Therefore, truthful reports of unfamiliar events may
not produce high CBCA scores when compared with
accounts that are familiarized to children due to
repeated experience or talking about the situation,
regardless of whether or not the stated events actually
occurred. Finally, this technique requires trained
coders to detect differences in children’s true and false
reports. Studies that have trained laypersons to use
CBCA have found mixed results with regard to
improved lie detection accuracy. Accordingly, noted
differences are not easily detected by laypersons, and
use of the CBCA technique may require extensive
training before accurate detection is achieved.Other Factors
A number of other factors can either help or hinder
the detection of children’s deception, and as more
research is conducted in the area, more factors may
be revealed. Children’s lies may be more sophisti-
cated when an adult coaches the child to lie and helps
prepare their false statements. Coaching may help
children tell more convincing lies as well as maintain
their lies over repeated questioning. Inconsistent
statements that are revealed through the use of fol-
low-up questions are less likely to be exposed when
children are coached on what to say. Coaching is of
particular importance in legal cases, because when
children lie in court, the possibility exists that they
may have been coached by an adult close to them to
conceal or fabricate certain information. The handful
of studies that have examined this issue have found
that children who receive coaching to deceive are not
easily detected. Even more, children below 7 years of
age who have had coaching in preparing their lies are
able to maintain consistency in their verbal deceptive
reports.
Another factor that may help adults detect children’s
deception is interviewer instructions about the impor-
tance of telling the truth (sometimes referred to as
“truth induction”). Research has found that asking
children about their understanding of truth and lies, as
well as having children promise to tell the truth before
they are asked about a critical event, helps adults
detect children’s lies and truth with an accuracy that is
above chance level. It may be that under these circum-
stances, adults are better able to detect children’s non-
verbal deception cues, which may be made more
salient due to children’s guilt, or contradictory emo-
tions, after promising to tell the truth and then lying.Adults’ biases are another factor that may con-
tribute to their perception of a given child as a liar and
thus play a role in adults’ overall accuracy of detection.
For instance, boys are more likely to be perceived by
adults as lie tellers than girls. Conversely, adults tend
to have a truth bias, believing in general that children
are truthful. In particular, women are more likely to
perceive children as truthful than male adult detectors.
Finally, some evidence suggests that those who have
experience dealing with children in their daily lives
(e.g., parents, educators, child care workers, etc.) are
better at detecting children’s lies than those who have
comparatively little experience with children.
There has been no real examination of children’s
lying in high-stakes situations, where the conse-
quences of being caught are serious, thus making
them similar to real-life cases. Most studies have had
no consequences at all for the child (i.e., when the
child is instructed to lie). The most serious high-stakes
situations in which children’s lie-telling behavior has
been examined have been in relation to denying a
transgression that is relatively minor in real life, such
as peeking at a forbidden toy or having the child or his
or her parent break a toy after its being touched. It
may be that in situations where the consequences are
perceived as very grave to the child (e.g., being taken
away from a close relative), the motivation to lie con-
vincingly may be greater, thus making children’s lies
harder to detect.Victoria Talwar and Mina PopligerSee alsoChildren’s Testimony; Detection of Deception:
Nonverbal Cues; Detection of Deception in Adults;
Detection of Deception in High-Stakes Liars; Statement
Validity Assessment (SVA)Further Readings
Akehurst, L., Bull, R., Vrij, A., & Kohnken, G. (2004). The
effects of training professional groups of lay persons to
use criteria-based content analysis to detect deception.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18,877–891.
Goodman, G. S., Myers, J. E. B., Qin, J., Quas, J. A.,
Castelli, P., Redlich, A. D., et al. (2006). Hearsay versus
children’s testimony: Effects of truthful and deceptive
statements on jurors’ decisions. Law and Human
Behavior, 30,363–401.
Granhag, P. A., & Stromwall, L. A. (Eds.). (2004). The
detection of deception in forensic contexts. New York:
Cambridge University Press.Detection of Deception in Children——— 215D-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:42 PM Page 215