Understanding the development of honesty in children through the domains‐of‐socialization approach

Abstract

AbstractHonesty is an important value that children acquire through socialization. To date, the socialization process by which children learn to behave honestly remains relatively unexamined. Researchers may have left this area of research relatively unexamined because there is no framework to understand how parents socialize honesty and lie‐telling in their children. As such, we suggest that the domains‐of‐socialization approach, which organizes the socialization process into various domains based on different aspects of the caregiver‐child relationship, may provide such a framework. Using this framework, researchers can operationalize vague parenting variables and identify gaps in the research, allowing them to investigate the relationship between socialization and developmental trajectories of honesty and lie‐telling tendencies more thoroughly. In this paper, we review the literature on factors influencing children's lie‐telling and honesty in relation to the five domains to demonstrate the applicability of the domains‐of‐socialization framework to research on the socialization of honesty. We also provide recommendations for future research on the socialization of honesty using a domain‐specific approach, which will contribute to our understanding of how children develop into normative or problematic liars.