Time travel study shows my years take up more space than yours

We think about time in terms of space, as revealed in the way we talk about it ("looking ahead to our future"; "looking back at our past") and in the results from psychology experiments. For instance, people from countries that write right-to-left find it easier to associate future events with the right-hand side of space. This begs the question - how much space do we think time takes up, and is it always constant, or does it vary with how richly we represent particular episodes?

Brittany Christian and her colleagues have explored this question with a pair of fascinating studies. The first involved 60 participants (aged 18 to 32 years) marking the position of various birthdays on a 36cm horizontal line. The middle of the line was marked as "now". Some participants were asked to draw a mark to show the position of their 8th and 9th birthdays, their previous and next birthdays (relative to now), and their 58th and 59th birthdays, representing past, present and future periods of time, respectively. Other participants did the same for the equivalent birthdays of a best friend; others did it for a stranger who shared the same birth date as them.

The key result here was that participants indicating their own birthdays tended to leave a larger gap between their previous and next birthdays, as compared with participants who marked the birthdays of a best friend. In turn, those marking the birthdays of a best friend left a larger gap between previous and next birthdays than did participants who marked the birthday positions of a stranger. No contrasts emerged for gaps between birthdays in the further past or future (8th and 9th or 58th and 59th), perhaps because we represent such distant time more generically. The main result suggests that the more richly we encode past and future events in our minds, the more physical space we allocate to our mental representation of those periods.

A second study was similar but this time 63 participants (aged 18 to 32) controlled their passage backwards or forwards through time, an experience that was created using the optic flow of white dots on a computer screen. The contraction of the dots towards the centre creates the sensation of moving backwards, the expansion of dots outwards gives the feeling of travelling forwards. Using a keypad to control their motion, the participants were asked to move forward or backwards through time until they reached various birthdays up to ten years in the past or future. As in the first study, they did this either for their own birthdays, the birthdays of a friend, or a stranger.

Participants chose to travel through more space to reach birthday events in their own lives, compared with the space they travelled when journeying towards a friend's same birthdays. Participants traversed the least amount of space to reach those birthday dates in the life of a stranger. These differences were true for past events and future events, and they held across the full span of time that was investigated (i.e. a birthday up to ten years in the past or future).

Christian and her colleagues said their finding was consistent with construal level theory: "more space is allocated to events that feature self-relevant and episodically rich (i.e. more concrete) mental representations." Future research is needed to see if other factors also affect the amount of space allocated to temporal representations, such as factual knowledge or emotional salience. Would we allocate more space to time in the life of someone who we like but don't know well, or to someone we know well, but don't like?

The researchers said the "behavioural implications of these findings remains an important challenge for future". It's speculative for now, but they surmised that their results could help make sense of the planning fallacy - our tendency to underestimate how long things will take us, compared with others. The fact that we represent our own time with more space could tempt us to feel like we can get more done in a given period.

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Christian BM, Miles LK, and Macrae CN (2012). Your space or mine? Mapping self in time. PloS one, 7 (11) PMID: 23166617

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Self-esteem is catching

You've probably heard about the negative research showing how people take their work stress home, upsetting their partner's mood. Well, the good news is there's a positive equivalent. Angela Neff and her colleagues monitored the self-esteem of 102 working couples over five days (mostly German academics), getting them to answer questions about their work-related self-esteem when they got home, and then again at bed-time (e.g. they rated their agreement with statements like "I feel as smart as others"). They also completed a measure of their general self-esteem levels and their empathy.

The key finding was that a person's after-work self-esteem was positively related to their partner's self-esteem at bed-time that same day. In other words, when one person came home with a spring in their step, feeling confident about their ability at work, this seemed to infect their partner, so that by bed-time, the partner too was feeling more confident about their own work-related abilities. This transfer of positive self-esteem was more pronounced when the receiving partner tended to be of lower self-esteem more generally and was more empathic.

"This finding supports the notion that work and family do not necessarily have to be conflicting domains," the researchers said, "but can also be mutually enriching." That said, there's a negative interpretation of these results. If one person comes to depend on their partner's after-work positivity, this can backfire on those occasions that the partner has a bad day.

Neff and her colleagues said their finding was important because research shows that high work-related self-esteem tends to go hand in hand with better job performance and satisfaction. In this sense, the psychological effect of one person's success at work can filter its way through to their partner, in turn boosting his or her work performance the next day. From a practical perspective, this shows managers how important and far-reaching the effects can be of providing their employees with positive (self-esteem enhancing) feedback.

On a more sober note, the study has several limitations, as the authors realise. This includes the fact that they have no idea of the mechanism by which self-esteem passes from one person to the other. And the sample was narrow, made up of highly-educated people who nearly all came from one field of work. It remains to be seen if the same result will be found with more diverse participants.

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Neff, A., Sonnentag, S., Niessen, C., and Unger, D. (2012). What's mine is yours: The crossover of day-specific self-esteem Journal of Vocational Behavior, 81 (3), 385-394 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2012.10.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

"The end of history illusion" illusion

An intriguing study was published in Science recently with the eye-catching title "The End of History Illusion". It spawned plentiful uncritical media coverage, including the You Won't Stay The Same article in the NYT, and already the effect has its own Wikipedia entry. But does it really exist or has hype and stylish presentation generated an illusory illusion?

Jordi Quoidbach, Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson claimed to have shown that people of all ages underestimate how much their personalities, preferences and values will change in the future. Ideally the psychologists would have asked people to predict the amount they'd change, and then followed them up later to compare the actual change with the prediction. They didn't do that.

Instead, their favoured approach was to survey over 7,000 people aged 18 to 68 and to ask some of them - "the reporters" - to recall their personality ten years ago, using a personality questionnaire, and to ask others - "the predictors" to estimate their expected personality ten years hence. All participants also answered questions about their current personality. The key contrast was the amount of difference between recalled vs. current personality (documented by reporters) and the amount of difference between predicted and current personality (documented by the predictors). Across every decade of life, the former was much larger. People thought their personality had changed more than they thought it would change.

But there are some serious problems here. First off, there's no actual data on real change. How do we know this is a delusion of prediction? Perhaps the reporters are wrong about how much they've changed. Quoidbach's team realised this so they looked at data from a separate longitudinal study that really had followed people over time (once in 95-96 and again in 04-06), allowing examination of actual personality change.

Unfortunately, this MacArthur Foundation Survey of MidLife Development in the United States (MIDUS) used a completely different measure of personality. "Direct comparison of the data was not possible," Quoidbach et al confessed. Nonetheless, after comparing the amount of personality change in the MIDUS survey with amount of change estimated by reporters in their own study, the researchers said the change was "almost identical", and "substantially larger" than the change predicted by the predictors in their study.

But there's another serious issue with the new research, which was highlighted in a recent blog post: that is, the predictors might well have believed that their personality will change, but they didn't know which direction it will change in. Take extraversion. Perhaps they will become more shy, perhaps more gregarious? Without knowing the direction of change, the most accurate prediction is to report no change in extraversion from their current score.

Quoidbach's group hinted at this problem by acknowledging that participants may not "feel confident predicting specific changes". To overcome this, they asked over a thousand people to answer a non-specific question, estimating how much they felt they'd changed as a person, or how much they would change. It doesn't entirely deal with the direction of change issue, but again, "reporters" estimated more change than "predictors" predicted.

Yet another survey with thousands more participants asked them to recall or predict changes in their values over ten years - things like hedonism and security. Again, people reported more change in their values than they predicted. Recalled change was more modest in older participants, but again the difference in recall and prediction occurred at every decade. However, this survey has the same problems as before - the issues of memory distortion and predicting bi-directional change - and in this case they went unaddressed.

Gathering yet more data, the researchers surveyed thousands of people about their preferences in the past compared with now, and asked others about their likely preferences in the future, compared with now - things like favoured holidays, taste in music and food. The idea of this study was to eliminate memory bias. Quoidbach et al reasoned that people have an accurate sense of their past preferences, although they didn't reference any data to support this claim. People recalling the past again appeared to have changed more than was anticipated by those looking ahead.

A final, far smaller study attempted to address the practical implications of our failure to anticipate how much we will change in the future. One hundred and seventy adults were split in two groups. One stated their current favourite band and said how much they'd pay to see them in ten years. The other group reported their favourite band ten years ago and said how much they'd pay to see them today. There was a big difference - those looking ahead said they'd pay 61 per cent more to see their current favourite band, as compared with the price the retrospective group said they'd pay to see their former favourite band today. "Participants substantially overpaid for a further opportunity to indulge a current preference," the researchers said.

But was this a fair comparison? The retrospective group know things about their former favourite band that the future group couldn't possibly know about their current favourite band. For example, perhaps members of the retrospective group didn't like their chosen band's follow-up albums, perhaps they already saw them in concert many times over the last ten years. Maybe the future group were optimistic about the future creative output of their current favourite band. In short, there are so many other factors at play here, besides participants' beliefs about the stability of their own preferences.

Convinced by their own demonstrations of the End of History Illusion, Quoidbach et al speculated about the possible causes. One explanation, they suggested, is that the effect is a manifestation of our gilded view of ourselves: "most people believe that their personalities are attractive ....," the researchers wrote, "having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change." But this explanation seems to ignore the self-doubt and pessimism that blights many people's lives. Quoidbach's other proposal is that the End of History Illusion is a manifestation of the fluency heuristic - because it's tricky to imagine change in the future, we infer that change is unlikely.

These speculations are premature. It would be easier to believe in the End of History of Illusion if there was data on actual change, rather than a reliance on participants' memories of themselves in the past. Even if the effect is real, it's also not clear if this is a general bias about the future that extends beyond our beliefs about ourselves. What predictions would we make about the future change of other people? Or about human culture in general? Here's one thing that surely won't change - slick psychology papers with eye-catching titles getting lots of attention.

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Quoidbach J, Gilbert DT, and Wilson TD (2013). The end of history illusion. Science (New York, N.Y.), 339 (6115), 96-8 PMID: 23288539 

[thanks Thom Baguley for help with understanding some of the methodological issues]

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. There's More to Life Than Being Happy - by Emily Esfahani Smith for the Atlantic. "Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a 'taker' while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a 'giver'."

2. The latest issue of the Wellcome Trust's free Big Picture magazine is devoted to the brain and brain scanning techniques.

3. Psychologists discuss the cocktail party effect - BBC Radio 4.

4. How switching tasks maximises creative thinking.

5. The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz - stories and case studies from 25 years as a London psychoanalyst - was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. The book is "already something of a literary sensation", says the Guardian.

6. The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational.

7. Psychological insights into human attention from the skills of a pick-pocket - by Adam Green for the New Yorker.

8. The jobs with the most psychopaths.

9. Psychologists discuss disgust - BBC Radio 4.

10. New book that's definitely worth a look - The World Until Yesterday in which Jared Diamond explores what we can learn from traditional societies. Tom Payne, the Telegraph reviewer, said it left him "riveted and thinking hard". But Wade Davis for The Guardian was less enthusiastic: "the lessons [Diamond] draws from his sweeping examination of culture are for the most part uninspired and self-evident."

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Social disapproval leads to longer lasting behaviour change than cash fines

If you want to influence people's behaviour by hitting them where it hurts, the wallet seems like a great place to aim. Say a local authority began fining litter-bugs on the spot, you can bet the streets would soon be cleaner. But there's a downside. People begin to see the behaviour in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. They stop littering not because it's wrong, but because it makes financial sense. This approach can also encourage would-be litterers to perceive other people's tidy behaviour as a financial rather than a moral choice. None of this matters too much until the litter wardens go home. Absent the financial threat, litterers are quick to start dumping their junk again.

It's not realistic to have a constant method of enforcement in place. So what approach will be more effective than the time-limited influence of fines? A new study by Rob Nelissen and Laetitia Mulder suggests that social disapproval is more effective than financial sanctions because the effects linger on even after the threat of disapproval is lifted.

The researchers invited 84 participants to sit alone at computer cubicles, to play several rounds of a public goods game in groups of four. Players started with 4 Euros each, and every round they chose how much to place into a group kitty. At the end of each round the group stash was multiplied 1.5 times and shared among the four players. The anti-social temptation is to free-load, to enjoy the proceeds from the group payout without contributing a fair share.

One third of the groups played under threat of financial sanction. Each round, these participants saw the contributions of the other players and could choose to fine others one Euro. Players were also told about any fines they'd received. Another third of the groups played under threat of social disapproval. Each round participants could choose to direct their disapproval at other players. They also learned how many players had frowned on their tactics. There was also a control group with no sanction system in place.

For the first seven rounds, both financial threats and social disapproval threats increased fair play (compared with control condition), but the effect of fines was greater. Crucially, at the seventh round, the players in the sanction conditions were told there was a computer malfunction and that the final three rounds would be played without any fining or disapproval system in place. The key test was how they'd behave once the threat of sanction was lifted.

With the sanctions gone, the cooperative play of participants in the financial condition fell away quickly, more so than in the social disapproval condition. Indeed, by the tenth and final round, players in the financial condition played the same selfish style as control condition players. In contrast, the players in the social disapproval condition continued to show signs of increased fair play.

"Clearly this has important implications for public policy," Nelissen and Mulder concluded. "Our results suggest that successful norm induction requires public communication of social (dis)approval, not only because it increases the salience and thus the effectiveness of norms in guiding behaviour, but also because it makes them stick even if people are not consistently punished for their violations."

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Nelissen, R., and Mulder, L. (2013). What makes a sanction “stick”? The effects of financial and social sanctions on norm compliance. Social Influence, 8 (1), 70-80 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.729493

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close

Children's sense of God's closeness is apparently related, not to their mother's religiosity, but to their mother's attachment style - that is, whether the mother is calm and confident in her relationships or anxious and uncertain. Specifically, Rosalinda Cassibba and her colleagues have shown that the children of securely attached mothers (religious or not) tend to think that God is closer, as compared with the children of insecurely attached mothers.

The new finding builds on claims made last century by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby that attachment style is transmitted from generation to generation (via non-genetic means). The new result suggests that a mother's attachment style affects the kind of attachment her child forms not just with her, but with other potential caring figures, even non-corporeal ones.

Seventy-one Italian mothers were classified as having a secure or insecure attachment style based on a short interview. They also answered questions about their religious faith and attachment to God. Meanwhile, their children (average age 7; 29 boys, 42 girls) were presented with a felt board depicting a child and were told six stories involving that child: some were neutral (e.g. he sits at a table and reads), others were more distressing (e.g. his dog died). For each story, the children were asked to place a felt character to show where God was located. The children were able to choose from 10 possible felt figures to represent God - most chose a man or a heart.

The children of securely attached mothers tended to place God nearer to the child in both the neutral and distressing stories. By contrast, the children's placement of God was unrelated to their mother's religiosity. Cassibba and her colleagues aren't certain of the mechanism underlying the relationship between mothers' attachment and children's sense of God's closeness, but they think it probably has to do with the mothers' care-giving style, or possibly a personality style shared with the parent.

The study has a number of short-comings including the fact that the children were locating God's closeness to a fictional child, not to themselves. Also, we don't know how specific this is - would they, for instance, have located a child's teddy bear as nearer? Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said their finding "is important both for attachment research in developmental psychology and the psychology of religion."

Somewhat strangely for an article published in a psychology journal, Cassibba and her colleagues ended with the following advice for the pious: "A caregiver who desires his or her children to come to view God as a close relational partner may do well in placing a high priority on the children's own needs for support and closeness. The caregiver's implicit teachings about relationships is likely to be far more important than his or her explicit preaching about God."

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Cassibba R, Granqvist P, and Costantini A (2013). Mothers' attachment security predicts their children's sense of God's closeness. Attachment and human development, 15 (1), 51-64 PMID: 23216392

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

These are the unwritten rules of Facebook

With over a billion users worldwide, Facebook has become a fundamental part of social life. Much as there are long-standing unwritten rules governing the way we behave toward each other face-to-face, today there also exist cultural expectations for how one ought to behave on Facebook. Now researchers at Trinity University in the USA have conducted focus groups and a survey of hundreds of undergrads, in one of the first attempts to find out what these rules are.

Erin Bryant and Jennifer Marmo conducted 6 focus groups with 44 students (aged 19 to 24), during which the participants were asked to brainstorm the rules governing interactions on Facebook. Merging similar-sounding rules, and only including those mentioned in two or more focus groups, the researchers were left with 36 rules.

Next, these rules were shown to 593 more participants (aged 18 to 52), who were asked to think of a particular Facebook acquaintance, causal friend or close friend, and to say how strongly they agreed that each of the 36 rules should be followed when interacting with that person.

Thirteen of the rules to emerge from the focus groups received overall endorsement by the survey participants:

I should expect a response from this person if I post on his/her profile.
I should NOT say anything disrespectful about this person on Facebook.
I should consider how a post might negatively impact this person's relationships.
If I post something that this person deletes, I should not repost it.
I should communicate with this person outside of Facebook.
I should present myself positively but honestly to this person.
I should NOT let Facebook use with this person interfere with getting my work done.
I should NOT post information on Facebook that this person could later use against me.
I should use common sense while interacting with this person on Facebook.
I should consider how a post might negatively impact this person's career path.
I should wish this person happy birthday in some way other than Facebook.
I should protect this person's image when I post on his/her profile.
I should NOT read too much into this person's Facebook motivations.

A fourteenth rule that almost achieved overall endorsement from the survey was: I should be aware the information this person posts about me can have real world consequences.

Looking again at the entire list of 36, the researchers found that these fell into five distinct categories: communication channels (e.g. I should use Facebook chat with this person); control and deception (e.g. I should block this person if he compromises my image); relational maintenance (e.g. I should use Facebook to communicate happy birthday to this person); negative consequences for the self (e.g. I should not post info this person could use against me); and negative consequences for the friend (e.g. I should protect this person's image online).

Another finding was that the categories of rule that were considered most important varied according to what type of friend a person was thinking of. Communication rules and rules governing protecting friends were rated more important when considering close friends. Detection and deception rules were thought most important when considering acquaintances. And relational maintenance rules were rated as more important when thinking of acquaintances and casual friends, perhaps because close friends already interact more outside of Facebook.

The study has obvious limitations - particularly its reliance on a student sample in the USA, and the fact that no actual Facebook behaviours were recorded. Nonetheless, Bryant and Marmo said their exploratory study "can serve as a starting point for future research regarding the subject of interaction rules as they manifest in the digital age." They added that an interesting avenue for future research would be to look at what happens when people contravene these rules.

What do you think is the most important interaction rule when using Facebook? Was it mentioned in this research?

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Bryant, E., and Marmo, J. (2012). The rules of Facebook friendship: A two-stage examination of interaction rules in close, casual, and acquaintance friendships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29 (8), 1013-1035 DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443616

--Further reading--
Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
Shy students who use Facebook have better quality friendships
What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background
People judged as likable in the flesh also make good first impressions online

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week (or so):

1. Atlantic published a truly dazzling long-form feature about anaesthesia and consciousness, including instances when people wake during surgery, and the on-going attempts to build a machine that can somehow measure the level of a person's awareness (their consciousness). (see also).

2. Bang in the middle of the Xmas and New Year festivities, BBC Radio Four broadcast a timely special edition of its Thinking Allowed programme all about intoxication (now on iPlayer).

3. It's never too late to learn a new skill, says Gary Marcus in an up-beat essay for the New Yorker.

4. Vaughan Bell for The Observer wrote a column arguing that violent video games are unlikely to be the catalyst for mass killings, and that playing them could even have cognitive benefits. But this is a controversial area. Daniel Simons recently took to his blog to argue that the evidence-base for the cognitive benefits of video games is woefully weak: "There’s no reason to think that gaming will help your real world cognition any more than would just going for a walk." [check the comments on Simons' blog for debate between him and Bell].

5. It's the season for "Best-Of" lists. Forbes had a good one (compiled by David DiSalvo): "The Top 10 Brain Science and Psychology Stories of 2012".

6. Psychology Today listed their 25 most popular blog posts of 2012: relationships and gender were the dominant themes.

7. Wiley made a whole suite of papers on siblings relationships available for free.

8. The latest Neuropod podcast was posted online, including an item on the genetic and other mechanisms underlying autism.

9. The BPS Social Psychology Section wrote to the Times Higher Educational Supplement, protesting at the way the whole discipline is being tarred by the Stapel brush.

10. The psychology of make-up.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Disgusted people have enhanced ability to spot dirt

The cool, calm extravert - that's the emotional profile that our culture puts on a pedestal. Prudes, introverts and scaredy-cats just aren't fashionable.

Yet there's mounting psychological research showing that unpopular emotional traits often come with advantages. The anxiously attached are quicker to detect danger, such as smoke in a room; those with trait anxiety have fewer accidents; introverts speak in a way that's perceived as more trustworthy. Now Gary Sherman and his colleagues have published research showing how prudish disgust-sensitivity is associated with a superior ability to detect impurities.

Over one hundred students had to judge repeatedly which of four squares on a computer screen was the odd-one-out in terms of its shading. The squares were either light grey against a white background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others (akin to spotting dirt against a white background); or they were dark grey against a black background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others.

Students more prone to disgust (they agreed with statements like "it would bother me to see a rat run across my path") tended to have heightened sensitivity for spotting grey shades against a white background, similar to spotting dirt on a clean surface. They displayed no such heightened sensitivity at the other end of light spectrum - grey on black.

A second study was similar, but this time students more prone to disgust had heightened sensitivity when identifying digits written in light grey against a white background (yet they were no better at spotting grey digits against a mid-grey background).

In a final study, looking at disgusting pictures (e.g. maggots on meat) boosted the ability of disgust-sensitive participants to spot grey digits against a white background. Participants low in disgust sensitivity didn't show this response to the pictures, perhaps because they were unmoved by them.

The effect documented here is a form of perceptual tuning, like the way in infancy we gradually lose our ability to hear sounds that feature in foreign languages. It's not clear if being disgust prone leads to more exposure to clean white surfaces, and so more practice and superior ability at seeing darker shades against a light background. Or if instead, some people have heightened sensitivity at this end of the colour spectrum, which has the effect of making them more prone to disgust. Or both, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

"Disgust not only makes people want to avoid impurities," the researchers said, "but also makes people better able to see them."

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Sherman, G., Haidt, J., and Clore, G. (2012). The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of Impurity. Psychological Science, 23 (12), 1506-1514 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612445318

--Further reading--
More research items on disgust.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When parents lie to their children

We teach our kids that it is wrong to lie, even though most of us do it everyday. In fact, it is often our children who we are lying to. A new study, involving participants in the USA and China, is one of the first to investigate parental lies, finding that the majority of parents tell their children lies as a way to control their behaviour.

Gail Heyman and her colleagues presented 114 parents in the USA and 85 in China with 16 so-called "instrumental lies" in four categories - lies intended to influence the kids' eating habits (e.g. "you need to finish all your food or you will get pimples all over your face"); lies to get the children to leave or stay put (e.g. "If you don't come with me now, I will leave you here by yourself); lies to control misbehaviour (e.g. "If you don't behave I will call the police"); and finally, lies to do with shopping and money (e.g. "I did not bring any money with me today. We can come back another day.").

Eighty-four per cent of US parents and 98 per cent of Chinese parents admitted telling at least one of the 16 lies to their children, and a majority of parents in both countries admitted to telling lies from three of the four categories. The exception was the misbehaviour category - just under half the US parents said they told lies to make their children behaviour better, compared with 80 per cent of Chinese parents.

The lie that the greatest proportion of parents said they told was threatening to leave a child behind if he/she refused to follow the parent. Rates of lying by parents were higher in China than in the US, especially in relation to misbehaviour and eating. The Chinese parents also viewed instrumental lying by parents with more approval than the US parents did; at the same time, they (the Chinese) viewed lying by children with more disapproval. "This cross-cultural difference may reflect greater concern with social cohesiveness and a greater emphasis on respect and obedience," the researchers said.

Asked why they told instrumental lies to their children, parents across both countries talked in terms of a cost-benefit trade-off and the stress of getting children to comply. Other times it was felt children would struggle to understand the truth, such as the complexities of the family budget.

As well as looking at instrumental lies, the study also asked parents about untruths they told their children regarding fantasy characters like the tooth-fairy, or to make their children feel better, for example praising a poor piano performance. Here there were no cultural differences in rates of lie-telling, although the Chinese parents showed less approval toward lying about the existence of fictional characters.

The study has limitations, as acknowledged by the researchers. The two samples differed in other ways besides their culture - the US parents being more highly educated, for example. And of course there was a reliance on self-report rather than an observation or record of actual lies told. Despite these issues, Heyman said their study "helps fill a void in an understudied area that may have strong implications for children's social and moral development."

What do you think about parents lying to their children? Do you lie to yours? Do you remember being lied to as a child?

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Heyman, G., Hsu, A., Fu, G., and Lee, K. (2012). Instrumental lying by parents in the US and China. International Journal of Psychology, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2012.746463

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.