Presented at the California Workshop for Evolutionary Social Sciences (CWESS) Conference, 2022 & Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) Conference, 2022

Abstract:

Cross-cultural observations indicate that parents occasionally and intentionally deceive their children. Despite the commonness of this behavior, evolutionary research is lacking, and thus the ultimate functions of parent-child deception are yet under-explored. This work proposes that it may be situationally advantageous to lie to children over telling the truth under specific fitness related conditions, whereby lies serve distinct evolutionary functions as the benefits of the falsehood outweigh the costs of the child believing the lie. We collected data using ethnographic interviews that cataloged lies parents recall telling their children and those they recall their own parents telling them during childhood. Evolutionary themes of reported parental deceptions (N=819) and topics avoided (N=321) were created following content analysis, with lies coded according to the fitness function of each deceptive category. This study generated data that suggests parents mostly employ lying to maximize trade-offs and allocation of parental investments that save time. It also found parents lie to children in ways that promote their mental and physical health, preserve their access to physical and social resources, promote the acquisition of lie detection skills, and enculturate them into the costly signaling beliefs of their group.