DEVELOPMENT OF DECEPTION IN CHILDREN 5
The study concluded that young children are able to control their nonverbal expressions
quite well. Twenty-nine subjects out of thirty-three peeked: 38% said "yes," 38% said "no," and
24% gave no verbal response. Moreover, those who peeked and lied to the experimenter had an
increase in smiling and relaxed face, and the children with no response had more nervous
touching. The study suggests that children have increased positive nonverbal expressions and
behavior when they admit to transgression. Although this study was done over twenty years ago,
the findings corroborated with Talwar and Lee (2002) in that three year olds were good at
masking nonverbal expressions, but made verbal transgressions. According to this study, three-
year-old children are capable of deception. However, there are some limitations with this study,
as there were thirty-three subjects, a small sample, that were middle- and upper-class Caucasians.
Having a small sample size and type makes it questionable if this could apply to the general
population. Although this study found boys were more likely to admit their transgression (which
contradicts Talwar & Lee, 2000), it is a small sample size and is insufficient at generalizing to
the public. In addition, this was done in a laboratory. Many three-year-olds do not interact in a
lab often. Also, the child's parent was in the room, and that could affect whether the child lies or
not as children might believe they would be punished or face consequences at home (Lewis et
al.,1989).
There may be situations in which children tell the truth as opposed to lying. In the study
by Talwar, Lee, Bala, and Lindsay (2004), the researchers wanted to examine the implications of
children lying for their parents in the legal system. For experiment one, there was one hundred
and thirty-seven children ages three to eleven. They were assigned to one of three conditions –
Parent Absent, Parent Present, and Child Absent condition. The parent committed a minor
transgression of breaking a puppet, acting distress, and asked their child to agree to not tell the
The use of topic sentences and connective phrases, as in this section, can improve
the readability of a review by better improving flow from one paragraph to the next.