Truthful yet misleading: Elementary second-order deception in school-age children and its sociocognitive correlates

Abstract

In highly competitive contexts, deceptive intentions might be transparent, so conveying only false information to the opponent can become a predictable strategy. In such situations, alternating between truths and lies (second-order lying behavior) represents a less foreseeable option. The current study investigated the development of 8- to 10-year-old children’s elementary second-order deception in relation to their attribution of ignorance (first- and second-order ignorance) and executive functions (inhibitory control, shifting ability, and verbal working memory). An adapted version of the hide-and-seek paradigm was used to assess children’s second-order lie-telling, in which children were asked to hide a coin in either of their hands. Unlike the standard paradigm, the opponent did not consistently look for the coin in the location indicated by the children, so children needed to switch between telling simple lies and truths (elementary second-order lies about the coin location) to successfully deceive the recipient. The results showed that older children were less likely to tell elementary second-order lies. However, across the sample, when children decided to lie, this ability was positively related to their second-order ignorance attribution and their verbal working memory. Moreover, we obtained preliminary evidence for the presence of a habituation effect in second-order lying, with children being more accurate and having less variability in their truthful-to-deceive responses (this being the more frequently elicited response) than when telling lies to deceive. Our findings could have implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying children’s ability to alternate between truths and lies to deceive.