Cultural Differences in Children’s White Lie-Telling Behaviour

This research explored cultural differences in children’s white lie-telling behaviour by comparing 4- to 5-year-old Anglo Canadian, Chinese Canadian, and Russian Canadian children. Two online experiments, a Reverse Rouge Task (Experiment 1) and an Art Rating Task (Experiment 2), put participants in politeness situations that prompted them to tell a white lie (or a blunt truth). Parental measures of collectivism and parenting style were also collected to explore children’s likelihood of white lie-telling in relation to these factors. The current data revealed that, contrary to our hypotheses, children’s likelihood of white lie-telling behaviour did not vary as a function of their cultural background or the presence/absence of a stated social consequence and was not predicted by parental collectivism or authoritarianism. Across both experiments, parental authoritativeness was positively associated with children’s likelihood of white lie-telling behaviour. These findings are discussed in relation to possible factors that might have accounted for the lack of cultural differences, and directions for future research are proposed.