As is often the case, parents are very shocked to discover their children have lied to them for the first time. But new research has suggested many parents may not even notice many of the lies their children tell them.
Psychologists have discovered that most parents are over-confident in their children's honesty and this may impair their ability to discover a lie.
The findings may help to explain why some parents seem to be willing to let their children get away with almost anything even in the face of the evidence(迹象). They say parents suffer from a "truth bias(偏见)" with their own teenagers, but when faced with lies from other people's children, they have less difficulty telling if a statement is true or not.
Dr. Angela Evans, a psychologist at Brock University in Canada, said, "The close relationship that parents share with their own children may lead to parents failing to discover their children's lies. Parents' truth bias may result in parents being less doubtable of their children, allowing them to successfully cheat(欺骗) them."
Most children are thought to start lying as early as two years old but start telling more believable lies at around the age of four years old. Learning how to lie is considered as a key part of cognitive (认知的) and social development in children. But many parents are shocked when their children start lying to them. In their study, Dr Evans and her colleagues filmed 108 children aged between 8 and 16 as they performed a test after being asked not to look at the answers. They were then asked afterwards if they had looked, with about 45% truthfully denying(否认) looking, about 30% lying about looking and 8% admitting (承认) to looking.
Videos of those denying looking were then shown to 152 parents of children aged 8 to 16. Eighty of the parents had children who had taken part in the test. The researchers found that the parents were less able to discover lies told by their own children than by other people's children.
