Early roots of lying in families

Children who lie, learn this from a very young age. While some forms of lying are harmless, or even adaptive, other types are maladaptive. Yet, social origins of lying are grossly understudied.

Parents sometimes lie (claiming to leave the child behind, when misbehaving) or model lying to children (telling someone they love a gift, while admitting to the child their dislike). How parental deception affects children is unknown.

In fact, socialization of child lying is paradoxical: despite lying or modelling lying, parents usually teach that lying is wrong. Thus, many children receive mixed messages about the value of honesty.

To begin the crucial study of this paradox, I coin a novel term: “parental moral dissonance”, a mismatch between what parents teach about lying and what they actually do.

In the multimethod FAMI-LIES project, I will explore and explain how and why parents lie to children, how this contrasts with what they teach, and how lying and moral dissonance relate to child socio-emotional and moral outcomes.

The problematic scarcity of research on social origins of lying reflects in a lack of valid measures to assess variation in parental lies.

Therefore, I will first design a new, necessary questionnaire and behavioural observation codes to assess parental lying.

Second, I will explore parental and child correlates of moral dissonance to generate hypotheses about its appearance, origins, and effects.

Third, I will assess longitudinal associations (including bidirectional patterns) between parent and child lying, and child outcomes. Fourth, I will experimentally test causal socialization pathways from parent to child lying. A unique integration of insights of psychology and family studies frames lying in a psychosocial context.

Findings will impact various disciplines, aid evidence-based prevention and intervention programs for parents and children, and provide foundations for further expansion of this societal and clinically relevant research line.