Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily summarizes some interesting research on teens and lying. The research focused on the issue of when teens thought it was okay to lie to their parents or to their friends. The results are interesting: teens are much more likely to think it is okay to lie to their parents when their parents direct them to do something immoral (such as not to be friends with a person of another race) than other circumstances, but teens are much more likely to lie to their parents than to a friend:
Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:
Moral:
* Parents don’t want their child to befriend another teen because he/she is of a different race
* Parents want their child to fight another teen because he/she had been teased by them
Personal:
* Parents don’t want their child dating a teen they don’t like
* Parents think the club their child wants to join is a waste of time
Prudential:
* Parents object to their child not wanting to finish her/his homework
* Parents don’t want their child to ride a motorcycle
In each case, the participants were asked whether it would be acceptable for a 16-year-old to lie about doing (or not doing) these things despite their parents’ objections. . . .
[N]early all teens believe it’s okay to lie to your parents when you’ve defied their expectations to commit an immoral act. A statistically significant portion of older teens (age 15-17) believe lying is okay when the parents have personal objections to their behavior, but significantly fewer younger teens (age 12-14) believe this type of lie is acceptable. When the parents seem to be looking out for the child’s best interests (the prudential domain), most teens believe lying is wrong — though significantly more older teens still believe lying is acceptable in this case as well.
But Perkins and Turiel went further: They asked a separate group of 64 teens the same questions, except the role of parents was completely replaced by the role of a friend. Is it okay to lie to a friend? . . .
Both groups were significantly less likely to say it was okay to lie to friends in the moral and personal domains — even if a friend asked you to do something immoral, about 50 percent of teens still said it was not okay to lie to them about the fact that you took the moral high ground (of course, telling the truth might be the higher moral course in this situation). In the prudential domain, the pattern was reversed, and lies were seen as more justified by both groups of teens.
In many ways these results aren’t especially surprising, but it is interesting to note when the differences in age groups come into play. Younger teens are less likely to believe lying about personal / prudential situations is okay compared to older teens, suggesting that older teens justify their lies based on their sense of autonomy.
But there are limits to this trend: the researchers also asked both groups whether it was acceptable to lie about a misdeed (breaking their parents’ / friends’ cell phone), and all agreed that this was unacceptable.
Read it all here.