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

Abstract

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. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03785-6.

Prosocial speech acts: Links to pragmatics and aging.

“…Why would that be? One possibility is that older adults’ propensity for prosocial behavior (as extensively documented in the literature; e.g., Mayr & Freund, 2020) may offset a cross-cultural favorability toward direct truths in old age (O’Connor et al, 2022). That is, while older adults may prefer information to be given to them directly (as it is easier to process; e.g., Pomareda et al, 2019) they may also prefer to stick to politeness strategies with others to create or maintain social connectedness, which is highly sought after in old age (Carstensen et al, 1999; Charles & Carstensen, 2010).…”

“…Regarding the first question, we predicted a general decrease in older adults' use of prosocial speech acts, compared to younger adults, based on recent cross-cultural work which revealed a communicative preference for direct truths in old age (O'Connor et al, 2022). Regarding the second question, we made specific predictions according to each situational context such that in Experiments 1a and b, we anticipated younger adults to adapt more to the recipient manipulation (given that it requires the use of audience design; Long et al, 2018) but predicted that no age differences would emerge for the severity manipulation (since the integration of general knowledge appears to be stable over the adult lifespan; Ligneau-Hervé & Mullet, 2005).…”

“…This could provide stronger evidence as to the source of age-related differences (i.e., whether age-related differences in audience design underlie the results since the recipient’s preferences have been explicitly stated).Regarding the health context (where age-related differences emerged in the overall rate with which prosocial speech acts were used, suggesting stylistic differences in communication) two plausible explanations exist: (a) cultural differences in communicative styles or (b) generational differences in communicative styles. In order to fully tease apart these possibilities, we recommend that future studies employ a cross-cultural design (see O’Connor et al, 2022) as well as a longitudinal design, to test whether prosocial linguistic behavior is better predicted by cultural factors or by different stages of development.…”

“…With regard to the first question, a general preference for directness over prosocial linguistic behavior could be attributable to stylistic differences in communication across generations, whereby older adults place a lower premium on nuanced versus direct truths. Supporting this notion, recent work has shown that older adults evaluate dishonesty more harshly than younger adults, even when it is well intentioned (O’Connor et al, 2022). Interestingly, this pattern holds across populations whose cultures vary in collectivism and individualism, which suggests harsher evaluations of well-intentioned lies (and likewise more favorable evaluations of “blunt truths”) may be attributable to generational rather than cultural norms.…”

“…However, despite the expansive literature on children’s acquisition of prosocial speech acts, no prior work has examined how individuals at the other end of the lifespan use prosocial speech acts. This is somewhat surprising given that older adults’ exhibit substantial variability in socio-cognitive skills (including declines in theory of mind and executive function skills; Celsis et al, 1997; Charlton et al, 2009; Henry et al, 2013) as well as an increased acceptance of “blunt honesty” over prosocial linguistic behavior (O’Connor et al, 2022). Based on these findings, it is reasonable to predict that older adults use prosocial speech acts less frequently than younger adults.…”