{"id":38539,"date":"2016-04-13T11:03:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=38539"},"modified":"2018-12-20T11:37:48","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T16:37:48","slug":"brock-research-shows-parents-struggle-to-detect-their-childrens-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2016\/04\/brock-research-shows-parents-struggle-to-detect-their-childrens-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock research shows parents struggle to detect their children\u2019s lies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Think you know your kids well enough to tell if they\u2019re lying to you or not? New research from Brock University says that\u2019s probably not the case.<\/p>\n<p>Angela Evans, Associate Professor in Brock\u2019s Department of Psychology, says a parent is no more likely to be able to detect their own children\u2019s lies than any other parent or adult without kids. Basically, the odds of anyone detecting a lie are about 50\/50, she says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were curious if parents were actually better at detecting their own children\u2019s lies given their personal experience with them,\u201d says Evans, mother of a three year old and a one year old.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/258660874&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nThe research paper, <em>Can parents detect 8- to 16-year-olds\u2019 lies? Parental biases, confidence, and accuracy, <\/em>was recently published by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0022096516000461\">Journal of Experimental Child Psychology<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Evans says previous research shows anyone \u2014 including a police officer or social worker, for example \u2014 has about a 50\/50 chance of detecting lies. A common belief was that parents were more accurate when it came to identifying lies in their own kids since they have more knowledge about their own child\u2019s behaviour. But Evans\u2019 research disproves that theory.<\/p>\n<p>Videos of children telling lies or telling the truth about having cheated on a test were shown to three groups of people: the children\u2019s parents, other parents, and university students who didn\u2019t have kids.<\/p>\n<p>The group of parents were about 54 per cent accurate in detecting their own children\u2019s lies. The other parents were 51 per cent accurate and the undergrads were also 51 per cent accurate \u2014 rates that vary little from a 50\/50 chance.<\/p>\n<p>That result wasn\u2019t necessarily surprising, says Evans, but what wasn\u2019t expected was how biased parents were in their belief that their own child would be honest.<\/p>\n<p>The group of parents had a strong truth bias about their own children \u2014 typically believing they were telling the truth. This led to a higher accuracy of detecting truthful statements (93 per cent) and a much lower accuracy of detecting lies (eight per cent).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey want to believe that their child isn\u2019t going to cheat on a test and, if they did, that they would tell the truth about having cheated,\u201d Evans says. \u201cThis means that when children lie to their parents, they are able to get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><u><\/u>Evans says the lesson parents should take away from the research is the importance of developing a trusting relationship with their kids from a young age.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDeveloping open communication early is important so children are willing to share the information with us, rather than trying to catch them telling lies,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Think you know your kids well enough to tell if they\u2019re lying to you or not? New research from Brock University says that\u2019s probably not the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":38540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,5],"tags":[4020,4019,546,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38541,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38539\/revisions\/38541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}