Practice what you preach? Exploring parental attitudes, behaviors, and teaching about lying
Bibliographic Data
Many parents lie to their children. Paradoxically, many also disapprove of lying to children, and teach that lying is unacceptable, suggesting discrepancies between parental lying attitudes, behaviors, and teaching. This study explored the alignment and discrepancies between parental attitudes, behaviors, and direct moral instruction across three lie types: other-oriented, self-oriented, and instrumental. Cross-sectional data were collected from parents in the Netherlands (N = 312, 79.8% mothers) and analyzed using correlational and latent profile analyses. Between-parent associations suggested general alignment between attitudes, behaviors, and direct moral instruction, with variations in strength depending on lie type. However, within-parent analyses showed many parents exhibited discrepancies between their lying attitudes, behaviors, and direct moral instruction. Prevalence and patterns of alignment and discrepancies differed by lie type. For instance, discrepant profiles were more prevalent for self-oriented and instrumental lying than for other-oriented lying. These findings suggest most parents do not fully practice what they believe or preach, nor consistently preach what they believe, reflecting internal moral conflicts within parents and inconsistencies in children’s moral socialization. This study expands understanding of parental alignment and discrepancies and proposes hypotheses about environmental, societal, and relational factors influencing how parents navigate moral beliefs, behaviors, and teaching in daily life
Deception · Lie detection · Lying · Moral behavior · Moral dilemma · Child and Animal Learning Development · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies
Cognitive Dissonance
White Lies
From little white lies to filthy liars
Variable-Centered, Person-Centered, and Person-Specific Approaches
TidyLPA
Measurement Error in Survey Data
Statistical Power to Detect the Correct Number of Classes in Latent Profile Analysis
Latent Class Analysis
Prosocial lies
Ethical dissonance, justifications, and moral behavior
Toward using confidence intervals to compare correlations.
The Role of Parents in Moral Development
Integrating Different Perspectives on Socialization Theory and Research
Finding latent groups in observed data
An entropy criterion for assessing the number of clusters in a mixture model
Calculating and reporting effect sizes to facilitate cumulative science
The theory of planned behavior
The reliability of a two-item scale
Normativity and Practical Judgement
Latent profile analysis
Parental lying to children
Individualism and the “Western Mind” reconsidered
Revised Socialization of Lying Questionnaire
Socialization of lying scale
Do As I Say and Not As I Think
False excuses
Perceptions of Dishonesty
The Right to Do Wrong
In a very different voice
Cross-cultural differences in children's choices, categorizations, and evaluations of truths and lies
Everyday lies in close and casual relationships
Lying in everyday life
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |