Older adults are more approving of blunt honesty than younger adults: a cross-cultural study

Research has explored age-related and cultural differences in moral evaluations of dishonesty; however, this has not yet been examined in an aging context. The present study provided a novel account of how younger and older adults (in Canada, Singapore, and China; N = 401) morally evaluate adults’ truths and lies in antisocial, modesty, and politeness settings. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing how acceptable it is for adults to tell the truth or a lie in given social scenarios, and they reported on their levels of collectivism and individualism. In all countries, older adults provided more favorable evaluations to blunt and immodest truths than younger adults did. Compared with younger adults, older adults provided harsher evaluations to Polite Lies (in Canada and China) and Modesty Lies (in Canada and Singapore). Thus, there may be an age-related increase in the acceptability of direct honesty over good-intentioned lies, and this age effect is somewhat stable across cultures. Older adults were also more lenient in evaluations of an antisocial lie to conceal an affair compared to younger adults. Overall, adults in China tended to rate lies less negatively, and their greater levels of collectivism mediated their greater approval of polite lies. The present results demonstrate that evaluations of (dis)honesty differ as a function of age and culture and these results can assist in developing a more complete lifespan model of the morality of dishonesty.