The Willingness of Children to Lie and the Assessment of Credibility in an Ecologically Relevant Laboratory Setting

Abstract

A series of 4 experiments were conducted to (a) determine the willingness of children to lie in a realistic setting, (b) compare judgments of credibility from both lay evaluations and Criterion-Based Content Analysis (CBCA), and (c) examine the effects of expert testimony regarding Statement Validity Assessment on mock jurors who were asked to make evaluations of the children\u27s statements. In Experiment 1, 81% of children who witnessed a research assistant steal a textbook made accusations against the thief (truthful), 69% of children who did not witness the theft accused the research assistant of the theft following prompting by significant others, and 56% of the children who witnessed a significant other steal the textbook incorrectly accused the research assistant following a request from their significant other. Using the statements obtained from the children in Experiment 1, Experiments 2 and 3 found that classification accuracy of lay evaluators was significantly poorer than expert application of CBCA, which resulted in 89% classification accuracy. Finally, brief exposure to CBCA expert testimony appeared to have no benefits on mock jurors\u27 assessments of credibility of the children\u27s statements in Experiment 4. Implications for North American legal systems are discussed

An Experimental Analysis of Children's Ability to Provide a False Report about a Crime

“…Therefore, children's general willingness to lie in the FD (70%) and FA (73%) conditions and tell the truth in the TD (97%) and TA (93%) conditions suggests that each condition incited the intended behaviors from the participants. In accordance with past research 8,12,14,24 , most children were willing to make a false denial to protect another. Nevertheless, due to the lack of experimental research on false accusations 14 , it is difficult to determine how the findings from the FA group relate to other research in the field.…”

“…Children's intentional false reports in police and forensic interviews have lowered the public's trust in the validity of child testimonies because of the potential negative consequences to the accused, accuser and criminal justice system [3][4][5][6] . A considerable amount of research has evaluated children's ability to falsely deny an event or transgression to protect someone [7][8][9][10][11][12] , yet considerably less is known about children's abilities to make a false accusation [13][14] . Even though children do make false denials and/or purposefully omit information in their testimonies, there have also been numerous real-life cases of children being persuaded to falsely accuse someone of committing a transgression, such as false allegations of abuse in custody battles 5,[15][16][17][18] .…”

“…Previous lie-telling research with children has generally involved a low-cost situation, whereby they were telling a lie about a non-threatening event, such as a broken toy 9,12,14 . Children who provide testimonies to police officers or forensic interviewers often disclose information about a high cost-event, such as witnessing a crime or experiencing abuse.…”

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

“…Moreover, by age 6, children can provide false statements to back up their secrets (Tye, Amato, Honts, Devitt, & Peters, 1999). …”

Value of Content-Based Deception Detection Methods

“…Th e results of the studies are contradictory. In some studies, the training in applying CBCA helped to increase the accuracy rate of coders compared to an untrained population (Landry & Brigham, 1992;Vrij, Kneller, Mann, 2000;Fiedler & Walka, 1993;Porter, Yuille, Lehman, 2000, Tye et al, 1999, in others, it reduced it (Akehurst et al, 1998), and yet in others no diff erence in the accuracy rate of fi nding insincere statements between trained and untrained coders was discovered (Ruby & Brigham, 1998;Santtila et al, 2000). However, attention should be paid to the fact that majority of cases covered by the studies referred to above lasted for 45 minutes (e.g.…”