Parenting Journal · Volume 2 · Issue 2 · Licensed source edition
Prosocial lie-telling in preschoolers: The impacts of ethnic background, parental factors, and perceived consequence for the partner
Originally published 2023-03-30 · Frontiers in Psychology
Frontiers Media SA · DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1128685 ↗
Editorial reading guide · Kindness
How do we talk with a child about both kindness and honesty?
The authors examine telling a polite untruth in a situation involving another person’s feelings.
Who was studied?
94 preschoolers from European Canadian and Chinese Canadian families
Age / stage: 4–5 years
Read with three questions
- How did the authors investigate telling a polite untruth in a situation involving another person’s feelings?
- Which actions were observed directly, and how closely does the task resemble family life?
- Did the child expect the polite answer to change what happened to the other person?
Keep the limits in view
The elicited lie concerns a particular social task and foreseeable consequences. It is not a general measure of a child’s honesty.
The text below is the original article’s licensed repository edition. Its wording is not rewritten. Use the Paper Agent beside the text to locate evidence; open the source for figures, tables and complete context.
Opening the verified paper and agent…
Checking the article identity, license record, and saved source text.
Open the repository recordAttribution & reuse
Follow the original.
Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.
Roksana Dobrin-De Grace; Lili Ma (2023). Prosocial lie-telling in preschoolers: The impacts of ethnic background, parental factors, and perceived consequence for the partner Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1128685
Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-04. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.