While there has been extensive research on children's moral knowledge about lying and truthtelling and their actual lie-or truth-telling behaviors, research to examine the relationship between the 2 is extremely rare. This study examined one hundred and twenty 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds' moral understanding of lies and their actual lying behaviors in a politeness situation. Results revealed that as age increased, children increasingly evaluated others' lying in politeness situations less negatively and were more inclined to tell lies in such situations themselves. Contrary to previous findings, children's socio-moral knowledge about lying was significantly related to their actual behaviors particularly when children's rationales underlying their moral judgments were consistent with their motives for actual lie-or truth-telling in the politeness situation.
Lying and Truth-Telling in Children: From Concept to ActionLying is a common social phenomenon. It occurs regularly in various social contexts for a multitude of purposes. For children, there are two types of lies that are of great importance during their socialization. One type is the lies that violate moral rules as they are typically told to benefit oneself at the expense of others. Due to the anti-social nature of this type of lie, it is universally discouraged by children's caregivers and teachers from a very early age. The other type of lies are lies that are told with an intention to help, not harm, another individual (e.g., faking liking an undesirable gift in front of a gift-giver) and are thus prosocial in nature. Although philosophers and theologians have long debated about whether prosocial lies should be morally sanctioned (Bok, 1978), in everyday practice, such lies are told frequently (DePaulo & Bell, 1996;DePaulo & Kashy, 1998), and often entail positive values (Nyberg, 1993). Some theorists such as Sweetser (1987) have even suggested that in some situations prosocial lies are not only socially acceptable but also are not lies at all.There has been extensive research on the development of lying which dates back to the beginning of developmental psychology (e.g., Binet, 1896;Darwin, 1877;Piaget, 1932). This longstanding interest in this topic is due to the fact that lying can serve as a window into many aspects of children's developing minds, for example, intelligence (Binet, 1896;Lewis, 1993), theory of mind (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989;Leekam, 1993;Peskin, 1992;Peterson, 1995;Peterson, Peterson, & Seeto, 1983;Polak & Harris, 1999;Sodian, 1991, Talwar, Gordon, & Lee, 2007), moral understanding (Piaget, 1932 (Hartshorne & May, 1928), and children's competence as witnesses in the courts of law (Goodman et al., 2006;Lyon, 2000;Strichartz & Burton, 1990;Talwar, Lee, Bala & Lindsay, 2002; for a review, see Lee, 2000).
Research on Antisocial LyingTo date, most studies have focused on the development of antisocial lies and can be divided into two major streams. One stream investigates children's conceptions and moral judgments of antisocial li...