure this tendency. People who have a high CM score say what they think other people want them to say and keep their real opinions or behaviors to themselves. People with a low CM score will answer honestly without worrying what people think of them. According to a self-assessment test on Cengage's website, two-thirds of all respondents score somewhere in the middle, indicating that they do care about what others think of them but not to the extent of completely masking their real selves. Social desirability develops in childhood as part of the process of learning ethical reasoning.

Moral Development

• When children are first born, they think almost exclusively about their own needs. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg called this the "premoral" stage of childhood development, because children at this stage are not capable of any ethical reasoning. In the second stage of Kohlberg's model, the child begins to think of right and wrong in terms of direct consequences. Actions that have pleasant consequences are viewed as right, and actions with negative consequences are viewed as wrong. In the third stage, the child begins to define right and wrong primarily by whether others approve. This is the stage of social desirability.

Early Development

• When young children reach Kohlberg's third stage of development, their need for approval naturally focuses on the people who are most important in their daily lives. They want their parents, teachers or day care providers to think of them as good kids. According to a 2005 article in Child Development, children will internalize whatever is reflected back to them in early childhood. A child who receives approval will come to think of himself as a good kid, which can motivate him to make ethical choices as he grows up. A child who receives disapproval will come to think of himself as a bad kid.

Later Development

• When children start to get bigger and spend more time with their peers, social desirability refocuses on the peer group instead of the parents. The need for approval by others can start to have negative consequences at this point. In Kohlberg's model, people can develop beyond the need for approval by others to develop a sense of ethics based on principles. The Child Development article describes a similar process, in which most children eventually develop a stable inner sense of their own worth. However, children without such an inner confidence can continue to crave approval from their peers even when they can only gain it by making a bad decision they wouldn't otherwise have made. While social desirability can encourage children to make ethical choices, it can also make them vulnerable to negative peer pressure.