Development of lying to conceal a transgression: Children’s control of expressive behaviour during verbal deception

Abstract

T he present study examined lying behaviour in children between 3 and 7 years of age with two experiments. A temptation resistance paradigm was used in which children were left alone in a room with a music-playing toy placed behind their back. T he children were told not to peek at the toy. Most children could not resist the temptation and peeked at the toy. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, about half of the 3-year-olds confessed to their transgression, whereas most older children lied. Naṏve adult evaluators (undergraduate students and parents) who watched video clips of the children's responses could not discriminate lie-tellers from nonliars on the basis of their nonverbal expressive behaviours. However, the children were poor at semantic leakage control and adults could correctly identify most of the lie-tellers based on their verbal statements made in the same context as the lie. T he combined results regarding children's verbal and nonverbal leakage control suggest that children under 8 years of age are not fully skilled lie-tellers.

Children's Antisocial and Prosocial Lies to Familiar and Unfamiliar Adults

“…One of the first paradigms used was a temptation resistance paradigm, was originally pioneered by Sears, Rau, and Alpert (1965), and has been subsequently modified to examine children"s antisocial lies Talwar & Lee, 2002a). During the temptation resistance paradigm, children are instructed not to peek at a toy while an experimenter is out of the room.…”

“…In another study, Talwar and Lee (2002a) examined 3-to 7-year-old"s lie-telling behaviours using a modified temptation resistance paradigm. Similar to , they examined whether children would tell a lie to conceal a transgression and examined children"s ability to maintain their lie through follow-up questioning.…”

Repeated Questions, Deception, and Children’s True and False Reports of Body Touch

“…secrets, both spontaneously and when asked to do so by an adult (e.g., Bottoms, Goodman, Schwartz-Kenney, & Thomas, 2002;Talwar & Lee, 2002;Wilson & Pipe, 1989). Moreover, by age 6, children can provide false statements to back up their secrets (Tye, Amato, Honts, Devitt, & Peters, 1999).…”

Tell-tale eyes: Children's attribution of gaze aversion as a lying cue.

“…Third, it is possible that children learn to associate avoidant gaze with lying from their direct experience of deception "in the playground." Although young children and adults do not appear to avoid mutual gaze when they lie (Kleinke, 1986;Lewis, Stranger, & Sullivan, 1989;Talwar & Lee, 2002), a recent study has found that 7-to 9-year-olds do display this behavior (McCarthy, Muir, & Lee, 2007). Accordingly, at 9 years old, children will have had greater opportunity to observe the co-occurrence of gaze aversion and lying in their peers than at 6 years old.…”