Social and Cognitive Correlates of Children's Lying Behavior

Social and Cognitive Correlates of Children's Lying Behavior

The relation between children's lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children, three to eight years, were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children's subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their deceit. Children's conceptual moral understanding of lies, executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were also assessed. Children's initial false denials were related to their first-order belief understanding and their inhibitory control. Children's ability to maintain their lies was related to their second-order belief understanding. Children's lying was related to their moral evaluations. These findings suggest that social and cognitive factors may play an important role in children's lie-telling abilities.

Lying involves a speaker making a false statement with the intention to deceive the recipient. Lie-telling behavior in children has received increased attention in recent years by developmental psychologists for both its theoretical implications in understanding children's social-cognitive development and its practical applications in legal, clinical, and educational settings. The majority of existing research on children and lying has examined children's understanding and moral evaluation of lies. These studies have shown that children show rudimentary conceptual and moral understanding of lying around three years of age but take more than a decade to reach maturity. Only a limited number of studies have investigated children's actual lie-telling behavior, most of which have involved preschool children. Overall, these studies have found that lie-telling behavior emerges in the preschool years and that young children are able to deceive others early in life.

Children's Lie-Telling Behavior

The most frequently used method to study lying in children is the temptation resistance paradigm pioneered by Sears, Rau, and Alpert. In this paradigm, children are typically told explicitly by a researcher not to peek at or play with a toy when left alone. Due to children's curiosity and difficulty to resist temptation, most children tend to disobey the researcher's instruction. Upon returning, the researcher asks children whether they have peeked at or played with the toy. Thus, the temptation resistance paradigm creates a situation where children who have transgressed by disobeying an adult's instruction can make a decision either to lie or to tell the truth about their transgression. The advantage of this paradigm is that it elicits spontaneous lies from children to conceal a transgression. More importantly, it mimics the naturalistic conditions in which children tend to lie.

Observational studies have found that the most common and earliest lies children tell tend to conceal misdeeds where they have done something they were not supposed to do. Interestingly, despite the early and common occurrence of these types of lies, children of all ages and adults view them very negatively. For instance, Bussey found that children as young as four years of age rated lies about misdeeds as being very bad and that the liar would feel guilty for telling such a lie. Furthermore, they rated this type of lie more negatively than other types of lies and even misdeeds themselves.

In a classic study, Lewis et al. experimentally investigated three-year-olds' deception to conceal their transgression with the use of the temptation resistance paradigm. Lewis et al. found that of the thirty-three children tested, twenty-nine peeked and thirty-eight percent lied about peeking at the toy. Lewis et al. concluded that children as young as three years of age are capable of verbally deceiving others. This result was replicated by Talwar and Lee who showed that thirty-six percent of three-year-olds lied about their peeking. They also found that unlike the three-year-olds, the majority of the children between four and seven years of age lied. Polak and Harris further modified Lewis et al.'s paradigm. They used a permissive condition where children were allowed to play with a toy and a prohibition condition where children were instructed not to touch the toy. Similar results were obtained with the majority of three- and five-year-olds lying in the prohibition condition, whereas all children in the permissive condition admitted to their touching the toy. Thus, Polak and Harris concluded that children's denials about their transgression reflected their deliberate attempt to mislead rather than forgetting. These results, along with the results of related research, suggest that young children are able to engage in intentional verbal deceptive acts when given the opportunity.