Teaching your child to always be honest could have some negative repercussions.
A new peer-reviewed study shows that children who are blunt truth-tellers are judged more harshly by adults than children who lie to be polite and protect others from the truth.
Dr. Laure Brimbal, an assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University, is the lead author of the study. She told KMOX that she and her co-author got interested in the topic because there's lots of research on antisocial lying, but not much on why kids lie pro-socially.
"When you lie to protect yourself, that's considered antisocial -- when the person lying stands to gain from from that lie," Brimbal said. "A pro-social lie is going to be when you lie for kind of an altruistic goal. So to protect someone's feelings, to protect someone, just to keep them safe."
A pro-social lie, she said, would be a kid telling their parent that the food they made is delicious -- even if they don't like it.
"If you look at all sorts of different characteristics of how people can be judged, being judged a liar is the worst thing that people can be judged as," Brimbal said.
But why she found this interesting, she said, is that sometimes we feel like we have to lie. In her research, she and her co-author talked to parents and childless adults and asked them to rate different characteristics about niceness, trustworthiness and honestly.
"In situations...when they're asked something and they they lied to protect someone's feelings, the children were rated more trustworthy, and more honest. So that would be positive, right?" She said. But subtle truth tellers were rated more positively than blunt truth tellers. So you have sort of a certain type of truth teller that's actually rated less positively from a disposition perspective than liars, but liars are viewed as less trustworthy."
Brimbal said that children start to lie at around two or three years old.
"It's actually pretty cool. Because it can be an indication of kind of a developmental line where they learn something called theory of mind," she explained. "So to be able to lie, you have to understand that what you know, is different than what someone else knows. And so you have to be able to understand that to be able to lie, right?"
Hear more from Dr. Laure Brimbal on her study and how and why kids lie:
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