THE ROLE OF PERCEIVED INTENTION TO DECEIVE IN CHILDRENS AND ADULTS CONCEPTS OF LYING

In three experiments, a total of 89 children aged 5 through 8 years ac id 87 adults were asked to judge the communicative intentions of prota gonists in videotaped or pictorial cartoon stories who made factually true or false utterances under a variety of mental states. The results of Expt 1 highlighted the importance of consulting subjects' own perc eptions of speakers' intentions when seeking their 'lie' judgements, s ince adults' attributions of deceptive intent were not always consiste nt with researchers' a priori assumptions. When subjective intent perc eptions were matched with definitions of lying in Expts 2 and 3, even 5- and 6-year-olds were found to base concepts of lying significantly upon their own attribution to speakers of deceptive intent. On the oth er hand, a substantial minority of adults in Expt 3 defined a truthful ly intended lapse of memory as a lie, suggesting that intention to dec eive is not the sole criterion for lying, even in adulthood. These res ults were seen to contradict several aspects of Piaget's (1932/1965) t wo-stage theory of the conceptualization of lying. In addition, the re sults showed that children's attributions of communicative intent were generally similar to adults', especially when the speaker's mental st ate was unambiguous. So were their concepts of truth telling. Implicat ions of these results for legal applications of Piaget's theory were c onsidered.