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Adult Detection of Children's Selfish and Polite Lies: Experience Matters
Author(s) -
TALWAR VICTORIA,
CROSSMAN ANGELA,
WILLIAMS SHANNA,
MUIR SIMONE
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00861.x
Subject(s) - prosocial behavior , lying , politeness , psychology , social psychology , truth telling , developmental psychology , psychoanalysis , linguistics , medicine , radiology , philosophy
Five groups of participants ( N = 150) with differing amounts of experience working with children were assessed on their ability to detect children's lying or truth telling. Children's lies were told for antisocial reasons (i.e., self‐serving lies) and for prosocial reasons (i.e., to benefit others). Overall, adults were more accurate at identifying children's dishonest statements than their true statements, and children's antisocial lies were detected more accurately than were their prosocial lies. While adults without experience were poor at detecting child lie tellers and truth tellers, adults with extensive child experience were better at distinguishing children's lies and truths.