A recent study by Lee and colleagues (2014)
lends support to the idea that positive appeals to tell the truth may influence children’s behavior.
They found that children who heard a folk story emphasizing
the positive consequences of telling the truth were more likely to tell the truth compared with children who heard stories emphasizing the negative consequences of lying or heard neutral stories.
However, this study did not directly test the impact of internal or external appeals to tell the truth on
children’s lying or how expectations of punishment interact with the influence of such appeals.