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Children's Competency in Understanding the Role of a Witness: Truth, Lies, and Moral Ties
Abstract
Research is reviewed that shows the developmental steps by which children acquire understanding of the reasons why witnesses at court must speak the truth and only the truth. From as young as 2 years of age children can distinguish between true and false, and show some implicit sensitivity to the conditions under which knowledge is acquired. Explicit understanding of how knowledge is formed emerges around 4 years. At the same time children grasp the notion of false beliefs, acquire the ability to flexibly deceive and to judge the moral implications of lies. A clear differentiation of lies from mistakes and other speech acts (like jokes) takes a few more years to develop. However, full appreciation of the circumstances under which one is morally obliged to speak the truth (as opposed to white lies) is not in place until around the age of 9–10 years. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... Podemos então afirmar que as mentiras podem ser distinguidas dos erros, das brincadeiras e das pretensões que os sujeitos queiram fazer chegar até ao ouvinte (Wilson et al., 2003). A capacidade de distinguir uma mentira de um erro ou de uma brincadeira é, de acordo com Perner (1997), proficiente na criança a partir dos cinco anos de idade. Deste modo e segundo o autor referido, as crianças a partir desta idade entendem o carácter não moral presente numa mentira, distinguindo-o dos erros e das brincadeiras que são ou não intencionais, da ironia ou do sarcasmo. ...
... Tornam-se assim mais capazes cognitivamente de mentir, dado que tomam em conta a capacidade dos ouvintes acreditarem nos seus argumentos (Stott, 2005). A partir desta idade, as crianças entendem "os efeitos que uma falsa mensagem pode ter na cabeça dos ouvintes, reconhecendo que estes interpretarão e avaliarão a frase à luz de todos os seus conhecimentos", o que segundo Perner (1997), revela a noção de que a mentira é mais repreensível do que uma brincadeira. Embora as crianças desta idade ainda tenham algumas dificuldades em saber quando o ouvinte acredita numa frase falsa, estas sabem que "nunca se deve dizer uma mentira, porque (…) irão sempre descobrir que era mentira." ...
... This is key in the context of misinformation in particular, as the act of sharing misinformation can be perceived differently depending on whether the sharer's intent has been regarded as deliberate or accidental. For children, perceiving someone as deliberately or accidentally sharing misinformation, requires a level of mental state understanding and ability to infer intentionality (Perner, 1997). This ability, however, is subjected to developmental differences. ...
Previous developmental research shows that young children display a preference for ingroup members when it comes to who they accept information from – even when that information is false. However, it is not clear how this ingroup bias develops into adolescence, and how it affects responses about peers who misinform in intergroup contexts, which is important to explore with growing numbers of young people on online platforms. Given that the developmental span from childhood to adolescence is when social groups and group norms are particularly important, the present study took a Social Reasoning Developmental Approach. This study explored whether children and adolescents respond differently to a misinformer spreading false claims about a peer breaking COVID-19 rules, depending on (a) the group membership of the misinformer and their target and (b) whether the ingroup had a “critical” norm that values questioning information before believing it. 354 United Kingdom-based children (8–11 years old) and adolescents (12–16 years old) read about an intergroup scenario in which a peer spreads misinformation on WhatsApp about a competitor. Participants first made moral evaluations, which asked them to judge and decide whether or not to include the misinformer, with follow-up “Why?” questions to capture their reasoning. This was followed by asking them to attribute intentions to the misinformer. Results showed that ingroup preferences emerged both when participants morally evaluated the misinformer, and when they justified those responses. Participants were more likely to evaluate an ingroup compared to an outgroup misinformer positively, and more likely to accuse an outgroup misinformer of dishonesty. Adolescents attributed more positive intentions to the misinformer compared with children, with children more likely to believe an outgroup misinformer was deliberately misinforming. The critical norm condition resulted in children making more positive intentionality attributions toward an ingroup misinformer, but not an outgroup misinformer. This study’s findings highlight the importance of shared group identity with a misinformer when morally evaluating and reasoning about their actions, and the key role age plays in intentionality attributions surrounding a misinformer when their intentions are ambiguous.
... Research has shown that children display deficits in the following areas: comprehension (Saywitz, Jaenicke & Camparo, 1990;Bala, Lee, Lindsay & Talwar, 2000;Perner, 1997;Lamb, Sternberg & Esplin, 1998); potential for deception (DePaulo & Pfeifer, 1986;Kassin, Meissner & Norwick, 2005;Meissner & Kassin, 2002); suggestibility (Owen-Kostelnik et al., 2006;Singh & Gudjonsson, 1992;Thierry, Spence & Memon, 2001;Ceci & Bruck, 1993;Redlich & Goodman, 2003); and accuracy (Brady, Poole, Warren & Jones, 1999;Castelli, Goodman & Ghetti, 2005;Steinberg & Cauffman, 1996). Therefore, the child as a witness is biologically at risk of being an unreliable witness and is especially susceptible to giving false testimony, and the risk of unreliability is further compounded by the suggestibility of child witnesses and improper interview procedures. ...
Children can be unreliable witnesses, and they are especially vulnerable to questionable interview practices. However, in some crimes like child sexual abuse, children may be the only person capable of providing testimonial evidence. States must balance the needs of bringing criminals who target children to justice and ensuring that due process is upheld to reduce the chances of false convictions. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has published a set best‐practices for the interviewing of children to achieve this balance. This article conducts a statutory analysis to determine if states are currently following the recommendations of the OJJDP.
... 쾌락 중심의 도덕추 론을 하는 아동은 타인의 필요나 인정을 고려하 는 상위 수준의 도덕추론을 하는 아동에 비해 자 기중심적인 특성과 공격성을 표출하기 때문에 비인기아로 분류되는 경향이 많다 (송종란․조 증열, 2000;Bear & Rys, 1994 (Bok, 1978). 예를 들어, Peterson, Peterson과 Seeto(1983) (Perner, 1997). 또, 4세경이 되면 벌을 받지 않는 거짓말보다 벌을 받는 거짓말을 더 부정적으로 평가하기는 하지 만 거짓말과 참말의 차이를 명확하게 구분할 수 있다 (Bussey, 1992). ...
This study investigated how peer popularity is linked to children's understanding, moral judgment, and emotional reactions about three different types of lies. Participants were second (n=53) and fourth (n=54) grade children. Results showed that (1) popular children afforded better understanding of white lies than unpopular children; most children understood the definition of an antisocial lie, but not a trick lie. (2) Popular children rated lies more positively than unpopular children. Second graders did not differentiate between the morality of white and trick lies; fourth graders rated white lies as the least serious type of lie. (3) Second graders anticipated greater positive emotional reaction for antisocial lies and greater negative emotional reaction for white lies and trick lies, respectively, than fourth graders.
... However, 3-year-olds' failure could be due to their executive functioning difficulties in rejecting the speaker's directions rather than their awareness that ''lie'' denotes inaccuracy. Indeed, Perner (1997) has noted that even 2-year-olds exhibit some understanding of the counterfactual aspect of the concept of lying, based on findings that before their 2nd birthday, children tend to reject counterfactual statements by objecting to false propositions (Koenig & Echols, 2003;Pea, 1982) and by denying false propositions expressed in question form (Hummer, Wimmer, & Antes, 1993;Pea, 1980). Together, extant research raises an important distinction between the ability to reject counterfactual statements and the ability to label counterfactual statements as such. ...
Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth-telling and lying, and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (104 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements, and that older children's ability to label true and false statements as "truth" and "lie" emerged in tandem with their positive evaluation of true statements and "truth" and their negative evaluation of false statements and "lie." The findings suggest that children's early preference for factuality develops into a conception of "truth" and "lie" that is linked both to factuality and moral evaluation. Study 2 (128 3- to 5-year-olds) found that, whereas young children exhibited good understanding of the association of true and false statements with "truth," "lie," "mistake," "right," and "wrong," they showed little awareness of assumptions about speaker knowledge underlying "lie" and "mistake." The results further support the primacy of factuality in children's early understanding and evaluation of truth and lies.
... Although Astington does not describe her results with respect to their implications for children taking the oath in court, Perner (1997) discusses both Astington's (1990) work and his own (Mant & Perner, 1988) and argued that his results "suggest that children before 9 or 10 years are not competent to appreciate the full moral impact of an oath, insofar as it formalizes the absolute necessity to tell the truth" (p. S31). ...
Two studies, with 102 nonmaltreated 3- to 6-year-old children and 96 maltreated 4- to 7-year-old children, examined children's understanding of the relative strengths of "I promise," "I will," "I might," and "I won't," to determine the most age-appropriate means of eliciting a promise to tell the truth from child witnesses. Children played a game in which they chose which of 2 boxes would contain a toy after hearing story characters make conflicting statements about their intent to place a toy in each box (e.g., one character said "I will put a toy in my box" and the other character said "I might put a toy in my box"). Children understood "will" at a younger age than "promise." Nonmaltreated children understood that "will" is stronger than "might" by 3 years of age and that "promise" is stronger than "might" by 4 years of age. The youngest nonmaltreated children preferred "will" to "promise," whereas the oldest nonmaltreated children preferred "promise" to "will." Maltreated children exhibited a similar pattern of performance, but with delayed understanding that could be attributed to delays in vocabulary. The results support a modified oath for children: "Do you promise that you will tell the truth?" (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
... 14). Moreover, with age, children begin to differentiate lies from honest mistakes, guesses, exaggerations, jokes, and eventually sarcasm and irony (Creusere, 1999;Perner, 1997). Children also gradually take into consideration the social context in which lies are told. ...
The veracity of child witness testimony is central to the justice system where there are serious consequences for the child, the accused, and society. Thus, it is important to examine how children’s lie-telling abilities develop and the factors that can influence their truthfulness. The current review examines children’s lie-telling ability in relation to child witness testimony. Although research demonstrates that children develop the ability to lie at an early age, they also understand that lie-telling is morally unacceptable and do not condone most types of lies. Children’s ability to lie effectively develops with age and is related to their increasing cognitive sophistication. However, even children’s early lies can be difficult to detect. Greater lie elaboration requires greater skill and children’s ability to lie effectively improves with development and as a function of cognitive skill. Different methods of promoting children’s truthful reports as well as the social and motivational factors that affect children’s honesty will be discussed.
... What may account for this finding? By the age of 4, children are usually able to tell lies from truth on the basis of the factuality of a statement (Perner, 1997). If the factuality of the statement is not clear to them, however, they may be undecided as to whether the person is operating under a deception or under a false belief. ...
Children's credibility as witnesses in court cases has become an important issue in recent years. When testifying, younger children are considered to be more susceptible to suggestion than are older children. The present study examined the possibility that knowledge of an interviewer's mental states (intention and false belief, in this study) would influence the accuracy of young children's reporting of a recently witnessed event. Five-year-old children were shown a short video clip, after which they were asked to free recall as well as respond to a list of specific questions. Results showed that children who were given knowledge of an interviewer's intention resisted suggestive questioning, whereas children without mental-states knowledge were misled to report inaccurate information.
This study investigated developmental differences of moral evaluation for different lies. The subjects were 170 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Children's understanding of, moral judgment for, and emotional reactions to antisocial lie, white lie, and trick lie were assessed. Major findings were as follows: 1. Children's understanding of lies was increased with age. Children understood well in definition for antisocial lie, whereas they understood poorly in definition for trick lie. 2. There were differences of children's moral judgment for lies according to age and lie types. Six- and 8-year-olds rated trick lie as the least serious lie type, whereas 10-year-olds rated white lie as the least serious lie type. 3. Children anticipated the greatest negative emotional reaction to antisocial lie, and the greatest positive reaction to trick lie by all ages. There was no difference of positive emotional reaction between antisocial lie and white lie for 6- and 8-year-olds. But 10-year-olds anticipated greater positive emotional reaction to white lie than antisocial lie.
Adults appear to recognize that different memory sharing contexts, such as telling a story to a friend at a party versus providing eyewitness testimony, vary in their accuracy demands and adjust their retellings accordingly. There is less evidence that children are able to make the same distinctions. In the present two-part experiment, we first tested 6–8-year-old children's beliefs about the accuracy requirements of different memory sharing contexts that varied on the listener's implicit expectation about accuracy. Children were then read a short story and were given retelling instructions that emphasized accuracy or entertainment. Results from the first task indicated that children evidence a significant truth bias, suggesting that they believe accurate retellings are preferred regardless of context. Despite this, children did appear to adjust their retellings as a function of context, with retellings in the high accuracy condition including more verbatim and less error statements. Finally, children who evidenced a stronger truth bias were less likely to employ the language of storytelling by producing lower-quality narratives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
IntroductionChildren and the Legal SystemChildren's Competency as WitnessesChildren and Criminal ResponsibilityConclusion
Objective: The aim of the research was to analyse interviewer practice in investigative interviews, concentrating on features other than the type of questions asked. Method: Transcripts of 70 videotaped Memorandum interviews from England and Wales were coded using a specifically developed scheme. Children were aged from under 7 to 12 years. Aspects of interviewer practice that were recorded included implementation of the different phases of the interview, interviewer distortions, and other problematic interviewer behaviours, e.g. excessive familiarity, inappropriate disbelief, etc. Results: A number of problems were noted in the transcripts. Rapport, closure and free narrative phases varied in the degree to which they were present, and in their quality even when included. Discussions of truth and lies in the rapport phase were at a basic level that did not include intention to deceive. Over half the sample included interviewer distortions, and other instances of problematic behaviours were also noted. Conclusions: The results of the study support and extend earlier research, and suggest a number of areas requiring attention. The importance of interviewer training is highlighted, and further discussion is required as to why such training does not appear to be implemented in practice.
Franz and Gegenfurtner (2008) argue that the evidence for a division of labour within the visual system for action and perception is flawed because perception is often measured by manual estimation, which responds in general with a larger slope to a change of physical size than does adjusting. Therefore results obtained under manual estimation have to be corrected for this difference in slope: In a reanalysis of six studies grasping and perception were equally influenced by the illusion after this correction. However, closer inspection of methods reveals that visual feedback was confounded with conditions (suppressed vision while grasping vs. full vision while adjusting). We argue that studies can produce relevant and decisive data only when they (a) do not confound conditions with visual feedback, (b) do not allow online corrections of the action due to a direct comparison of the hand with the target, and (c) do not provide any risk of grasping being memory driven when the target is removed.
Results from 4 experiments and an analysis in which all data from 444 English and Japanese children are pooled show (a) a linear increase in understanding false belief with the number of older siblings, (b) no such effect for children younger than 3 years 2 months, (c) no helpful effect of younger siblings at any age (despite the large sample), (d) no effect of siblings’ gender, and (e) no helpful effect of siblings on a task measuring children’s understanding of how they know something. Discussion involves speculation about how older siblings may assist children (e.g., through pretend play and mental state language) and how different aspects of a theory of mind may develop through different means.
The meaning of the word lie ('prevaricate') consists in a cognitive prototype to which various real or imagined events may correspond in varying degrees. This view contrasts with the familiar one in which word meanings consist of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, and distinguish discretely between instances and non-instances. The relevance of the notions of PROTOTYPE and GRADIENCE in semantics has previously been established in physical and sensory lexical domains. The present paper shows that these notions are also relevant in abstract and social domains. Results are reported from an experiment which supports this view.
The ability of preschool-aged children to modify their verbal communication as a function of listener attributes was explored. 3- and 4-year-old children twice engaged in a variety of tasks with an adult. 1 week after each interaction they talked about their experiences under 2 conditions of listener knowledge: (a) when the listener was knowledgeable about those experiences (having participated in them), and (b) when the listener was naive. The communicative behavior of the children differed substantially on a number of measures under the 2 conditions of listener knowledge. They appropriately modified their language as a function of listener needs.
This study examined preschool children's conceptions of moral and social-conventional rules. 44 children between the ages of 2-6 and 4-9 were divided into 2 groups of 21 and 23 children according to age (X̄=3-3, 4-2). Children made judgments concerning the seriousness, rule contingency, rule relativism, and amount of deserved punishment for 10 (depicted) moral and conventional preschool transgressions. Analyses of variance with age and sex as between-group factors and domain as the within-group factor indicated that, constant across both sexes and the ages studied, children evaluated moral transgressions as more serious offenses and as more deserving of punishment than conventional transgressions. Moreover, moral events were less likely than conventional events to be regarded as contingent on the presence of a rule and relative to the social context. Test-retest reliability of the ratings of the seriousness of transgressions was .66 over a 2-3 week period. The findings were discussed in relation to the developmental differentiation model and the distinct conceptual domain approach.
126 children (aged 4 yrs 2 mo to 5 yrs 11 mo) were told stories in which a protagonist with the intention to communicate truthfully said something false because he himself was mistaken. Ss were asked to judge whether the protagonist should be rewarded or punished for his false statement (moral judgment) and whether he had lied (lexical judgment). Replicating an earlier finding by the present authors (see record
1984-14615-001), there was a high number of inconsistent responses when the moral judgment was elicited first: Frequent subjectivist reward judgments were followed by realist "lying" judgments. Such an inconsistent response pattern was nearly absent when the lexical judgment was elicited first. Here the frequent realist lying judgments led to subsequent realist punishment judgments. Findings show (1) that young children's moral intuition about lying is advanced as compared to their definition
to lie and (2) that children's realist definition of
to lie carries a strong negative moral connotation that overrides their usual subjectivist moral intuitions. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
considers children's understanding of . . . different types of social rules / most of the research to be discussed is on children's understanding of social rule violations
begins with a description of a conceptual model for categorizing different types of social rules / the development of children's rule knowledge is examined, focusing both on what develops and on the processes that account for development / children's understanding of social rules in different social contexts, including the family, schools and culture, is considered / finally, an understanding of social rules in special populations, including rejected children, deaf children, retarded children and abused and neglected children, will be discussed (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested whether young children could infer another persons' perspective by showing 80 2–6 yr olds 2 videotaped stories which included audio information describing the action, and later reshowing the films to the Ss and their mothers, with the audio turned off. The Ss were then asked questions about their mothers' knowledge of the action and asked to justify their answers. Few or none of the 2- and 3-yr-olds answered nonegocentrically but most to all of the 4-, 5-, and 6-yr-olds did. The ability to make a correct inference appeared somewhat earlier than the ability to justify it. Results are compared to those from other studies. (3 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We investigated 5- to 10-year-old children's understanding of the conditions under which a person becomes committed to carrying out an intended action in a series of three experiments. We asked subjects to pass moral judgment on story protagonists for not carrying out an action that, if it were carried out, would have prevented a friend's misfortune. In a
commitment story the protagonist agreed to act, whereas in a
no-commitment story the protagonist only predicted that he would act without understanding that his friend would later rely on this action. Up to the age of 9 years children thought both protagonists equally reprehensible for not acting. By varying the no-commitment story, a developmental sequence emerged in the understanding of when failure to act need not be reprehensible. Even the youngest children did not blame the protagonist if he never had the intention to act or if he was prevented from acting by external force. By the age of 7 years, they did blame the protagonist if he kept his intention to act a secret. Although children from a very early age have the concept of commitment, the understanding of the interpersonal conditions for becoming committed develops later. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Most research suggests that it is not until age 4 that children understand deception as a means of creating a false belief. Yet children could have failed on these tasks because of either (1) conceptual problems (an inability to understand that deception is a means of creating false belief), or (2) pragmatic problems (an inability to articulate an understanding of false beliefs) and task complexity (an inability to follow the narrative or make appropriate inferences). Three experiments were conducted to determine why children might fail deception tasks, and results indicated that (1) children were no better at understanding deception whether they were "active deceivers" or observers of a deceptive act, and (2) children's difficulty appeared to be associated with a conceptual deficiency (e.g., they could leave clues that would lead another to a possible belief but not a false belief). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children's ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29% of 3-year-olds knew to influence the competitor's mental state, 87% knew to physically exclude the competitor. There was no difference between children's performance when trying to obtain the object for themselves or predicting what a story character would do. The success of the older children in concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence another's behavior, one must influence that person's mental state.
Three- and 4-year-old children (Homo sapiens) were tested for comprehension of knowledge formation. In Experiment 1, 34 subjects watched as a surprise was hidden under 1 of 4 obscured cups. The experimenter then pointed to the cup. All children searched under the correct cup, but no 3-year-olds (in contrast to most 4-year-olds) could explain how they knew where to look. Subjects then discriminated between simultaneous pointing by 2 adults, one who had hidden a surprise and one who had left the room before the surprise was hidden. Most 4-year-olds (but no 3-year-olds) showed clear discrimination between the adults. In Experiment 2, 16 subjects were tested with procedures designed to make the source of their own knowledge more obvious, but this had no effect on performance. We conclude that studies using very similar procedures with chimpanzees and rhesus macaques were measuring an ability (or inability) to understand how knowledge states form.
Factors associated with individual variation in false belief understanding were examined. Sixty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on 4 standard false belief tasks. General language ability and verbal memory were found to be significant predictors of false belief understanding after the effects of age were partialled out, but nonverbal memory was not. There was evidence for a threshold effect in that children did not pass false belief tasks before they reached a certain level of linguistic ability. False belief scores were higher in children from larger families, after the effect of age and language had been partialled out. Family size was more strongly associated with false belief understanding in children who were less competent linguistically, suggesting that the presence of siblings can compensate for slower language development in developing false belief understanding.
Observations were made in 10 preschools of interactions in 2 domains of social events: social conventional and moral. On the basis of criteria defining each domain, observed events could be reliably classified as social conventional or moral. As another aspect of the study, an interview was administered to children from the preschool who had witnessed the same events as the observer. The children's view of the events as social conventional or moral was in agreement with our classifications of the events in 83% of the cases. It was hypothesized that the responses of both children and adults to social conventional events differ from their responses to moral events. Observed behaviors were rated on a standard checklist of response categories. Different types of responses were elicited by the 2 types of events. Almost all responses to social conventional transgressions were initiated by adults. Children and adults responded with equal frequency to moral transgressions. Adults responded to social conventional transgressions differently from the ways they reacted to moral transgressions.
There are a number of accounts in the literature of how general event knowledge can affect recall of specific episodes (Linton, 1982; Neisser, 1981; Schank, 1983). Based on these accounts and on research on constructive processes in children's recall, a model of the relation between general-event knowledge and the development of autobiographic memory is proposed and tested in two studies of effects of familiarity on children's general-event scripts and their recall of specific episodes. Study 1 compared 3-and 5-year-olds' scripts and episodic memories of routine and more novel events. Children appeared to have difficulty recalling routine episodes: They provided more general information about everyday events than they could recall for particular episodes; their episodic memories were no more detailed than their general accounts; and memories of less routine episodes were relatively longer and more detailed than recall of everyday episodes. Study 2 compared 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds' scripts and episodic memories for events with which they had varying amounts of experience. With increased experience, both types of reports became more generic and included fewer particular details. In both studies, major developmental differences appeared only in stylistic measures: Older children's narratives were longer and more elaborate than younger children's accounts. Results suggest that children organize and retrieve autobiographic memories in much the same way as do adults.
Young children's understanding of the sources of their beliefs was investigated. 3, 4, and 5-year-olds learned about the contents of a drawer in 3 different ways: they saw the contents, were told about them, or inferred their identity from a clue. Children were then asked, immediately and after a brief delay, how they knew about the contents of the drawer. 3-year-olds had difficulty identifying the sources of their knowledge, while 5-year-olds did not. Moreover, even 3-year-olds who could correctly identify the source immediately had difficulty remembering the source after a delay. Explicit training in identifying sources did not improve the 3-year-olds' performance. These results support the hypothesis that children learn about the causal relation between the world and the mind between 3 and 5 years of age.
A sharp improvement was found between 3 years and 5 years in children's understanding of the role of visual perception and linguistic communication in knowledge formation. Although children at any age were able to obtain knowledge and could reliably introspect on the existence of knowledge obtained through visual and linguistic information, most 3- and some 4-year-olds seemed completely ignorant about the causal connection between access to an informational source and resulting knowledge. They could not tell how they themselves had acquired a particular piece of knowledge (i. e., whether they had been shown or told). They were also incapable of assessing another person's knowledge of a fact on the basis of observing that person being deprived of or being given information about that fact.
80 children between 2.5 and 6.5 years of age were administered a task in which they were required to distinguish among multiple conceptual points of view. The task was based on the notion of a secret, involved 3 participants, and was administered in the children's homes. Results indicated that children as young as 4 years of age could conceive of others' conceptual points of view in a non-egocentric fashion. The results were discussed in terms of the nature and context of perspective-taking tasks, and of the development of group interaction.
Ratings of the frequency of occurrence of each of 29 items thought to be associated with deceptive behaviour were obtained from 100 mothers of children aged between 3 and 7 years. Principal components analysis of their responses yielded three factors: the first concerned knowledge of mental states, the second deception by behavioural manipulation, and the third a general propensity to mislead others. Trend analyses of individual factor scores revealed different patterns of age-dependent changes for each of the factors. The first factor had significant linear, quadratic, and cubic components with change between years 3 and 4, stability through years 4 to 6, and further change between years 6 and 7. The second factor was best described by a downward linear function from years 3 to 7, while the third remained stable over the same age range. These results highlight a pervasive tendency for children in this age range to engage in deception for the purpose of self-interest, indicate that younger children favour deceptive strategies that differ from those of older children, and support the notion of qualitative changes in 4- and 7-year-olds' understanding of mental states.
looks at how children might learn to become good liars / the focus is on whether children's developing success as liars may be related to their developing understanding of another person's belief / I [the author] develop a conceptual framework in which lying can be considered at different levels or degrees of complexity / review some of the developmental literature on lying to see whether the different levels of lying that I propose might correspond to particular developmental levels or stages
levels of lying [level 1: manipulating behavior, level 2: manipulating belief, level 3: manipulating belief about intentions] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
look at two verbal forms of teasing and deception; jokes and lies / my aim is to show how children's understanding of falsehood is related to their developing understanding of people's intentions and beliefs
focus primarily on the child's understanding of jokes and lies because the distinction between these two acts seems to rely on distinguishing the higher-order intentions and beliefs (i.e. what A wants B to believe) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
provides an interesting philosophical analysis of deception / to engage in a minimal lie, he [the author] argues, the perpetrator who believes X must do something or omit something with the intent of making the listener think "not X" / thus, a minimal lie requires understanding the complex relation between actions (pointing in the wrong direction, speaking falsely), and the production of false beliefs in one's audience / moves the debate over children's use and understanding of deception squarely into the realm of theory of mind / to deceive, according to his analysis, children must read at least some of their listener's mind
epistemic and moral issues / the semantics of 'lie' / socialization for honesty (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The hypothesis of the 1st and 3rd authors (see record
1983-27705-001) that a conceptual limitation underlies 3-yr-olds' difficulty with false-belief attribution was tested against 3 competing hypotheses. Results from 2 experiments involving 101 3- and 4-yr-olds show that false-belief attribution remained difficult for younger 3-yr-olds, despite their retention of essential facts and attempts to make expectations more explicit and prevent pragmatic misinterpretation. Findings strengthen the original hypothesis, specified as the inability to assign conflicting truth values to propositions. This hypothesis can explain why 3-yr-olds find pretend play, the distinction between expected and achieved outcomes, the real–imaginary distinction, and level 1 perspective taking easier to understand than false belief, the reality–appearance distinction, and level 2 perspective taking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
33 normal 3-yr-old, 16 normal 4-yr-old, 11 7–17 yr old autistic, and 14 7–28 yr old mentally handicapped (MH) children completed a task to measure capacity for strategic deception. A competitive game was played between the Ss and an experimenter in which participants tried to win chocolates. In the training phase, Ss learned that it was in their interest to tell the experimenter to look into an empty box for the chocolate, although Ss did not know until after the search which box was empty. In the testing phase, Ss could see the empty box. The 4-yr-olds and MH Ss generally pointed to the empty box on the 1st trial. The 3-yr-olds and autistic Ss frequently continued to point to the baited box for the full 20 test trials. The ability to apply the correct strategy was associated with success on a standard false-belief task. The tasks may be difficult because they require Ss to inhibit the tendency of salient knowledge about object locations to overwrite knowledge of epistemic states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments with 145 children (aged 2 yrs 8 mo to 4 yrs 11 mo) explored Ss' ability to deceive a competitor in a hiding game, using a paradigm similar to the one introduced by G. Woodruff and D. Premack (see record
1981-04926-001) for the study of deception in chimpanzees. There was a significant increase with age in the frequency of deceptive pointing, with children below the age of about 3.5 yrs consistently failing to deceive a competitor even under conducive conditions. Two deception tasks were significantly more difficult for 3–4 yr olds than parallel "sabotage" tasks. Findings demonstrate 3-yr-olds' difficulty with false belief representation and are discussed with regard to controversies on the early acquisition of a theory of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviews the book, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood by Jean Piaget (1951). The current work by Piaget is another stimulating and provocative contribution to the literature on the development of children's thinking. In this well-translated volume, Piaget has as his basic goal an explanation of the evolution of "representative activity," which is "characterized by the fact that it goes beyond the present, extending the field of adaptation both in space and in time." Such an activity is essential in reflective thought as well as in operational thought. Two theses are presented by Piaget in the book: (a) the transition from rudimentary, primitive, and situational assimilation of experience to the operational and reflective adaptation of experience can be studied by the analysis of imitative behavior and play activity of the child from very early months of the life; and (b) various forms of mental activity--imitation, symbolic activity, and cognitive representation--are interacting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure.
The ability to understand false beliefs is critical to a concept of mind. Chandler, Fritz, and Hala challenge recent claims that this ability emerges only at around 4 years of age. They report that 2- and 3-year-olds remove true trails and lay false ones to mislead someone about the location of a hidden object. Experiment 1 confirmed that 2- and 3-year-olds produce apparently deceptive ploys, but they produce them less often than 4-year-olds, require prompting, and rarely anticipate their impact on the victim's beliefs or search. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds produce deceptive and informative ploys indiscriminately, whether asked to mislead a competitor or inform a collaborator. By contrast, 4-year-olds act selectively. The results support earlier claims that an understanding of false beliefs and deceptive ploys emerges at around 4 years of age. 2- and 3-year-olds can be led to produce such ploys but show no clear understanding of their effect.
Preschool (M= 4.9 years), second- (M= 7.8 years), and fifth- (M= 11.0 years) grade children's definitions of, moral standards for, and internal evaluative reactions to both lies and truthful statements were investigated. The influence of 4 factors on these judgments was also examined: the falsity of the statement, the content of the statement, whether or not the statement was believed, and whether or not the statement resulted in punishment. Results revealed that while the older children identified almost all statements correctly, preschoolers correctly identified about 70% of lies and truthful statements. Lies were rated as worse than truthful statements by all age groups; however, only the second and fifth graders ascribed feelings of pride to story characters after truthfulness. Implications of these findings for children's moral development are discussed.
3 studies involving more than 70 3- and 4-year-olds were carried out in an effort to better secure an earlier but controversial set of findings interpreted as demonstrating that children younger than 4 already have a grasp of the possibility of false belief, and consequently deserve to be credited with some authentic if fledgling theory of mind. These studies, which relied on a measure of deceptive hiding rather than more familiar “unexpected change” procedures for indexing false belief understanding, all demonstrated that even the youngest of these subjects: (a) accurately anticipated the likely impact of their deceptive strategies on both the behaviors (Study 1) and beliefs (Study 3) of their opponents, and (b) were able to selectively employ these same methods of information management as a means of helping as well as hindering the efforts of others (Study 2).
This study investigated the relation between family size and “theory of mind.” Results from an experiment with 3- and 4-year-olds showed that children from larger families were better able than children from smaller families to predict a story character's mistaken (false-belief based) action. Results from a second experiment on children with exactly 1 sibling failed to show any superiority of older over younger siblings in promoting earlier understanding of belief. The data are interpreted as suggesting that sibling interaction provides a rich “data base” for building a theory of mind, and this is discussed in relation to other studies showing that particular kinds of interaction between sibling and child, or caregiver and child, have a beneficial effect on the understanding of false belief.
These studies examined whether toddlers take their communicative partners' knowledge states into account when communicating with them. In Study 1, 16 2-year-old children (mean age 2-7) had to ask a parent for help in retrieving a toy. On each trial, a child was first introduced to a new toy that was then placed in 1 of 2 containers on a high shelf. The parent either witnessed these events along with the child or did not because she or he had left the room or had covered her or his eyes and ears. As predicted, when asking for help in retrieving the toy, children significantly more often named the toy, named its location, and gestured to its location when a parent had not witnessed these events than when she or he had. In Study 2, 16 2-year-old children (mean age 2-3) had to ask a parent for help in retrieving a sticker dropped into 1 of 2 identical containers placed out of reach in the far corners of a table. The parent either witnessed, along with the child, which container the sticker was dropped into or did not because her or his eyes were closed. In their requests for help, young 2-year-old children gestured to the sticker's location significantly more often when the parent did not know its location than when she or he did. The implications of these findings for current characterizations of 2-year-old children's ability to assess the knowledge of others is discussed.
Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where children look in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from the place where it really is. This implicit measure of understanding was contrasted with children's explicit answers to the experimenter's question about where the protagonist would look for the object. Children from 2 years 5 months to 2 years 10 months erroneously looked at the object's real location, which they gave for their answer. From 2 years 11 months to 4 years 5 months, about 90% of the children looked at the empty location where the protagonist thought the object was.In sharp contrast, only about 45% of the children in this age span gave that location as their explicit answer to the experimenter's question. These results are explained in terms of a distinction between representing a fact and making a judgment about that fact.
We contrasted 3- and 4-year-olds' difficulty imputing knowledge, a paradigmatic representational internal state, with their ability to infer hunger, a typical non-representational internal state. Results confirmed earlier reports that most 3-year-olds and even some 4-year-olds are unable to impute knowledge on the basis of access to relevant information. In contrast, few 3- and no 4-year-olds encountered comparable difficulty inferring a person's hunger. We conclude that children's difficulty with imputing knowledge is not due to an inability to infer an unobservable internal state, but to their deficient understanding of information transfer and of the representational function of mental states.RésuméNous avons comparé les difficultés qu'éprouvent des enfants âgés de 3 et 4 ans respectivement à imputer un certain savoir - un état interne représentationnel paradigmatique - à quelqu'un, et leur capacité à inférer que quelqu'un a faim - un état interne non représentationnel paradigmatique. Nos résultats confirment des résultats précédemment obtenus selon lesquels la plupart des enfants âgés de 3 ans et même certains enfants âgés de 4 ans sont incapables d'imputer un savoir à partir des informations pertinentes. Nous en concluons que la difficulté qu'éprouvent les enfants à imputer un savoir ne tient pas à une incapacité à inférer un état interne inobservable, mais à une mauvaise compréhénsion des transferts d'information et de la fonction représentationnelle des états mentaux.
Four- to twelve-year-old children's use of the verb “lying” and their moral judgment of true and false assertions was tested. Two types of stories were used in which a speaker was led to a false belief and therefore mistakenly produced either a false statement despite his truthful intentions or a true statement despite deceptive intentions. It was first tested whether children understood that the speaker held a false belief. As a test of moral judgment children were then asked to reward the speaker. Even 4-year-olds tended to reward according to the speaker's intentions and showed little sign of “moral realism” by rewarding according to the truth value of the assertion. As a test of the lexical definition of lying, children were first tested as to whether they understood that the falsity of the assertion by the well-meaning speaker was unintentional. Then they were asked whether this speaker had told a lie or not. Of those children who had given correct answers to the control questions (i.e., who understood that the speaker entertained a false belief and that the falsity of his assertion was therefore unintentional) most 4-year-olds, a fair proportion of 6-year-olds, but practically no 8-year-olds showed a realist concept of lying. They called the well-intended, mistakenly false statement a lie. This conceptual realism persisted even in children who just before had rewarded this speaker for his truthful intentions.
Most 4-, but no 3-year-olds, were able to understand the mind's active role in evaluating the truth of verbal information. They appreciated that a statement, whether true or false, will be disbelieved if the listener has existing beliefs to the contrary and that it will be believed if no such beliefs exist. Four- and 5-year-olds were equally competent in understanding the need for interpretation of pictorial material. They realized that an uninitiated person cannot make sense of a “droodle”, which in itself is an uninterpretable section of a larger meaningful drawing. We discuss the impact of our findings on the question of whether children at this age entertain a copy theory of mind.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sussex, 1988.
3 studies investigated whether young children understand that the acquisition of certain types of knowledge depends on the modality of the sensory experience involved. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were exposed to pairs of objects that either looked the same but felt different, or that felt the same but looked different. In Study 1, 36 children were asked to state, when one of these objects was hidden inside a toy tunnel, whether they would need to see the object or feel it in order to determine its identity. In Study 2, 48 children were asked to state which of 2 puppets knew that an object hidden inside a tunnel possessed a given visual or tactile property, when one puppet was looking at the object and the other was feeling it. In Study 3, 72 children were asked, in a scenario similar to Study 2, to state for each puppet whether he could tell, just by looking or by feeling, that the hidden object possessed a certain visual or tactile property. Children were also asked what was the best way to find out whether a given object possessed a certain visual or tactile property. Results of all 3 studies suggest that an appreciation of the different types of knowledge our senses can provide (i.e., modality-specific knowledge) develops between the ages of 3 and 5. The results are discussed in relation to young children's developing understanding of the role that informational access plays in knowledge acquisition.
Individual differences in young children's understanding of others' feelings and in their ability to explain human action in terms of beliefs, and the earlier correlates of these differences, were studied with 50 children observed at home with mother and sibling at 33 months, then tested at 40 months on affective-labeling, perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. Individual differences in social understanding were marked; a third of the children offered explanations of actions in terms of false belief, though few predicted actions on the basis of beliefs. These differences were associated with participation in family discourse about feelings and causality 7 months earlier, verbal fluency of mother and child, and cooperative interaction with the sibling. Differences in understanding feelings were also associated with the discourse measures, the quality of mother-sibling interaction, SES, and gender, with girls more successful than boys. The results support the view that discourse about the social world may in part mediate the key conceptual advances reflected in the social cognition tasks; interaction between child and sibling and the relationships between other family members are also implicated in the growth of social understanding.
3 experiments were conducted to investigate the claim made by Wimmer, Hogrefe, and Perner that 3-4-year-old children do not understand that people gain knowledge about something by looking at it. The first experiment involved a simple forced-choice procedure in which children had to judge which of 2 assistants knew what was inside a box when one of the assistants had looked inside and the other had lifted it up. In this experiment, the children did realize that the assistant who had looked in the box knew its contents. The second experiment followed the Wimmer et al. procedure, but with a simpler question form. The children were just asked to state whether someone knew what was in the box. Again, the children were able to work out that a person who had looked in a box knew what was inside it. In the third experiment, a direct comparison was made between the simpler question and the more complex, double-barreled question asked by Wimmer et al. The children found the more complex question considerably harder. The results of these experiments suggest that, in contrast to the claims made by Wimmer et al., 3- and 4-year-old children do understand that looking leads to knowing, and that their difficulty in the Wimmer et al. study was mainly with the form of the question that they were asked.
This study examined the developmental questions of when children begin to use the terms lie and truth, how they understand them, and when their understanding approaches that of adults. 150 subjects in 5 groups (nursery schoolers, preschoolers, first graders, fifth graders, and adults) were presented a series of 8 short puppet plays that systematically varied the presence of absence of the 3 prototype elements: factuality of a statement, the speaker's belief in the factuality or falsity of the statement, and the speaker's intent to deceive the listeners. The interactions of age, factuality, and belief most fully accounted for the use of the terms lie and truth. Persons at different ages differentially weighed the prototypic elements. Responses of fifth graders were transitional between those of the younger children and adults. The results are interpreted as supporting the development of definitional prototypes for these moral concepts.
This research report summarizes the results of a study into the abilities of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children to deceptively lead others into false beliefs, and is intended to help arbitrate a growing controversy as to when young persons first acquire some theory-like understanding of other minds. Utilizing a novel hide-and-seek board game as a context within which to observe children's spontaneous use of deceptive strategies, a total of 50 subjects between the ages of 2 1/2 and 5 were tested. In contrast to the competing findings of others, which are claimed to establish that children younger than approximately 4 suffer a cognitive deficit that wholly blocks them from the possibility of entertaining any sort of contrastive beliefs about beliefs, the results of this study show that even 2 1/2-year-olds are capable of already successfully employing a range of deceptive strategies that both trade upon an awareness of the possibility of false beliefs and presuppose some already operative theory of mind.
This chapter examines two parallel yet distinctive phenomena of human memory. First, most adults can recall few if any specific events from the early years of life. Second, attempts by preschool children to recall past events on demand-even events of the previous day-frequently are unsuccessful by adult standards. A tantalizing parallelism is evident about the connection, if any, between the paucity of early childhood memories for adults and the limitations of an immature human memory system. The chapter delineates possible connections between early memory development and the difficulties that most adults experience when trying to remember events of their childhood. Two prior questions have to be addressed. First, evidence for the presumed lack of early memories in adults-commonly termed childhood amnesia-has with a few notable exceptions consisted of clinical case studies. Critical new data have been presented in the past few years. So, what is the current scientific status of this concept? Second, systematic studies of preschoolers' memory for naturally occurring events, practically nonexistent 10 or 20 years ago, also have increased sharply in the 1980s. Is a deficiency of memory in early childhood convincingly demonstrated? A review and integration of research on memories of childhood events is timely for two reasons. First, the most compelling evidence has appeared in the last few years and has not yet been synthesized. Second, both adults' and children's recall failures have practical consequences. For adults, reconstruction of early childhood events remains an important component of psychotherapy. For preschool children, the question of whether they can recall specific episodes has become a critical and controversial aspect of legal testimony.
This paper describes a study of children's legal vocabulary and their knowledge of criminal court procedures. Subjects (aged six, eight, 10 years and adults) were also asked about their feelings regarding a hypothetical court appearance as a witness. All subjects, children and adults, performed best on a vocabulary recognition section, with descriptions and concepts proving more difficult. Observed developmental trends in both legal vocabulary and conceptual appreciation of criminal law replicates previous work from Australia and America and supports the contention that children younger than 10 years are not well informed about the legal system. Results indicated clear deficits in knowledge as well as frequent misconceptions regarding legal personnel and procedures.