Children’s conceptual understanding of lie maintenance and the role of Theory of Mind
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it