Neuroscience
With their wide eyes and innocent hearts, you might think it's easy to tell when a child is lying. Oh no it isn't. Not according to Leif Stromwall and colleagues, who found adults were useless at detecting when children were lying.
Thirty children aged between 11 and 13 were told they were going to be interviewed about one event that had really happened to them, and about another that they'd never experienced (an earlier questionnaire identified which life experiences the children had actually had). The children's task was to talk about both events as if they had experienced them both.
So next the children were interviewed about two such experiences (e.g. the time they were bitten by a dog, or the time they found a dead bird) by one of three female researchers who were blind to which experiences the children had and had not really experienced. Half the children were given two minutes to prepare for talking about the experience they'd never had, the others had to make up their account on the spot.
The children's parts in the interviews were video-taped and played to 60 undergrads (average age 26 years) whose task was to identify which accounts were truthful and which were fabricated. Overall, the undergrads were correct 51.5 per cent of the time – no better than chance. They were slightly better at spotting the unprepared made up accounts, identifying 55.6 per cent of these.
It's no wonder the undergrads were so poor at spotting the children's lies - the children seemed to anticipate their lie-detection strategies. For example, the most commonly used cue the undergrads said they looked for was a lack of detail in the children's accounts, but meanwhile the children's most commonly cited strategy for appearing convincing was to add detail to their accounts by drawing on information they knew about from other people's experiences. The undergrads also said they had looked for signs of nerves, while the children said they had tried to stay calm.
Children are often witnesses in criminal cases so these findings have serious, practical implications. “It should be acknowledged that detecting deception in children is a difficult task, perhaps as difficult as detecting adults' lies”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Stromwall, L.A., Granhag, P.A. & Landstrom, S. (2007). Children's prepared and unprepared lies: Can adults see through their strategies? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21, 457-471.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying
With their wide eyes and innocent hearts, you might think it's easy to tell when a child is lying. Oh no it isn't. Not according to Leif Stromwall and colleagues, who found adults were useless at detecting when children were lying.Thirty children aged between 11 and 13 were told they were going to be interviewed about one event that had really happened to them, and about another that they'd never experienced (an earlier questionnaire identified which life experiences the children had actually had). The children's task was to talk about both events as if they had experienced them both.
So next the children were interviewed about two such experiences (e.g. the time they were bitten by a dog, or the time they found a dead bird) by one of three female researchers who were blind to which experiences the children had and had not really experienced. Half the children were given two minutes to prepare for talking about the experience they'd never had, the others had to make up their account on the spot.
The children's parts in the interviews were video-taped and played to 60 undergrads (average age 26 years) whose task was to identify which accounts were truthful and which were fabricated. Overall, the undergrads were correct 51.5 per cent of the time – no better than chance. They were slightly better at spotting the unprepared made up accounts, identifying 55.6 per cent of these.
It's no wonder the undergrads were so poor at spotting the children's lies - the children seemed to anticipate their lie-detection strategies. For example, the most commonly used cue the undergrads said they looked for was a lack of detail in the children's accounts, but meanwhile the children's most commonly cited strategy for appearing convincing was to add detail to their accounts by drawing on information they knew about from other people's experiences. The undergrads also said they had looked for signs of nerves, while the children said they had tried to stay calm.
Children are often witnesses in criminal cases so these findings have serious, practical implications. “It should be acknowledged that detecting deception in children is a difficult task, perhaps as difficult as detecting adults' lies”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Stromwall, L.A., Granhag, P.A. & Landstrom, S. (2007). Children's prepared and unprepared lies: Can adults see through their strategies? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21, 457-471.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How To Praise Children
When we praise a child, our wording can either be specific (e.g. “You did a good job drawing”) or generic (e.g. “You are a good drawer”). According to Andrei Cimpian and colleagues this subtle distinction can make a big difference to children's...
- The Way Children With Autism Draw People
Drawings of humans by children with autism tend to lack variety, researchers have found, possibly reflecting the unusual way they think about and relate to other people. Anthony Lee and Peter Hobson compared drawings by 14 autistic children (aged 8 to...
- Educational Tv Must Overcome Young Children's 'video Deficit'
Designers of educational television for young children face a major stumbling block: two-year-old children tend to ignore information presented to them on a TV screen. For example, in an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds...
- Helping Children By Teaching Them To Look Away
Teaching young children to look away while they are thinking could help improve their problem-solving abilities. Fiona Phelps and colleagues at Stirling University recruited 20 five-year-old children and videoed them while they answered a range of verbal...
- What On Earth...?
Children's drawings of the Earth as flat, or hollow with people inside, have led some psychologists to believe children develop naive, but coherent, mental models of what the planet is like based on their own observations. Such accounts predict that...