Kang Lee: UC San Diego Department of Psychology

In this talk, I will present three sets of studies that examined children’s lying: (a) to conceal their own transgression, (b) to be polite, and (c) to be modest. I will use the results of these studies to illustrate that (a) lying is a behavior that develops early and rapidly, (b) preschoolers are already capable of managing their nonverbal behaviors when lying, which makes their lies difficult to detect, and (3) cultural factors influence both children’s moral understanding of lying and their actual behavior. However, there exists a complex relationship between children’s moral understanding: One factor is whether both are consistently promoted and sanctioned in a culture. When they are not, there is no relationship between the two. When they are, there is a small to moderate correlation between the two.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Lee_3-14-05.pdf