How children tell a lie: gender and school achievement differences in children's lie-telling

Abstract

Research about children’s lie-telling mainly include the so-called “temptation resistance paradigm”. However, this procedure implicits only short, simple answers that do not require in-depth elaboration of lies. Aim of this study was to enforce a new procedure for measuring children’s ability to lie and investigate gender and school achivement differences in children’s lie telling. New procedure is designed to measure the degree of ability to lie, based on a person’s persuasiveness while telling a story of false autobiographical events. The fulfillment of this task requires the ability to construct detailed, coherent and plausible content of the story in a short period of time and the ability to present this content as convincing in order to persuade others that the event really took place.