Child lying refers to children displaying varying degrees of deceptive behavior in a social situation.
Children have been observed lying as early as age 2 and their deceptive skills increase sharply as they mature into adolescence.
Children may lie for various reasons including, but not limited to, escaping punishment for not obeying a task (such as eating a cookie when told not to), through observation of their parents and peers, or lacking a comprehensive understanding of basic morality.
Children's cognitive abilities increase as the brain develops and matures and gains more experience interacting with their surrounding environment.
Research and experimentation has validated and expanded upon the premise of cognitive functioning maintaining a leading role as the mechanism that drives the fabric of human behavior.
Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are "good" (or right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong).
The statement might be partly true, the statement may be totally true but only part of the whole truth, or it may employ some deceptive element, such as improper punctuation, or double meaning, especially if the intent is to deceive, evade, blame, or misrepresent the truth.
An honest lie (or confabulation) is defined by verbal statements or actions that inaccurately describe history, background, and present situations.
Child development refers to the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the end of adolescence, as the individual progresses from dependency to increasing autonomy.
This was the first experiment to examine the development of a child's early spontaneous verbal deceptive behaviors and how their cognitive skills relate.
In this experiment, the children performed tasks that tested their cognitive abilities for 5 different executive functioning skills.
There was proportional relationship between higher executive functioning scores and an increased tendency for children to lie.
The children were told a story and asked questions about it to determine their capacity to comprehend moral values.
In experiment 1 for the first round of questioning, half of the children told the truth immediately when asked "What happened?"
For the final round of questioning, only 4% of the children in the parent present condition lied when asked "What happened?
The next question card is left laying out and hidden cameras would show if the child looked at the answer or not.
Some children not only lied about peeking at the card but also tried to conceal how they would know the answer, claiming to have known by mere chance.
The control group followed a similar process, the only difference is when the experimenter left the children were informed that they could look at the back of the card.
Facial expressions of the children were coded for each segment in the experiment and given positive and negative display scores.
When asked what animal was on the back of the card, 56% of the lie tellers and 17.6% of the non-liars gave the correct answer.
The facial expressions of liars and non-liars does not show a difference until the children are questioned about why they made a decision.
When children reached around the age of 6, they would have the necessary cognitive abilities to understand rules and morality at a moderately decent level.
[1] Lawrence Kohlberg, influenced by Piaget's work, created a series of stages in moral reasoning that he believed all people progress through.
[1] Both Piaget and Kohlberg neglected to observe the significance of how younger children fit into the equation of moral development.
The experiments of Kang Lee and others have led to differing conclusions that have shed new light on how the moral and cognitive development of young children works.
[6][7][8][9] Children as young as age 2 can lie, which demonstrates: The results of these experiments do not completely disagree with Piaget's findings and even complement and validate portions of his work.
The findings also showed that children much younger than 10 can follow (and deviate) from Kohlberg's model of moral development.