Many parents make it clear that honesty is good while lying is bad and yet an adult's responses to their child's lies aren't always consistent.
Experiments show that parents can be more judgmental of liars than they are of truth-tellers.
Children can sense the discrepancy, according to the authors. Most kids aren't taught to lie, but the reactions of their parents may teach them that bending the truth is less risky than the other option.
It is not a bad thing. Everyone learns to twist the truth in order to keep another person happy. Lying is an important step in a child's emotional and social development, indicating a theory of mind or the ability to understand that other people have different thoughts.
Experiments show that a lie is often judged harshly by parents.
The first experiments to explore what feedback children receive from their parents when they tell a blunt truth are "I think your hat is ugly" and "I think the color of your hat is nice"
142 parents watched a series of videos depicting a child actor in different scenarios. Participants were asked to imagine the kid they were watching was their own and to think about how they would react to their behavior.
A child was asked by a parent to reveal the location of a sibling who was in trouble with the parents.
The kid in the video said that she was under the porch. The liar said that the woman went to the library.
The liar thought she might have gone to bed. The truthteller said she thought she might be outside.
The child lied in order to be polite.
Parents rated the child on characteristics such as trustworthiness, kindness, good behavior, competency, likeability, friendliness, intelligence, honesty, and warmth after watching the videos. Points were given for how good the kid was.
Lying was seen more negatively by adults than honesty.
A kid who lied to be polite was more likely to be rewarded than the most polite liars.
Children who lied to protect a sibling were judged more harshly than those who did not.
This form of honesty doesn't make a parent feel good. Ratings of likeability tend to go down when a kid tells their sibling.
Adults preferred tattletales in experiments to be more trustworthy.
Children are likely to engage in prosocial lie-telling if the message is more nuanced.
"Though brutal honesty may elicit dislike, it may also engender a perception that the individual can be trusted."
Future research will need to look at the child's perspective in similar scenarios to see if the authors are correct in assuming how kids learn.
The study was published in a journal.
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