Longitudinal Associations between Lie Evaluations and Frequency: The Moderating Role of Age

While previous studies have demonstrated correlations between children and adolescents' evaluations of lies and lie-telling behaviors, the temporal order of these associations over time and changes across this developmental period remain unexamined. The current study examined longitudinal associations among children and adolescents' (N = 1128; M[subscript age] = 11.54, SD = 1.68, 49.80% male, and 83.6% white) evaluations of lies to parents for autonomy and lie-telling frequency to parents and friends. Autoregressive cross-lagged analysis revealed longitudinal associations moderated by age. Among children, evaluations of lies predicted greater lie-telling rates over time. Conversely, among adolescents, lie-telling frequency predicted lie evaluations over time, and evaluations predicted lying to parents over time. These results demonstrate a novel developmental pattern of the associations between moral evaluations of lies and lie-telling.