Domain-general or specific: how is children's understanding of deception socialized?

Abstract

The current study investigated parenting influences on children's understanding of lie-telling in eight different social situations. These social situations clustered into two broad categories that have been assumed in the literature: first, self-oriented lies that were generally told to benefit the self (e.g., to avoid punishment or gain status); and second, socio-culturally-oriented lies that were told for more social reasons (e.g., to create positive affect, maintain modesty or politeness). Two types of parenting variables were also measured. The first concerned more general parenting practices and have been studied in the literature; while the second was about more specific parental deceptive behaviors like lying to your child for their compliance. Participants included 141 Turkish parent-child dyads aged 7, 9, and 11. All children judged the self-oriented and the socio-cultural lies as inappropriate but more so for the self-oriented ones; further, the socio-cultural lies were judged less negatively with age. While general parenting practices did not predict children's judgments, for parental deceptive practices, there were strong negative relationships between parents’ use of threatening lies (e.g., “come with me or I'll leave you here”) and children's judgments for both self- and socio-cultural lie types. The two main conclusions are that specific parental deceptive practices are more relevant than general parenting for understanding children's judgments about lie-telling situations. Second, the assumed categorization of lies into “self-” and “social-” seems generally valid when using a plurality of situations. Finally, some issues related to the morality of lie-telling are discussed.