Great idea
Despite the most important public lesson of telling the truth, adults judged children who told polite truths more negatively than those who lied in a recent study conducted by my colleagues.
We asked 171 adults to watch videos of children between the ages of 6 and 15. Participants were given a written background to identify children who were lying and who were telling the truth.
We are what psychologists call prosocial, meaning that they benefit other people from the child – or themselves. For example, they may try to protect a relative who has broken their bike or be polite and tell their parents that they enjoyed the birthday party they threw for them.
On the other hand, when they tell the truth, children betray their siblings to tell their parents, or are rude and tell their parents that the party they are holding is boring.
All children uttered two types of statements, either in an ambiguous way, or in an ambiguous way.
As expected, adults gave the most positive ratings to children who told the truth in a polite but subtle way. And they judge liars as more untrustworthy than children who tell the truth.
However, when we asked adult participants more broadly about children, they rated liars as having a generally more positive disposition when they lied politely than when they told the blunt truth.
Why is it important?
Lying is usually viewed negatively. In fact, being perceived as a liar is often considered one of the worst characteristics that someone can attribute to you. At the same time, many smooth social interactions depend on white lies and nonexistent lies.
So, we want to know how children learn to lie and, how adults judge children when they tell socially acceptable lies.
Prosocial lying is more complex than lying for selfish reasons. Parents have difficult choices to make when it comes to helping children understand this landscape.
Given our findings, it seems likely that adults may provide inconsistent messages in response to children’s lies. They seem to respond positively to polite lies and at the same time criticize them as less reliable.
Any
The adults in our study know when children are lying. But a lot of other research shows that people in general are good lie detectors. Our participants were able to judge liars and honest people differently if they didn’t know they were watching a lie.
The type of socialization we are interested in depends on the individual’s culture and circumstances. We have not researched how people from different backgrounds and with different personalities will respond to children who lie and help them understand what is socially acceptable.
Laure Brimbal is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Texas State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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