Children’s conceptual understanding of lie maintenance and the role of Theory of Mind

Children's ability to tell, and reason about lies develops rapidly in early childhood.However, we do not know whether children are able to discern between effective and ineffective strategies to maintain a lie, or whether this differs depending on the type of lie (a lie told to protect one's self or another) that is being considered.The ability to conceptualize and reason about moral dilemmas involving lying has implications in terms of children's own lie telling and prosocial behaviour.Therefore, the investigation of children's understanding of lie maintenance, as well as their moral reasoning about such scenarios, is an important area of study.The main goal of the present study was to gain a more detailed understanding of four-to six-year-old children's developing understanding of lies by examining whether young children are able to differentiate between effective and ineffective lie maintenance, and whether this differs based on the lie context (i.e., self-oriented vs. other-oriented; within-subject).The second goal of the study was to gain a better understanding of the factors that contribute to the development of children's conceptual understanding of lie maintenance.Of specific interest was the role of Theory of Mind (ToM) understanding.Children were told stories in which a character tells an initial lie, and is then asked a follow up question about the lie.The character then responds with an effective, or ineffective follow up lie, depending on the condition.The character also either tells a lie to protect themselves (self-oriented lie), or to protect their friend (other-oriented lie), depending on the condition.This resulted in four conditions, presented in a within participant design (N = 123).After each story, children answered questions regarding the believability of the follow up lie, moral judgment questions and were asked to provide their own example of effective lie maintenance.Children also received a battery of ToM tasks, including first-and second-order false belief, as well as Morally Relevant ToM (MoToM) tasks.Working memory and receptive LIE MAINTENANCE AND THEORY OF MIND vii vocabulary tasks served as control variables within the analyses.Results revealed that at six years of age, children were better able to provide sophisticated reasoning about lie maintenance, and an example of lie maintenance.Standard ToM, and specifically second-order false-belief played a more prominent role in children's reasoning about believability, and their production of effective lie maintenance examples.MoToM, in contrast, predicted children's moral evaluations, and their understanding of believability.The data also suggested, that the role MoToM plays in children's moral evaluations is affected by the lie context as it was only predictive in other-oriented stories, while it affected children's understanding of believability only in self-oriented stories.The results of this study have important implications for practitioners and professionals working with children to better understand how to intervene and speak with children in order to promote honesty, and to aid in early identification when children's behaviour veers from typical development.Additionally, these findings extend our theoretical understanding of children's moral development as it relates to lying.

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