Abstract
This study used longitudinal cross-lagged modeling to examine the contribution of theory of mind (ToM), executive function (EF) to children’s lying development and of children’s lying to ToM and EF development. Ninety-seven Chinese children (initial Mage = 46 months, 47 boys) were tested three times approximately 4 months apart. Results showed that the diverse desire understanding and knowledge access understanding components of ToM, as well as the inhibitory control component of EF predicted the development of children’s lying, while the diverse belief understanding and false belief understanding components of ToM, and the working memory component of EF did not predict development of children’s lying. Meanwhile, children’s lying predicted development of children’s belief-emotion understanding components of ToM, but not any other ToM components, or EF components. These findings provide longitudinal evidence for the relation between ToM, EF, and children’s lying during the preschool years.
Highlights
Attempts to understand the development of lying have often treated lying as a moral problem (Hartshorne and May, 1928; Piaget, 1932)
In line with theory of mind (ToM) hypothesis, we found that diverse desire understanding predicted development of children’s lying
Children were more likely to mislead the experimenter when they understood that the experimenter wanted the stickers by himself. These results extend previous cross-sectional findings and provide longitudinal evidence of ToM supports children’s lying
Summary
Attempts to understand the development of lying have often treated lying as a moral problem (Hartshorne and May, 1928; Piaget, 1932). It is being increasingly recognized that it is a cognitive problem (Lee, 2013). Links have been investigated between the cognitive skills of theory of mind (ToM), which involves the ability to understand other’s actions in terms of mental states (Wellman, 1990), and of executive function (EF), which involves the ability to guide goal-oriented behavior under conscious control (Zelazo and Carlson, 2012). There have been many studies documenting these relations, but prior work on this topic has generally relied on cross-sectional assessments. The present study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by looking at these links longitudinally
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