Lied-to children more likely to cheat and lie

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-03/uoc--lcm031814.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 18-Mar-2014

Contact: Inga Kiderra
University of California - San Diego

Lied-to children more likely to cheat and lie

People lie – we know this. People lie to kids – we know this, too. But what happens next? Do children who've been lied to lie more themselves?

Surprisingly, the question had not been asked experimentally until Chelsea Hays, then an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, approached professor Leslie Carver with it. Now the pair have a paper out in Developmental Science, suggesting that adult dishonesty does make a difference, and not in a good way.

"As far as we know," said Carver, associate professor of psychology and human development in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences. "This is the first experiment confirming what we might have suspected: Lying by an adult affects a child's honesty."

-----

The 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds who had been lied to were both more likely to cheat and then more likely to lie about having done so, too.

About 60 percent of the school-aged children who had not been lied to by the experimenter peeked at the tricky temptation toy – and about 60 percent of the peekers lied about it later. Among those that had been lied to, those figures rose to nearly 80 percent peeking and nearly 90 percent of the peekers lying.

-----