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Panel information
Panel 13. Moral Development

Abstract

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Honesty is highly valued, however, in some social situations, telling a lie is considered polite and even expected. But how do we learn how and when to tell a lie? Prominent socialization theories hypothesize that children learn about lie-telling via direct socialization by parental teaching and indirect socialization by parental observation (Talwar & Crossman, 2022). Experimental evidence shows that child lie-telling increases after being lied to by a stranger (Hays & Carver, 2014). However, the effect of observed lie-telling has never been studied in parent-child dyads, even though theories of socialization emphasize that parents are the most important source for socialization (Grusec & Davidov, 2010). In the current study, we have two aims; (1) we manipulate parental lie-telling to examine its effects on children’s prosocial lie-telling (indirect socialization), and (2) we examine the effects of parental teaching on children’s prosocial lie-telling (direct socialization).

119 parent-child dyads (child age 4-8 years) participated in this pre-registered study. The experiment contained two conditions: children would observe their parents tell a prosocial lie (“that is a pretty drawing, lie-condition) or the truth (“that is an ugly drawing”, truth-condition) to an experimenter (Figure 1). After some distractor tasks, children were given an undesired gift for their participation by the experimenter (disappointing gift paradigm). Children’s lie-telling was coded based on their verbal answer whether they liked the gift or not. Furthermore, teaching about lie-telling, and the covariates parental lie-telling behaviour in daily life and parenting-by-lying, were assessed via questionnaires.

All data was double coded with average to good intercoder reliability. 12 parent-child dyads were excluded from the analyses because of deviations from the experimental protocol. There was no effect of child’s gender and child’s age on prosocial lie-telling in the lab (χ2(2) = 0.35, p = .839). 56.6% of children lied about liking the undesired gift in the truth-telling condition and 70.4% of children lied in the lie-telling condition (Figure 2), however, the effect of condition on children’s lie-telling was not significant (χ2(1) = 2.47, p = .119). At the conference, we will present the pre-registered analyses for aim 2, that shed light on the role of parental teaching in children’s tendency to tell prosocial lies, based on the questionnaire data.

Our preliminary results demonstrated that there was no clear direct effect of parental lie-telling (indirect socialization) as manipulated in this experiment on children’s prosocial lie-telling. Our study will shed light on how direct and indirect socialization of lie-telling by parents influences children’s lie-telling, providing the first step into understanding the mechanisms of parental socialization of children’s lie-telling.

Author information

Author	Role
Dr. Lisanne Schroer, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands	Presenting author
Rianne Kok, Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.	Non-presenting author

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