Cognitive and contextual factors involved in the sophistication of school-age children’s lie-telling behavior

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Introduction: Deception is a normative process that relies on sophisticated socio-cognitive correlates, such as theory of mind (ToM), being developed at the interplay with complex contextual influences. Despite the generous attention given to the relation between deceptive abilities and first-and second-order ToM, there is little evidence of what happens beyond preschool years when higher-order ToM developments take place, and how this relates to children’s increasing ability to tell a successful lie. Moreover, insufficient research has examined contextual influences, considering that lie-telling is, in essence, an interpersonal act (Talwar et al., 2017).
Aims and Method: The current study examined children’s perception upon parental rearing practices, bilingualism, socioeconomic status, and children’s interpretive diversity understanding in relation to their propensity and proficiency to tell self-serving lies. Participants were196 school-age children (9-11 years; Mage = 124.18 months, SD = 7.25; 106 girls; 83 bilinguals). Our aims were to (1) explore the relation between children’s propensity and competency to tell a lie and their understanding of interpretive diversity, which to the best of our knowledge has not yet been directly linked to deception in children, (2) to replicate the negative relation between SES and children’s lie-telling, (3) to test the positive relation between children’s lie-telling and parental rejection and control. Participants went through a novel temptation resistance paradigm aimed to elicit both spontaneous lying and interpretive diversity understanding. Interpretive diversity understanding was also assessed using two additional tasks, Droodle Task (Lalonde & Chandler, 2002) and The Constructivist Theory of Mind Interview (ToMc; Weimer et al., 2017). Children also completed the EMBU-A (Paloș & Drobot, 2010) questionnaire to evaluate their parents’ rearing practices.
Results: A generalized linear mixed model analysis revealed that children’s propensity to lie was significantly predicted by their ability to understand the constructive nature of the mind, being negatively associated with the ToMc Comprehension score (b = -3.70, z = -2.31, p = 0.020),
but positively with ToMc Memory (b = 2.00, z = 2.23, p = 0.025). With regard to contextual factors, bilingualism (b = 2.99, z = 1.46, p = 0.045) and parental rejection (b = 0.49, z = 2.37, p = 0.017) positively predicted participants’ decision to lie, whereas parental emotional warmth (b = -0.56, z = -2.55, p = 0.010) was negatively associated with it.
A binary logistic regression was also employed in order to test the contextual and cognitive predictors of children’s semantic leakage control. The overall model was significant, χ2 = 20.74, Nagelkerke R2 = .36, p = 0.036, indicating that the ToMc Planning score (b = 1.55, p = 0.006, OR = 4.57) and parental emotional warmth (b = 0.17, p = 0.022, OR = 1.19) were positive predictors for children’s ability to feign ignorance.
Coclusion: Our study revealed that children’s propensity and ability to tell a lie is significantly predicted both by cognitive factors (ToMc) and contextual ones. This may suggest that interaction with caregivers can impact their deceptive behaviors and the extent to which children are willing to lie to obtain a personal gain.

Authors

• Narcisa Prodan, Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai
  Presenting Author

• Melania Moldovan, Babes Bolyai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Simina Alexandra Cacuci, Babes Bolyai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura A. Visu-Petra, Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai
  Non-Presenting Author