Currently, one study has found support for the relevance of Bandura’s (1991) theory in relation to
children’s perceptions of honesty.
Wagland and Bussey (2005) asked children (5- to 10-year-olds) to predict the likelihood that a hypothetical
child would lie or tell the truth in different situations.
The researchers discovered that when punishment was expected for the transgression,
children predicted that both external encouragement (referring to the experimenter’s satisfaction)
and internal encouragement
(referring to the child’s own self-satisfaction) would increase truth-telling behavior compared
with no encouragement.