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Deception is a common phenomenon in everyday life, yet some people generally lie more than others and some people consider lying more acceptable than others do. Current knowledge about lie acceptability across development or about the individual differences in emotion or personality which shape it is still in an incipient stage. We aimed to expand this emerging body of knowledge by investigating lie acceptability across three educational stages (primary school, middle school and high school) in a sample of 821 children and adolescents, ages 7 to 18. We also examined several predictors of lie acceptability assessed with the Behavioural Assessment System for Children and Adolescents (BASC): anxiety, sensation seeking, social desirability, attitudes towards school and teachers, and relationships with peers and parents. Lower anxiety and lower sensation seeking predicted middle school children's reduced lie acceptability. We showed that positive attitudes towards school and teachers predicted lower lie acceptability for primary and middle school children, but were not significant predictors for high school children. For middle school children, better peer relationships also predicted lower lie acceptability. This suggests that various predictors contribute differently to shaping lie acceptability across development, which can prove instrumental in designing age-appropriate interventions to reduce deceptive behaviour.

This study investigated the effect of moral stories on children's honesty during a temptation resistance paradigm in a large sample of 3 to 6-year-olds (N = 296). Both children and their parents were also asked to anticipate if a child vignette protagonist would confess to a minor misdeed and also to predict the consequences of this potential confession. Research Findings: Moral stories emphasizing positive or negative consequences for confessions of a misdeed did not significantly alter children's deceptive behavior. Moreover, the protagonist's expected confession in the vignette also proved unrelated to children's own transgression (peeking), subsequent lying behavior, or to their subsequent confession of the transgression in the temptation resistance paradigm. Parents and children concurred in anticipating that the vignette protagonist would confess. However, while most children expected aversive consequences for the protagonist confession (punishment), most parents expected non-aversive, positive ones (mainly praise and encouragement). Practice or Policy: Our results do not support the benefits of reading moral stories about fictional characters for promoting honesty. Children and parents had divergent interpretations of the consequences of confessions. Practices encouraging honest behavior should reduce punitive behaviors and reward children's truth telling, which is not what most children consider to be the case, despite their parents' views on the topic.

Although tattling is a common practice among young children, there is little systematic research about its socioemotional correlates. The current study focused on children's tattling between the ages of 5 and 7, assessing both their explicit attitudes toward tattling and their actual reporting of a transgression and relating them to individual differences in socioemotional competence and trait anxiety. Research Findings: About half of the children reported an adult's transgression freely or when generally prompted about the event, whereas the other half either reported only when confronted with a directly incriminatory question or completely concealed the adult's transgression. There was a minor congruence between the actual tattling behavior and children's explicit attitudes toward tattling (obligation to report a major transgression), measured via their reaction to a series of vignettes. A favorable attitude toward tattling was positively related to children's ability to recognize basic emotions and their external causes, yet it was negatively associated with the understanding of more complex components, such as the possibility of hiding an emotion. Moreover, tattling behavior was negatively related to understanding internally (belief-based) generated emotions and positively related to individual levels of anxiety. Practice or Policy: Educational practices should take into account individual differences in children's socioemotional development when relating to their tattling behaviors, preferably decreasing the amount of ambivalence a child experiences in this situation.