Honesty is an important value that children acquire through socialization. To date, the socialization process by which children learn to behave honestly remains relatively unexamined.Researchers may have left this area of research relatively unexamined because there is no framework to understand how parents socialize honesty and lie-telling in their children.As such, we suggest that the domains-of-socialization approach, which organizes the socialization process into various domains based on different aspects of the caregiver-child relationship, may provide such a framework. Using this framework, researchers can operationalize vague parenting variables and identify gaps in the research, allowing them to investigate the relationship between socialization and developmental trajectories of honesty and lie-telling tendencies more thoroughly. In this paper, we review the literature on factors influencing children's lie-telling and honesty in relation to the five domains to demonstrate the applicability of the domainsof-socialization framework to research on the socialization of honesty. We also provide recommendations for future research on the socialization of honesty using a domainspecific approach, which will contribute to our understanding of how children develop into normative or problematic liars.
This study examines how children's age, gender and interviewer gender affected children's testimony after witnessing a theft. Children (N ¼ 127, age ¼ 6-11 years) witnessed an experimenter (E1) find money, which he/she may/may not have taken. E1 then asked the children to falsely deny that the theft occurred, falsely accuse E1 of taking the money, or tell the truth when interviewed by a second experimenter. Falsely denying or falsely accusing influenced children's forthcomingness and quality of their testimony. When accusing, boys were significantly more willing than girls to disclose about the theft earlier and without being asked directly. When truthfully accusing, children gave lengthier testimony to same-gendered adults. When denying, children were significantly more willing to disclose the theft earlier to male interviewers than to females. As children aged, they were significantly less likely to lie, more likely to disclose earlier when accusing, and give lengthier and more consistent testimony.
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