Children’s understanding of deception

Pages: 497-498
Nirupama Bhuyan (Department of Psychology, Utkal University, Odisha)

This present study was designed to study the age; children develop an understanding of deception. The sample consisted of 100 participants equally distributed into five age groups (3 to 4 years, 4 to 5 years, 6 to 7 years, 8 to 9 years, and 10 to 11 years old). Again 20 subjects from each age group are collected where 10 subjects with high SES and 10 subjects with low SES are also chosen. All the participants were provided two different story comprehension and two false belief tasks. In the false-belief task, two different sub-tasks (Unknown content and Unknown location) were presented before the subjects verbally. In the unknown content subjects were asked two questions and the questions were content oriented. As well as in unknown location, they were asked two questions again, where the questions were location oriented. In the comprehension tasks children were told stories. The difference between the two tasks is that in false belief task, children were asked to respond the sub-tasks by taking into account both the content and location. But in the story comprehension task, children were asked only to evaluate the context of deception so that they would be able to explore the person being deceived in that story. Analysis of variance performed on the scores of subjects revealed that there is a significant difference noticed among the five age groups with respect to their comprehension task, unknown content and unknown location are {F(9, 90) =31.37, P<.01},{F(9,90)=38.0, P<.01}and{F(9, 90) = 2.5, P<.01} respectively. An associated result was found indicating socio economic status (SES) plays a major role in developing deception among children around their early age. The children with high SES performed better than the subjects with low SES. The specific findings obtained from this study reveal and concluded that around three to four years of age children are found to be able to understand deception in a complex way. Evaluation and exploration becomes the key objectives of children around that age.