The role of executive functions and theory of mind in children’s prosocial lie-telling

Advanced theory of mind and children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood: A training study

Children's advanced theory of mind (AToM) is concurrently associated with their prosocial lie-telling. However, the causal link between AToM and prosocial lie-telling has not yet been demonstrated. To address this gap, the current study adopted a training paradigm and investigated the role of AToM in children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. A total of 66 9- and 10-year-old children who did not demonstrate any prosocial lie-telling in a disappointment gift paradigm at the baseline were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n = 32) or an active control group (n = 34). The experimental group underwent a conversation-based training program of four sessions. The results showed significantly greater gains in AToM at the posttest for the experimental group children compared with the control group children, controlling for family socioeconomic status, children's literacy score, working memory, and inhibition. More important, the experimental group children were more likely to tell prosocial lies than the control group, even after controlling for the pretest AToM and other covariates. However, the training effects faded at the 6-month follow-up test after the training's completion. These findings provide the first evidence for the causal role of AToM in the development of prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. The fade-out effect is discussed in the context of educational interventions.

Young children with higher verbal intelligence are less likely to cheat

Cheating is a pervasive unethical behavior. Existing research involving young children has mainly focused on contextual factors affecting cheating behavior, whereas cognitive factors have been relatively understudied. This study investigated the unique role of verbal and performance intelligence on young children's cheating behavior (N = 50; mean age = 5.73 years; 25 boys). Bootstrapping hierarchical logistic regression showed that children's Verbal IQ scores were significantly and negatively correlated with their cheating behavior above and beyond the contributions of age, gender, and Performance IQ scores. Children with higher Verbal IQ scores were less inclined to cheat. However, neither children's Performance IQ nor their Total IQ scores had a significant and unique correlation with cheating. These findings suggest that intelligence plays a significant role in children's cheating but that this role is limited to verbal intelligence only. In addition, this study highlights the need for researchers to go beyond the contextual factors to study the early development of cheating behavior.

Academic cheating in early childhood: Role of age, gender, personality, and self-efficacy

The current study investigated the association of children's age, gender, ethnicity, Big Five personality traits, and self-efficacy with their academic cheating behaviors. Academic cheating is a rampant problem that has been documented in adolescents and adults for nearly a century, but our understanding of the early development and factors influencing academic cheating is still weak. Using Zoom, the current study recruited children aged 4 to 12 years (N = 388), measured their cheating behaviors through six tasks simulating academic testing scenarios, and assessed their Big Five personality traits and self-efficacy through a modified Berkeley Puppet Interview paradigm, as well as age and gender. We found that children cheated significantly less with increased age and that boys cheated significantly more than girls. However, neither Big Five personality traits nor self-efficacy were significantly correlated with children's cheating. These findings suggest that academic cheating is a developing issue from early to middle childhood and that factors such as gender socialization may play a role in such development. Personal characteristics such as personality traits and self-efficacy may undergo additional development before their associations with cheating become robust, as reported in the adult literature.

Cognitive empathy boosts honesty in children and young adolescents

Children and young adolescents often tend to behave dishonestly in order to serve their self-interests. This study focused on how empathic abilities affect children's tendency to deceive others. Deception is the act of causing others to form a false belief to get them to act in a way that serves the deceiver's interests. As such, it requires the ability to predict how others might use the provided information. In two experiments, 274 participants (aged 10-16 years) played a game in which they could send a deceptive message to another participant to boost their own payoff at the other player's expense. We measured participants' cognitive and emotional empathy using different measures. We found that a measure of cognitive empathy, namely the fantasy scale, was associated with less deception of another player when that other player was not identified and was presented only as "Player B." However, when Player B was identified by name, empathy did not predict deception. In such cases, the only factors affecting deception rates were the gain for the participant (higher possible gains lead to more deception) and loss to the other player (higher possible losses lead to less deception). Overall, the findings suggest that even by 11 years of age, children can understand the impact of their unethical behavior on another child and adjust their actions accordingly. However, when the other child is not identified, children need to possess high levels of cognitive empathy toward imagined individuals to resist the temptation to deceive the other child.

To tell the truth or not: What effortful control, false belief, and sympathy tell us about preschoolers' instrumental lies

This study aimed to examine the predictors of instrumental lies in preschool children, specifically focusing on false belief, effortful control, and sympathy. Instrumental lies are intentional falsehoods used to achieve personal goals such as avoiding punishment and obtaining an undeserved reward. A total of 192 preschool children (age range = 32-73 month-olds), along with their mothers and fathers, participated in the study. The Temptation Resistance Paradigm, an experimental task, was employed to elicit instrumental lies from the children. The children also completed first-order false belief measures, and their parents filled out questionnaires assessing their children's effortful control and sympathy skills. Results revealed a positive association between children's effortful control and their decisions to tell instrumental lies. However, no significant relationship was found between false belief and instrumental lying. Age moderated the link between sympathy and the decision to tell instrumental lies, with sympathy being negatively associated with lie-telling behavior among older children but showing no effect among younger children. The study variables did not predict the maintenance of instrumental lies. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the role of effortful control and sympathy as underlying temperamental and emotional processes influencing children's decisions to engage in instrumental lie-telling.

Development of prosocial behavior and inhibitory control in late childhood: A longitudinal exploration of sex differences and reciprocal relations

This study examined longitudinal development of prosocial behavior, assessed by the parent-reported Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire, and inhibitory control, measured by the Opposite Worlds Task, in a sample aged 9 and 12 years (n = 9468, 49.9% girls, 85.8% White) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The goal was to assess whether the level of prosocial behavior at age 9 relates to change in inhibitory control, and vice versa. Sex differences were also explored. Latent change score models showed that low inhibitory control in boys at age 9 was associated with more decreases in prosocial behavior from 9 to 12 years of age. This may suggest that interventions targeting inhibitory control in boys may also foster their social competence.

Testing Causal Effects of Empathy on Children's Prosociality in Politeness Dilemmas - An Intervention Study

Empathy is commonly considered a driver of prosociality in child ontogeny, but causal assumptions regarding this effect mostly rely on correlational research designs. Here, 96 urban German children (5-8 years; 48 girls; predominantly White; from mid-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds) participated in an empathy intervention or a control condition before prosocial behaviors (polite lie-telling: rating the drawing as good; prosocial encouragement: utterances interpreted as cheering up the artist) were assessed in an art-rating task. Contrasting children's empathy at baseline with their empathy after the intervention indicated promoted empathy compared to the control group. Despite the intervention's effect on children's empathy, there were no simultaneous changes in prosocial behaviors. At the same time, children's empathy at baseline was associated with their prosocial encouragement. These results indicate conceptual associations between children's empathy and prosociality. However, they do not support strict causal claims regarding this association in middle childhood. Further applications of the novel short-time intervention to address causal effects of empathy on prosociality and other developmental outcomes are discussed.

Other-Benefiting Lying Behavior in Preschool Children and Its Relation to Theory of Mind and Empathy

The present study examined children's lies to help others obtain benefits (other-benefiting lying) and its relation to theory of mind (ToM) and empathy among 3-5-year-old preschool children. One hundred nine children were recruited from preschools in China. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was used to measure children's other-benefiting lying behavior, a ToM scale was used to measure children's ToM abilities, and an empathy scale was used to measure children's empathy abilities. Results showed that children tended to tell more lies to help other to get benefits as age increased, and further analyses showed that this other-benefiting lying was related to children's ToM component of false belief understanding and their cognitive empathy performance. These findings provide evidence that cognitive factors play important roles in children's lying to help others.

When kindergarteners are tempted to deceive: A study of factors predicting lie-telling for personal gain

The current study examined the relations between children's cognitive and emotion abilities with their likelihood to tell a lie for personal gain in a tempting situation. These relations were examined using behavioral tasks and questionnaires. A total of 202 Israel Arab Muslim kindergarten children participated in this study. Our results showed that behavioral self-regulation was positively associated with children's likelihood to tell a lie for personal gain. Children with higher behavioral self-regulation actually tended to lie more for their own gain, suggesting that the likelihood to tell a lie might be related to children's ability to mobilize and integrate their cognitive abilities to self-regulate their behavior. In addition, through exploratory analysis, we found a positive relation between theory of mind and children's likelihood to tell a lie, which was moderated by inhibition. Specifically, only among children with low inhibition was there a positive correlation between their theory of mind and the likelihood to lie. Moreover, age and gender were related to children's lie-telling; older children tended more to lie for their own gain, and this likelihood was higher for boys than for girls.

The Role of Cognition in Dishonest Behavior

Dishonesty has received increased attention from many professionals in recent years for its relevance in many social areas such as finance and psychology, among others. Understanding the mechanisms underlying dishonesty and the channels in which dishonesty operates could enable the detection and even prevention of dishonest behavior. However, the study of dishonesty is a challenging endeavor; dishonesty is a complex behavior because it imposes a psychological and cognitive burden. The study of this burden has fostered a new research trend that focuses on cognition’s role in dishonesty. This paper reviews the theoretical aspects of how such cognitive processes modulate dishonest behavior. We will pay special attention to executive functions such as inhibitory processes, working memory, or set-shifting that may modulate the decision to be (dis)honest. We also account for some frameworks in cognitive and social psychology that may help understand dishonesty, such as the Theory of Mind, the role of creative processes, and discourse analyses within language studies. Finally, we will discuss some specific cognitive-based models that integrate cognitive mechanisms to explain dishonesty. We show that cognition and dishonest behavior are firmly related and that there are several important milestones to reach in the future to advance the understanding of dishonesty in our society.

Everyone’s a Critic (Sometimes): Young Children Show High Awareness of, But Lower Adherence to, Prosocial Lying Norms

From an early age, children are taught norms about socially-acceptable behaviors; however, children's ability to recognize these norms often predates their tendency to follow them. This conflict between understanding and action has been predominantly studied in cases when enacting the norm would be costly for the child (i.e. when sharing would result in forgoing resources), but is underexplored in more low-cost scenarios. The current study examined the gap between children's knowledge and behavior in a context with a low personal cost: telling a prosocial, or white, lie. Children (N = 46) evaluated objectively poor drawings in three contexts: in one context, children were asked how a third-party character should act in a story (to assess knowledge) and in the other two contexts, children were asked to provide real-time feedback to another person and to a puppet (to assess behavior). Results indicated that children endorsed prosocial lying norms (i.e. said the story character should give the drawing a good rating) at a significantly higher rate than they demonstrated through their own lie-telling behaviors (i.e. their willingness to give social partners good ratings). These data indicate that the discrepancy between children's knowledge of social norms and their actual behaviors cannot simply be attributed to the personal costs of enacting social norms. Instead, this competence-performance gap may be due to the fact that children are often taught social rules via hypothetical situations but enacting behaviors in real-world situations may require additional skills, such as inhibition and the processing of complex, multimodal social cues.

Emotional Regulation and Its Influence on the Experience of Stuttering Across the Life Span

PURPOSE

This study evaluated the relationship between emotional regulation (ER) and adverse impact related to stuttering across the developmental spectrum, in preschool and school-age children, adolescents, and adults who stutter. An additional aim examined how these variables relate to the ways that individuals approach speaking (i.e., their agreement on whether their goal is to speak fluently).

METHOD

Participants were the parents of 60 preschoolers and younger school-age children (ages 3-9 years), 95 school-age children and adolescents who stutter (ages 7-18 years), and 180 adults who stutter (ages 18-81 years). All participants completed surveys with age-appropriate measures examining ER and the adverse impact of stuttering. Older children and adults who stutter also answered questions regarding their goals when speaking. Multiple regression and ordinal logistic regression were used to examine relationships among ER, adverse impact related to stuttering, and goal when speaking.

RESULTS

In preschool children, adverse impact was significantly predicted by a parent-reported measure of ER skills; in school-age children and adults, adverse impact was significantly predicted by measures of the ER strategies cognitive reappraisal (CR) and expressive suppression. Less frequent use of CR by adults was significantly associated with an increased likelihood of having "not stuttering" as a goal when speaking. Differences in the significance and magnitude of these relationships were found across the life span.

DISCUSSION

For both children and adults who stutter, ER is a significant factor related to the adverse impact of stuttering; the relationship between ER and adverse impact may change over development. Accounting for individual differences in ER can improve understanding of why a person copes with stuttering in the ways they do, and this has notable implications for individualizing intervention for both children and adults who stutter.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20044469.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of associations between self-regulation and morality in preschool and elementary school children

The importance of self-regulatory skills for the socio-emotional competencies of children is being researched and discussed extensively. However, in order to make a clear statement about the impact of self-regulation on children’s morality, a systematic review of the literature is urgently needed. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to analyze associations between self-regulation and morality of preschool and elementary school children. In this context, distinctions among different definitions and operationalizations of self-regulation and morality are considered. Search terms were entered in the bibliographic databases PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science. To meet the inclusion criterion, studies needed to report empirical associations between self-regulation and morality in children of preschool and elementary school age. Furthermore, the studies should report primary data and be published in English in a peer-reviewed journal. Studies with secondary or summarized data, special populations or with certain designs were excluded. A total of 37 studies were included in the narrative synthesis. 35 of these studies were included in the meta-analysis. The narrative synthesis showed that different definitions and operationalizations were used for both self-regulation and morality. There also seems to be no consensus regarding the association between the constructs. Meta-analysis results revealed a small positive combined effect between self-regulation and morality, especially between temperament-related self-regulation and moral behavior and moral emotions. In order to gain a better understanding of the effects of self-regulation on morality, longitudinal research and further research addressing different forms of these constructs are essential.

Prosocial lies: Causes and consequences

Prosocial lies-lies that are intended to benefit others-are ubiquitous. This article reviews recent research on the causes and consequences of prosocial lies. Prosocial lies are often motivated by the desire to spare others from emotional harm. Therefore, prosocial lies are frequently told in situations in which honesty would cause heightened emotional harm (e.g. when a target is fragile) and by people who are sensitive to others' emotional suffering (e.g. those high in compassion). However, targets only react positively to prosocial lies when they prevent emotional harm and when honesty lacks instrumental value (i.e. when they prevent unnecessary harm). Outside of these situations, targets typically view prosocial lies as paternalistic and therefore penalize those who tell them.

Utilizing the Activation-Decision-Construction-Action Theory to predict children's hypothetical decisions to deceive

The Decision component of the Activation-Decision-Construction-Action-Theory (ADCAT) utilizes a cost-benefit formula to explain the cognitive, motivational and social processes involved in deception. Three prior studies suggest that ADCAT can be used to predict adults' future deceptive behavior; however, no study has assessed the potential relevance of ADCAT with children. The present study is the first to date to examine whether this cost-benefit formula can predict children's hypothetical decisions to tell three types of lies, and whether there are specific developmental factors that need to be considered. The results indicate that the cost-benefit formula was only effective for predicting children's hypothetical lies for self-gain at no cost to another (Self-No Cost lies) and lies for others when there was a personal cost (Other-Cost to Self). More specifically, expected value of telling the truth was related to lower willingness to tell hypothetical Self-No Cost and Other-Cost to Self lies. On the other hand, the expected value of lying was not related to children's hypothetical decisions to tell Self-No Cost, Self-Cost to Other or Other-Cost to Self lies. Children's inhibitory control and theory of mind were significant covariates for some of the ADCAT predictor variables and children's hypothetical truth and lying behaviors. Altogether, these findings indicate that the effectiveness of the ADCAT cost-benefit formula for predicting children's lying behavior is affected by developmental factors and the type of lie being analyzed.

The coin that is most current is flattery? Stability and discontinuity of false praise-telling from 5 to 7 years of life

Preschool children engage in flattery behaviors, including expressing opinions toward other people or objects that-although favorable-are not truly held. Research shows that in the following years, the number and complexity of motives underlying such insincere behavior increase. The current study focused on children's overt behavior, examining two aspects of the development of false praise-telling: individual stability and group-level discontinuity. Using an art-rating task, a total of 164 children aged 5 to 7 years were tested at three points in time (T1/2/3): M_T1 age = 5.66 years, SD = 0.1; M_T2 age = 6.65 years, SD = 0.16; M_T3 age = 7.61 years, SD = 0.14. The results show that, having become capable of giving false praise in politeness settings at 5.5 years of age, children continue to flatter others in this way at later ages, indicating that false praise-telling is an individually stable characteristic. In addition, a statistically significant increase in the proportion of false praise-telling to non-lying behavior in children over the 2-year study period was observed. This indicates that the discontinuity, namely the growth in children's flattery behavior, occurs from 5 to 7 years of age. The findings are discussed with respect to the diverse factors that might underlie and affect children's tendency to praise others falsely in politeness settings.

Three-year-olds' spontaneous lying in a novel interaction-based paradigm and its relations to explicit skills and motivational factors

Previous research has investigated children's lying and its motivational and social-cognitive correlates mostly through explicit tasks. The current study used an anticipatory interaction-based paradigm adopted from research with preverbal infants. We investigated 3-year-olds' spontaneous lying within interaction and its motivational basis and relations to explicit skills of lying, false belief understanding, inhibitory control, and socialization. Children interacted with puppets to secure stickers that were hidden in one of two boxes. Either a friend or a competitor puppet tried to obtain the stickers. Nearly all children helpfully provided information about the sticker's location to the friend, and about half of the sample anticipatorily provided false information to the competitor. Children misinformed the competitor significantly more often than the friend, both when the reward was for themselves and when it was for someone else. Explicitly planning to lie in response to a question occurred significantly less often but predicted spontaneous lying, as did passing the explicit standard false belief task. Thus, by 3 years of age, children spontaneously invoke false beliefs in others. This communicative skill reveals an interactional use of false belief understanding in that it requires holding one's perspective to pursue one's goal while providing a different perspective to distract a competitor. Findings support the view that practical theory of mind skills emerge for social coordination and serve as a basis for developing explicit false belief reasoning.

Theory of mind, executive function, and lying in children: a meta-analysis

Scientific research on how children learn to tell lies has existed for more than a century. Earlier studies mainly focused on moral, social, and situational factors contributing to the development of lying. Researchers have only begun to explore the cognitive correlations of children's lying in the last two decades. Cognitive theories suggest that theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) should be closely related to the development of lying since lying is, in essence, ToM and EF in action. Yet, findings from empirical studies are mixed. To address this issue, the current meta-analysis reviewed all prior literature that examined the relations between children's lying and ToM and/or between children's lying and EF. In total, 47 papers consisting of 5099 participants between 2 and 19 years of age were included, which yielded 74 effect sizes for ToM and 94 effect sizes for EF. Statistically significant but relatively small effects were found between children's lying and ToM (r = .17) and between lying and EF (r = .13). Furthermore, EF's correlation with children's initial lies was significantly smaller than its correlation with children's ability to maintain lies. This comprehensive meta-analysis provides a clear picture of the associations between children's ToM/EF and their lying behavior and confirms that ToM and EF indeed play a positive role in children's lying and its development.

Mindreading in conversation

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards "factive" forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation.

Little pranksters: Inhibitory control mediates the association between false belief understanding and practical joking in young children

To successfully pull a practical joke on someone, children need to understand that their victims do not know what they themselves know, be able to intentionally manipulate others’ beliefs, and maintain a straight face to safeguard the integrity of the joke. This study examined the relationship between children’s developing theory of mind (ToM), inhibitory control, and their ability to pull a practical joke. Ninety-five children between ages 2 and 6 participated in, among other measures, a practical joke task that required them to knowingly give one of the experimenters a gift box containing a rubber insect. Results showed that children’s ability to pull a practical joke was significantly related to their age, false belief understanding (FBU), inhibitory control, and verbal ability. Children with more siblings were more likely to successfully pull a practical joke. Most importantly, inhibitory control was shown to mediate the relation between FBU and practical joking. The findings provide evidence that practical joking as an example of ToM use is effortful.

Lying and Theory of Mind: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis investigated the link between lying and theory-of-mind (ToM) by integrating findings from 81 studies involving 7,826 children between 2 and 14 years of age from 14 different collectivist and individualist cultures. Overall, there was a small, significant positive association (r = .23). Four main moderators were examined: facet of lying (understanding, instigated production, spontaneous production, maintenance); valence of lies (antisocial, prosocial); type of ToM (first-order, second-order); and culture (collectivist, individualist). Facet of lying and type of ToM were significant moderators. ToM was positively related to all facets of lying, but most strongly linked to lie maintenance and weakest for spontaneous production. Both first-order and second-order ToM were positively related to lying, but the link was stronger for the former.

Prosocial lying in children between 4 and 11 years of age: The role of emotional understanding and empathy

This study examined whether emotional understanding and empathy were predictors of prosocial lying in children aged 4 to 11 years. A total of 144 children participated in the study. To assess children's prosocial lying, we used the Helping Scenario, a classical experimental paradigm that allows children to lie to help others at their own expense. Children's emotional understanding was assessed using the Test of Emotion Comprehension, a test that measures the nine components of emotional understanding. Children's empathy was assessed using the Griffith Empathy Measure, a questionnaire completed by parents that measures affective and cognitive empathy. Results indicated that emotional understanding plays a crucial role in the development of children's ability to produce prosocial lies from 4 to 11 years of age. However, we found no significant relationship between empathy and prosocial lying. Finally, our results confirm that as children grew up, they lied more and more effectively. Overall, the results allow us to better understand the factors that contribute to the emergence and development of children's ability to produce prosocial lies.

Do They Really Mean It? Children's Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

Interpreting other people's intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children's understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children's responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.

Perceptions of Dishonesty: Understanding Parents' Reports of and Influence on Children and Adolescents' Lie-Telling

Previous studies suggest parents lack knowledge regarding child and adolescent lie-telling; however, no study to date has examined children's and parents' reports of lying within parent-child dyads. The current study examined parents' knowledge of and influence on children's and adolescents' lie-telling. Parent-child dyads (N= 351) completed self-report surveys. Children (8-14 years, 52.3% children female) reported on prosocial and antisocial lie-telling. Parents (M_age = 41.68, 89.5% parents female) reported on their child's lie-telling, as well as their own honesty-targeted parenting strategies and modeling of dishonest behaviors. Parents' reports were unrelated to children's and adolescents' reports of prosocial and antisocial lie-telling. Additionally, parents' honesty-targeted parenting strategies and modeling of dishonesty did not predict children's lie-telling. Parents' behaviors predicted their reports of children's lie-telling, suggesting parents' behaviors bias their reports. Parents' biased perception of adolescents lie-telling may have negative implications for parent-child relationships.

The effects of the putative confession and evidence presentation on maltreated and non-maltreated 9- to 12-year-olds' disclosures of a minor transgression

The current study examined the influence of the putative confession (in which children are told that the suspect told them "everything that happened" and "wants [the child] to tell the truth") and evidence presentation on 9- to 12-year-old maltreated and non-maltreated children's disclosure (N = 321). Half of the children played a forbidden game with an adult confederate that resulted in a laptop computer breaking (no transgression occurred for the other half of the children), followed by coaching to conceal the forbidden game and to falsely disclose the sanctioned game. Children were then interviewed about the interaction with the confederate. Among the 9- and 10-year-olds, the putative confession led to a higher rate of breakage disclosure (62%) than the control condition (13%) and to a higher rate of leakage of incriminating details during recall (47% vs. 9%). Older children were more likely to disclose than younger children and to be uninfluenced by the putative confession. Among all ages, evidence presentation elicited disclosures from 63% of children who had not previously disclosed without eliciting any false disclosures.

Stop in the name of lies: The cost of blocking the truth to deceive

Most researchers assume that deception involves a conflict between a predominant truth response and a deliberate deceptive response. Such a view is consistent with dual process theories that state that high-order cognition operates through fast-automatic processes that may conflict with slow-deliberate ones. In the present study, we tested whether one must inhibit the truth to deceive in light of inconsistent findings in the literature. One hundred and eighty-nine participants were tested across two Negative Priming paradigms that rest on the logic that the activation of a fast-automatic process will be hampered on a given display if it is inhibited on the previous display. Our findings suggest that truthful responses are predominant in healthy adults, which is why inhibitory control is required to activate a deliberate deceptive mode. We argue that the findings from deception studies could be best accounted for by dual process theories.

Practice makes perfect? The impact of coaching and moral stories on children’s lie-telling

Children ( n = 202; 4 to 7 years old) witnessed a confederate break a toy and were asked to keep the transgression a secret. Children were randomly assigned to a Coaching condition (i.e., No Coaching, Light Coaching, or Heavy Coaching) and a Moral Story condition (i.e., Positive or Neutral). Overall, 89.7% of children lied about the broken toy when asked open-ended questions about the event. During direct questions, children in the Heavy Coaching condition lied more than children in the No Coaching and Light Coaching conditions. Older children were influenced by both Heavy Coaching and Light Coaching, whereas younger children were influenced only by Heavy Coaching. Children in the Positive Story condition were less likely to maintain their lies than those in the Neutral Story condition. An interaction between Coaching and Moral Story conditions influenced lie-maintenance.

Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children's ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children's performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children's performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children's pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children's performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.

Polite, instrumental, and dual liars

Lying is an interpersonal exercise that requires the intentional creation of a false belief in another’s mind. As such, children’s development of lie-telling is related to their increasing understanding of others and may reflect the acquisition of basic social skills. Although certain types of lies may support social relationships, other types of lies are considered antisocial in nature. The goal of this study was to compare several possible correlates, such as cognitive ability and children’s behavior patterns, that may be associated with children’s ( N = 133) use of lies in socially acceptable versus socially unacceptable ways. Children engaged in two lie-telling paradigms: one to measure socially accepted (polite) lies and one to measure socially unaccepted (instrumental) lies. Results indicate that instrumental liars were young with low theory of mind (ToM) scores and had high social skills. Polite liars were the oldest, had high ToM, and had similar levels of social skills as instrumental liars. Truth-tellers and dual liars had lower social skills and moderate ToM in comparison to the instrumental and polite liars. These findings suggest that children use lies selectively to achieve their social goals, and also suggest that children’s lying behavior may change from being self-motivated to being other-motivated as they age, which may reflect socialization toward socially accepted behavior.