Parents May Help Their Kids to Lie

Abstract

Deception was one way (possibly not a good way) for children to interact with surroundings by considering others’ perspective. The development of deception itself, as well as the strategy of deception, was related to the environment they lived in and people they live with. In this study, we conducted experiment using “Die in a cup” task. By inducing parents to help their children to lie about the dice results, we showed that in order to escape from uncertainty (in exp1), or get a bigger chance to win a reward (in exp2), parents, together with their kids, lied on a aggregated level. Specifically, baby boys adopted more radical strategies to win for a present (by claiming they got the best results, Boys vs. Girls: 29% vs. 13% in exp1, 9%:0.4% in exp2), while baby girls ended up to choose a better but not obvious result. Although parents were not directly tested in our experiments, it is only with their help that children could complete their game, particularly showed consistent deception. Compared to previous research that men constantly cheat more than women, we could say that the way children were brought up shaped the way they will be as an adult.