KIDS ARE PRETTY GOOD LIARS BY AGE 7

(Sept 2014) Researchers out of the University of Minnesota say kids typically figure out how to infer what others are thinking and what motivates them somewhere between 6 and 7 years old. By that age they’ve sorted out that they don’t have to trust others, and they don’t have to be truthful themselves.
– The researchers studied 69 kids ages 3 to 9 playing two games. In the first game, kids play either sender or receiver; the sender knows which of two boxes contains candy, and the receiver must guess after the sender points to one of the boxes. The sender keeps the candy if the receiver guesses the wrong box, and the receiver keeps it if he or she picks the correct box.
– In the second game, a kid and an experimenter are tasked with choosing one to five stickers simultaneously; the player who selects the fewest keeps that number of stickers, the other doesn’t get any, and neither gets any if they pick the same number.
Both games led to the conclusion that kids are capable of thinking strategically, including using competitiveness and lies to their own benefit.
* I’ll have to take their word for it, because those games make no sense.
* Maybe they’re lying?
* Oh, please. By age 4 kids know that “maybe” means no.
* I first learned about lying when none of my toys were as much fun as they looked in the commercials.
* I like it when kids are still really terrible liars but they don’t know it yet.
* “What happened to the lamp, Johnny?” “The gold fish jumped out and knocked it over.”
* “A gold fish couldn’t do that?” “Yes, but then a meteor hit.”
* “Oh, where’s the hole in the roof?” Long pause …”It came through the ground.”
* “Oh, well where’s the hole in the ground?” Longer pause. “The meteor came in through the front door.”
* PHONE TOPIC: How old was your child when they started lying? What was their first adorable little lie?