The Ecuadorian government's lackluster implementation of its Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policies merits further scrutiny. Seeking to catalyze change, we explored the discourse surrounding ECCE in Ecuador, as represented in government (n = 22) and media documents (n = 110) as well as social media posts (n = 253) to unveil…

The self-administered interview (SAI) is a written eyewitness recall tool that elicits more information from cooperative witnesses than written free recall (WFR) formats. To date, SAI research has examined the accounts of cooperative people providing honest reports. In the current experiment, truthful and fabricating participants (N = 128) either…

Research has attempted to explain perceived cues to deception based upon self-report of what participants believe are 'good' cues to deception, or self-report of what cues participants say they base their veracity judgements on. However, it is not clear to what extent participants can accurately self-report what influences their decision-making.…

Psychological research on pseudo-profound bullshit--randomly assembled buzz words plugged into a syntactic structure--has only recently begun. Most such research has focused on dispositional traits, such as thinking styles or political orientation. However, none has investigated contextual factors. In two studies, we introduce a new paradigm by…

Sham marriages occur frequently, and to detect them, partners are sometimes interviewed together. We examined an innovative method to detect deceit in such interviews. Fifty-three pairs of interviewees, either friends (truth tellers) or pretended to be friends (liars), were interviewed about their friendship. Just before the interview, they…

The current study examined the influence of observing another's lie- or truth-telling -- and its consequences -- on children's own honesty about a transgression. Children (N = 224, 5-8 years of age) observed an experimenter (E) tell the truth or lie about a minor transgression in one of five conditions: (a) Truth-Positive Outcome -- E told the…

Learning about research ethics and research integrity is greatly facilitated by case studies, which illuminate, ground and personalise abstract questions. This paper argues that fiction can provide similar learning experiences, incarnating ethical dilemmas through a medium that is highly accessible yet sophisticated in its depictions of how…

This study examines the emergent issue of blackmail and contract cheating through a scenario-based online exercise completed by 587 university students in Western Australia. Participants were presented with two consecutive scenarios, each involving a difficult assignment. The possibility of blackmail was introduced prior to (and within) the second…

This study focused on the development of the Socialization of Lying scale for which exploratory factor analysis demonstrated four empirically interpretable subscales: Parents' Values and Direct Socialization about Honesty, Encouragement and Modeling of Lying, Consequences for Lying, and The Child's Problematic Lying. These emergent factors suggest…

Auditing is the branch of accounting that allows exercising control over the operations carried out by the company and can be a prior or subsequent control and that is where the Forensic Audit appears, to make the appropriate subsequent review of the acts carried out in the entities in order to prevent or detect possible fraud and corruption…

The increased distribution of fake news on internet and social media raises concerns for democratic processes. Sometimes, argumentation in deceptive information is built on numbers, which gives reason to include mathematics when working with fake news in education. In this paper, I suggest a tool to facilitate students' critical thinking related…

In current news media environments where the separation between fact and opinion is blurred, it is important to understand college students' media literacy practices and variables that may affect how they discern fake news. The purpose of this study was to investigate variables that may be related to college students' fake news discernment,…

The manipulated or manufactured truth on social media platforms spreads false information to influence netizens' cognition, often resulting in fabricated social and political narratives. This study systematically reviews the literature on truth manipulation and its impact on the cognition of social media users. The primary focus is on…

Lying is a prevalent and normative behavior in young children. Conceptually, it is strongly linked with children's theory-of-mind development. However, empirical studies show that the link between children's lying and theory-of-mind is heterogeneous. This study examined whether parental control and parental warmth moderate the link between…

The emergence of 'post-truth' is often associated with the rise of conspiracy theories and the lack of trust in scientific knowledge. This article attempts to theorise the complex division of labour in this regime of 'post-truth', with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic/infodemic. First, we argue that the 'post-truth' condition mirrors what…