Telling children as young as 3 that they are clever motivates them to cheat in test situations, according to research.

The study, carried out by an international team of researchers, split 150 three-year-olds and 150 five-year-olds into three groups. 

In one group, children were given no praise, in another they were praised for their performance, and the remainder were told they were intelligent.

The children were given six attempts at guessing whether a playing card held by a researcher was higher or lower than the number six. They were told they would win a prize if they guessed correctly at least three times.

The odds were stacked against them, with the game rigged so that the children won on their first two attempts but lost the next three in succession. On the final attempt, the children were left alone in the room for one minute, with a hidden camera recording whether or not they cheated by leaning over the barrier or getting out of their chair to look at the card.

Sixty per cent of the children who had been told they were smart went on to cheat, compared with 41 per cent of those who had been praised for their performance and 40 per cent of the children who were given no praise.

However, boys were far more likely to cheat than girls. Among the children who were told they were smart, 68 per cent of boys cheated compared with 52 per cent of girls. The paper does not discuss why this was the case.

Simply praising young children without paying careful attention to the choice of words used could have “unintended consequences”, warned the researchers, who hailed from the University of California San Diego, the University of Toronto, and Hangzhou Normal University in China. The study was carried out in eastern China.

“Telling children that they are smart, a form of ability praise, may have the opposite effect by motivating them to cheat to appear smarter,” the researchers said.

They added: “Ability praise may have motivated children to cheat in order to uphold the positive trait assessment or the reputation of being smart.”

Their findings, recently published in the Psychological Science journal, demonstrated that “ability praise can promote cheating in young children”.

Co-author Dr Lee, from the Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, told Tes: “The most surprising about the findings to me is that children as young as 3 years of age are already sensitive to the linguistic differences between the smart praise (you are so smart) and the behavioral praise (you did very well this time), and behave accordingly.

“Such differences are really subtle and adults often find them undisguisable and they use them interchangeably when praising children.”

He commented that the higher proportion of boys cheating was due to them having “poorer inhibitory abilities than girls”.

The new research builds on previous studies by Professor Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, who has demonstrated that praising a child’s innate ability instead of their effort or a particular behaviour can lower their appetite for learning and ability to deal with setbacks.