Lee – cognitive development and lying

So why are some kids who are telling lies at this young age and why are some kids don’t tell lies.  You know, the first thing that would come to your mind would be, ‘ok, must be the parenting, the moral character in the child, but it turns out that’s not true.  So that’s another surprising thing was that it is actually executive functioning.  So if the child has a better executive functioning then the child tends to lie earlier so that’s number one. 

Another thing that’s very interesting is theory of mind, so the child’s ability to read mind.  So the sooner you learn how to read mind and then the earlier you’re going to tell a lie.  So lying turns out to be something that is an indication of better development, at least in terms of cognitive development.  So not something that is sinister or something that is part of your bad moral character, so that is very surprising to us.  Another thing of course is by seven years of age almost everybody’s child lies so you can tell lying is a very, very normal behaviour so I think that’s something that is very surprising to us. 

Another thing that is very surprising to us is as we age, as children age, by about 12 years of age, the lying rate actually drops down, back down to about 60%.  We have no idea why but there is this U-shape to development, reverse U, so going up, up, up and then by 12 years of age you start to go down and that is also against our assumptions.  We thought, you know, teenagers must be the worst liars… So they would be very more likely to tell lies than the rest of children’s group.  But turns out they don’t which is very interesting.