Evans Angela D, Bender Jasmine, Lee Kang
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada.
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2016 Jul;147:152-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.02.011. Epub 2016 Mar 24.
Honesty is a crucial aspect of a trusting parent-child relationship. Given that close relationships often impair our ability to detect lies and are related to a truth bias, parents may have difficulty with detecting their own children's lies. The current investigation examined the lie detection abilities (accuracy, biases, and confidence) of three groups of participants: non-parent group (undergraduates), parent-other group (parents who evaluated other peoples' children's statements), and parent-own group (parents who evaluated their own children's statements). Participants were presented with videos of 8- to 16-year-olds telling either the truth or a lie about having peeked at the answers to a test and were asked to evaluate the veracity of the statement along with their confidence in their judgment. All groups performed at chance in the accuracy of their veracity judgments. Furthermore, although all groups tended to hold a truth bias for 8- to 16-year-olds, the parent-own group held a much stronger truth bias than the other two groups. All groups were also highly confident in their judgments (70%-76%), but confidence ratings failed to predict accuracy. These findings, taken together, suggest that the close relationship that parents share with their own children may be related to a bias toward believing their children's statements and, hence, a failure to detect their lies.
诚实是建立信任的亲子关系的一个关键方面。鉴于亲密关系往往会削弱我们察觉谎言的能力，并且与真相偏向有关，父母可能难以察觉自己孩子的谎言。当前的调查考察了三组参与者的谎言检测能力（准确性、偏向和信心）：非父母组（大学生）、父母-他人组（评估他人孩子陈述的父母）和父母-自己孩子组（评估自己孩子陈述的父母）。参与者观看了8至16岁孩子关于是否偷看考试答案而说出真话或谎言的视频，并被要求评估陈述的真实性以及他们对自己判断的信心。所有组在真实性判断的准确性上都表现得与随机水平相当。此外，尽管所有组对8至16岁的孩子都倾向于持有真相偏向，但父母-自己孩子组的真相偏向比其他两组要强得多。所有组对自己的判断也都高度自信（70%-76%），但信心评级并不能预测准确性。综合这些发现表明，父母与自己孩子之间的亲密关系可能与倾向于相信孩子的陈述有关，因此，难以察觉他们的谎言。
