http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/01650254.html DOI: 10.1080/01650250143000373 Development of lying to conceal a transgression: Children’s control of expressive behaviour during verbal deception* Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada The present study examined lying behaviour in children between 3 and 7 years of age with two experiments. Atemptation resistance paradigm was used in which children were left alone in a room with a music-playing toy placed behind their back. The children were told not to peek at the toy. Most children could not resist the temptation and peeked at the toy. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, about half of the 3-year-olds confessed to their transgression, whereas most older children lied. Naõ ¨ve adult evaluators (undergraduate students and parents) who watched video clips of the children’s responses could not discriminate lie-tellers from nonliars on the basis of their nonverbal expressive behaviours. However, the children were poor at semantic leakage control and adults could correctly identify most of the lie-tellers based on their verbal statements made in the same context as the lie. T he combined results regarding children’s verbal and nonverbal leakage control suggest that children under 8 years of age are not fully skilled lie-tellers. Lying was an early topic of investigation in developmental psychology (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Piaget, 1932). Since the 1980s, the topic, after being neglected for nearly half a century, has received renewed attention from developmental psychol- ogists with diverse theoretical orientations and research purposes. The reasons for the current interest in the develop- ment of lying are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, research on the issue has implications for current debates about children’s theory of mind (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Peskin, 1992; Polak & Harris, 1999) and the universality of moral development (Lee, 2000; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987). Researc h on the issue also has practical implications for developing moral education programmes in schools and for assessing children’s testimony in legal settings (Burton & Strichartz, 1991; Goodman, 1984). Most studies on the development of lying have focused on children’s concept of lying and their moral evaluations of lie- and truth-telling (Bussey, 1992, 1999; Lee, Cameron, Xu, Fu, & Board, 1997; Peterson, Peterson, & Seeto, 1983; Siegal & Peterson, 1996, 1998; Strichartz & Burton, 1990; for a review, see Lee, 2000). A relatively smaller number of studies have examined children’s production of lies (Chandler et al., 1989; Lewis, Stranger, & Sullivan, 1989; Peskin, 1992; Polak & Harris, 1999; Sodian, 1991). Among these studies, the majority have mainly focused on whether children would lie. They did not investigate how successful children’s lies were in deceiving others, which is the focus of the present study. To deceive another successfully, lie-tellers must regulate expressive behaviours to avoid inconsistencies between the behaviours and the lie. Expressive behaviours involve two major inter-related components, one verbal and the other nonverbal. ‘‘Verbal expressive behaviour’’ refers to the semantic content of the statements children make during deception, including both the lie and other statements made in the same context. ‘‘Nonverbal expressive behaviour’’ refers to the vocal prosody, facial expressions, and body language displayed in conjunction with the verbal expressive behaviour. To be successful a lie-teller must ensure that the content of verbal statements made in conjunction with a false statement does not contradict the lie, which we refer to as ‘‘semantic leakage control’’. Second, they must simulate nonverbal behaviours consistent with their untruthful statements and suppress spontaneous, incongruent nonverbal responses, which is referred to as nonverbal leakage control (Ekman & Friesen, 1969). Several studies have found that young children were poor at ‘‘feigning’’ dislike or liking of different stimuli (e.g., the taste of a drink) (Feldman, Jenkins, & Popoola, 1979; Feldman & White, 1980; Morency & Krauss, 1982). However, in such situations children were instructed by experimenters to lie about something they seemed not to care about and therefore might not have been motivated to lie convincingly. Lewis et al. (1989) avoided this problem by using a temptation resistance paradigm in which they told 3-year-olds not to peek at a toy when the experimenter left the room. The majority of children peeked due to the highly tempting nature of the situation. As soon as children peeked at the toy, the experimenter returned to the room and asked the children if they had peeked. This set-up International Journal of Behavioral Development # 2002 The International Society for the 2002, 26 (5), 436–444 Study of Behavioural Development Correspondence should be addressed to Victoria Talwar or Kang Lee, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6; e-mail: talwar@psyc.queensu.ca or kang@ psyc.queensu.ca. This study was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the second author. We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and Mark Sabbagh, Alejo Freire, Laura Smith, and Christine Hains for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. * This paper was accepted during the editorial term of Rainer K. Silbereisen.