The development of lie-telling: the role of executive functioning and theory of mind in children’s prosocial and antisocial lying
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lying is a frequent behaviour in our daily interactions and emerges early in children's development.Deceiving others is a cognitively demanding task, as lie-telling has been found to place greater mental demands upon the individual than truth-telling.Although researchers have highlighted the role of cognitive skills on the capacity to tell a lie, these investigations have been limited in scope.Specifically, the majority of inquiries have focused on antisocial lie-telling of preschool and elementary school-aged children; yet children tell various forms of lies (i.e., prosocial and antisocial).Yet observational accounts of parents and researchers have found that children lie much younger than experimentally observed in laboratory settings.However, little empirical research has been conducted on the emergence of children's lie-telling (i.e., lies told prior to 3 years old).As a result, our understanding of children's lie-telling, both the emergence and use of various forms of lies, remains limited in scope.The current dissertation sought to address these gaps in the empirical research.Two manuscripts are included, which together document the role of executive functioning and Theory of Mind (i.e., ToM) in the development of lie-telling.The first manuscript of the dissertation examines the contribution of the executive functioning skills of working memory and inhibitory control to children's ability to tell prosocial lies (i.e., lies told for another individual's benefit).Children's ToM was also investigated in relation to prosocial lying through measures of second-order false-belief understanding.The Stroop and Digit Span tasks were used to measure inhibitory control and working memory.A total of 79 children between the ages of 6 and 12 years old completed a disappointing gift paradigm (i.e., DGP), designed to elicit prosocial lies and to measure children's ability to maintain such lies.Results reveal that children who told prosocial lies had significantly higher CHILDREN'S LIE-TELLING iii scores on measures of working memory and inhibitory control.Those children who were able to maintain their prosocial lies throughout questioning also had significantly higher performance on measures of second-order false-belief.These results provide evidence that prosocial lies are supported through the maturation of both executive functioning and ToM.The second manuscript examines the relation between preschool aged children's rudimentary lies, executive functioning, ToM and conceptual understanding of lies and truths.A total of 65 children between the ages of 2.5 and 3.5 years old participated in a modified temptation resistance paradigm (TRP).To examine executive functioning, children completed measures of inhibitory control and planning.Children's abilities to identify both truths and lies were also examined in relation to their actual lie-telling behaviour.Overall, a total of 29% of young children lied during the TRP.Results revealed significant differences between lie-tellers and truth-tellers on all measures of executive functioning, with lie-tellers having significantly better scores than truth-tellers.Moreover, lie-tellers also had significantly better accuracy in identifying both truths and lies.No significant differences between truth and lie-tellers were found on measures of ToM.As such, the results provide support for the role of executive functioning skills in the emergence of antisocial lie-telling.Taken together, the current research program provides support for a developmental model of lie-telling.Notably, results support the argument that children acquire lie-telling in developmental stages, with rudimentary lies being supported by the executive functioning skills of inhibitory control and planning.With age, executive functioning skills and ToM support other forms of lie-telling (i.e., prosocial), as well as improved lie-telling capacities (i.e., maintenance of lies through control of semantic leakage).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".