Parents with Greater Religiosity Lie Less to Their Children

• In Event: Parenting by Lying: Interdisciplinary Evidence from Singapore, Canada, and Turkey

Abstract

Extant research on deception in parent-child relationships has mainly examined children’s deceptive behaviors, but the phenomenon of parental lying remains understudied. Parents around the world adopt lying as a means to influence their children’s emotions and behaviors (Brown, 2002; Heyman et al., 2013). For instance, when a child throws a tantrum and refuses to follow the parent in public, the parent may induce the child’s behavioral compliance by saying: “If you don’t come with me now, I will leave you here by yourself.” Whereas the parent has no intention to do so (Heyman et al., 2013).
Although lying provides parents with the ease of obtaining their children’s immediate compliance, it may afford negative implications on children’s moral development in the long run. Lying contradicts parents’ emphasis on honesty and may even create an unwanted modeling effect on children. Existing evidence supports this reasoning–young adults’ exposure to parental lying during childhood was associated with heightened psychosocial maladjustment problems and greater dishonesty toward parents as a grown-up (Santos et al., 2017; Setoh et al., 2020). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the occurrence and correlates of parental lying in order to better inform parenting practices.
One possible predictor of parental lying is religiosity, as individuals who were high on religiosity had greater disapproval of lying and were less likely to engage in dishonest behaviors (Stavrova & Siegers, 2013). In the current study, we put the relations between religiosity and various types of parental lying into test. We expected religiosity to correlate negatively with the telling of self-oriented lies, but not other-oriented lies. Another goal of the current study is to understand the cross-cultural specificity of parental lying through surveying parents from a novel cultural context–Singapore.
Fifty-two Singaporean parents (30 mothers, Mage = 37.59 years) participated in this study. Parents completed the Singapore Parental Lying Scale, which was developed by interviewing Singaporean undergraduates about the types of lies they recall their parents told during childhood. The scale consists of three types of self-oriented lies (i.e., instrumental lies, superstitious lies, and cheating lies) and other-oriented white lies. Parents also completed the DUREL–a multi-dimensional measure of religiosity.
Results suggest two main conclusions. First, parental lying is a prevalent phenomenon. All the parents could recall telling instrumental lies (i.e., lying to control children’s emotions and behaviors). Moreover, the majority of parents could recall telling superstitious lies (67%), cheating lies (83%), and white lies (83%). Secondly, greater parental religiosity was associated with a lower likelihood of lying, except for other-oriented white lies, Table 1.
The current set of findings provides insights into parental socialization and the influence of religion in shaping moral behaviors. Moreover, it also highlights the importance of context in studying parental lying. Unlike parents from China and the U.S. (Heyman et al., 2013), whose lying behaviors were unrelated to religiosity, Singaporean parents’ religiosity predicted their telling of self-oriented lies. Therefore, although parental lying may exist across cultures, the factors that influence parental lying may vary from culture to culture.  

Authors

• Siqi Zhao, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachel Jackson, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gail D Heyman, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author