Abstract
The present study explored the relations among lie-telling ability, false belief understanding, and verbal mental age. We found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), like typically developing children, can and do tell antisocial lies (to conceal a transgression) and white lies (in politeness settings). However, children with ASD were less able than typically developing children to cover up their initial lie; that is, children with ASD had difficulty exercising semantic leakage control—the ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent statements. Furthermore, unlike in typically developing children, lie-telling ability in children with ASD was not found to be related to their false belief understanding. Future research should examine the underlying processes by which children with ASD tell lies.
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Notes
White lies have also been called prosocial lies; however, we refer to this type of lie as white lies in this paper because research has yet to establish that young children tell white lies for truly prosocial reasons.
This is with the exception of one child, who received a score of 9 on the SCQ but was still included in the present study because she clearly met criteria for an ASD on the ADOS-G. A second set of analyses were conducted excluding this participants and the results were highly similar to those including this participant.
In the two cases where the bar of soap was not one of the child’s least-liked items, the toy that they indicated that they did not like was used as the unattractive prize. Because these prizes could not be wrapped due to practical reasons, E1 made sure she left quickly enough to avoid seeing or hearing children’s initial reaction (e.g., disappointment).
The child had seized the toy and the musical card during the experimenter’s absence and was playing with them in his lap when the experimenter returned to the experimental room. Thus, he did not bother to hide the fact that he had peeked or did not even remember that he was asked not to peek.
Peekers from the two groups were comparable in terms of VMA, t(18.90) = .58, p = .57.
Note that only 8 TD children peeked in the temptation resistance paradigm and participated in the study after we had made modifications to the earlier version of the undesirable gift paradigm and thus had data for this exploratory analysis.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and Queen’s University to EAK and by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH R01) (HD047290) to KL. We wish to thank Dr. Tony Charman and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We would also like to thank our participants and parents for their participation in this study, Ellen Drumm, Layla Hall, Rachel Leung, and Laura O’Connell for their help with data collection, and Monica Haberl for blind-coding the data. This study was carried out by ASL in partial fulfillment for the requirements of a master’s degree in psychology at Queen’s University. Portions of this study were presented at the 7th International Meeting for Autism Research in London, the 38th meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in Québec City, the 2009 meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver, and the 8th International Meeting for Autism Research in Chicago.
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Li, A.S., Kelley, E.A., Evans, A.D. et al. Exploring the Ability to Deceive in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 41, 185–195 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1045-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1045-4