Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Children's resistance to unpleasant hypotheticals undermines their apparent understanding of the truth and lies. Better understanding of children's developmental limitations, improved questioning, and objections to developmentally insensitive questions could improve children's performance.

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 …