Lee – cultural differences in lying motivation

What really motivates a child to lie is a very big question. But, so what we have found, there are two basic motivations.  One kind is basically to avoid punishment and to benefit, to gain personal benefits.  So lying to cover up a transgression is one of those lies to – for personal protection.  Typically, what happens in a regular household is if a child transgresses, and sometimes parents will say, “If you tell me the truth, I’m not going to punish you”, but actually that’s not true.  So observational studies have shown that when a child confesses about his or her transgression, the parents always punish one way or the other.  So the child learns very quickly, it’s actually a much better way to avoid punishment altogether by just lying to cover up a transgression. 

There’s another kind of motivation that is we socialize our kids to be nice people to others and so this motivation is really instilled by parenting, by socialization.  So, for example, white lies – so we want to be polite to others, we want, we do not want to hurt others feelings by telling white lies and because of that we learn how to tell white lies.  White lies starts about three years of age as well but at the first the child typically tells it out of fear.  For example, if they see someone giving you a gift you really don’t like but you don’t want to say it because you don’t want the gift-giver to be mad at them but they are not thinking about – if I tell you the truth, you’re going to be hurt in terms of your feelings.  But with time, by about four or five years of age, they actually figure it out and then they start to tell white lies about 50-60% of the time and then the rate of lying goes up quite dramatically with age.  So now they start to tell white lies to be polite to others, to avoid hurting another person’s feelings.  And that goes hand in hand with their understanding of why we need to tell white lies.  So in North America these are the two major motiviations. 

But, however, in other countries, there are other kinds of motivation.  For example, in East Asia, in Japan, in Korea, in China, in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore even, kids also learn to tell different kinds of lies.  So one kind of lie they tell that’s very different from the kids in North America is to be modest.  So for example, if you have got a very high grade from your exam, when your friends ask you how do you do in the exam, instead of saying “oh, I got 100”, you can say “oh, I’m not very good”. But in these more collectivist cultures you are not supposed to be different or superior to other kids.  That’s going to damage the cohesion among the group, so what you do is you have to minimize your personal achievement.  So then kids learn to do that by telling so-called modesty lies and goes, younger age, 7 years of age, Chinese kids or Japanese kids don’t do that.  They still would be very proud, so “I got 100 or 99” or whatever.  But by the time they get to about 11 or 12 they start to hide the fact they have achieved something that others have not achieved.  So, and that goes hand in hand with the understanding of the moral norms of these, the cultures they are living in. So that’s another kind of motivation.