Neuroscience
They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.
Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.
Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.
The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.
An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."
A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.
_________________________________
Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409
--Further reading--
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do Lying Skill And Frequency Change Through Life, From Childhood To Old Age?
Young adults – defined here as people aged 18 to 29 – are the most skilled liars, while teens are the most prolific. That's according to a new study published in Acta Psychologica that claims to be the first ever to investigate lying behaviour...
- When We Lie To Children, Are We Teaching Them To Be Dishonest?
Cookie Monster - one of the characters featured in this research.Most parents lie to their children, often as a way to control their behaviour. A new study asks whether lying to the little ones increases the likelihood that they too will lie. The authors,...
- 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...
- 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...
Neuroscience
Lying is common at age two, becomes the norm by three
Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.
Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.
The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.
An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."
A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.
_________________________________
Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409
--Further reading--
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do Lying Skill And Frequency Change Through Life, From Childhood To Old Age?
Young adults – defined here as people aged 18 to 29 – are the most skilled liars, while teens are the most prolific. That's according to a new study published in Acta Psychologica that claims to be the first ever to investigate lying behaviour...
- When We Lie To Children, Are We Teaching Them To Be Dishonest?
Cookie Monster - one of the characters featured in this research.Most parents lie to their children, often as a way to control their behaviour. A new study asks whether lying to the little ones increases the likelihood that they too will lie. The authors,...
- 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...
- 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...