There is a need to tell if children are providing truthful testimonies in legal cases. This study examined differences between children's true and false statements obtained using either an interview that included cognitive instructions or one that did not. Children witnessed a theft that they were asked to deny and were interviewed with or without…

Conspiracy thinking among college students is an under-investigated phenomenon. People who work with college students may seek to reduce conspiracy thinking among students or consider ways to work with those students better. This study provides insight into how well various personality factors predict conspiracy thinking among college students.…

Using a behavioral ethics framework and YouTube video clips, this exercise engages students in a demonstration of how people employ cognitive errors and self-deception to protect their interests when making ethical decisions. This approach helps instructors supplement lessons using normative theories to teach business ethics. Normative theories…

The current study evaluated the benefits of free-recall, cognitive load, and closed-ended questions on children's (ages 6 to 11; N = 147) true and false eyewitness disclosures. Children witnessed an experimenter find a stranger's wallet and were then asked to make a false denial, false accusation, true denial, or true accusation regarding an…

Children (n = 202; 4 to 7 years old) witnessed a confederate break a toy and were asked to keep the transgression a secret. Children were randomly assigned to a Coaching condition (i.e., No Coaching, Light Coaching, or Heavy Coaching) and a Moral Story condition (i.e., Positive or Neutral). Overall, 89.7% of children lied about the broken toy when…

Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth telling and lying and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (one hundred four 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements and that older children's ability to…

Previous studies have demonstrated a link between language behaviors and deception; however, questions remain about the role of specific linguistic cues, especially in real-life high-stakes lies. This study investigated use of the so-called filler, "um," in externally verifiable truthful versus deceptive speech of a convicted murderer. The data…

The study used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Coh-Metrix software to examine linguistic differences with deception in an ultimatum game. In the game, the Allocator was given an amount of money to divide with the Receiver. The Receiver did not know the precise amount the Allocator had to divide, and the Allocator could use deception.…

Lying is a deliberate attempt to transmit messages that mislead others. Analysis of language behaviors holds great promise as an objective method of detecting deception. The current study reports on the frequency of use and acoustic nature of "um" and "like" during laboratory-elicited lying versus truth-telling. Results obtained using a…

Human social cognition critically relies on the ability to deceive others. However, the cognitive and neural underpinnings of deception are still poorly understood. Why does lying place increased demands on cognitive control? The present study investigated whether cognitive control processes during deception are recruited due to the need to…

Professionals conclude that child molesters (CMs) hold offense-supportive beliefs (or cognitive distortions) from CMs' questionnaire responses. Because questionnaires are easily faked, we asked 32 CMs to complete a cognitive distortion scale under standard conditions (Time 1). A week later (Time 2), the same CMs completed the scale again. This…