Tracy Alloway, UNF – Lying Kids

If your kids are lying to you, it might be an indicator of intelligence!

Tracy Alloway, psychologist at the University of North Florida, is studying the psychology behind the lies of children.

Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD is an associate professor of psychology and program director of the Psychology Graduate program at the University of North Florida. Her area of research interest is in working memory and has spent over a decade being part of cutting-edge research on the importance of working memory in childhood and education. She has published seven books and almost 100 scientific articles on this topic. She is an associate editor for Applied Cognitive Psychology and also serves on the editorial board of several international scholarly journals.

Lying Kids

Lying is a relatively common behavior in children. The interesting thing about this study is that we wanted to look at the relationship between lying and role of Working Memory – the ability to remember and process information. This is an important issue as lying clearly involves keeping multiple pieces of information in mind in order to tell a successful lie.

So we designed this study looking at 6 and 7 year old children. We first tested their Working Memory. Then we asked them a series of questions. For the very last question, they would only know the answer if they actually peeked at a card when they weren’t supposed to. So we left them in the room and we told them, “Don’t look at the back of the card.”

When we came back into the room, the first question we asked them was whether they looked at the card. The majority of the children who peeked, lied about it and said that they did not look.

We then asked them to answer a question about a fake cartoon – What is the name of the character in Spaceboy? The only the children would answer that correctly is if they actually peeked at the back of the card.

Then we asked them the final question and that’s where the fun began. We asked them how they knew the answer. The children with good Working Memory were able to come up with very plausible and good explanations. They would say things like, “Oh it’s is my favorite cartoon, I watch it every Saturday.” The children with poor Working Memory would often mumble something like, “I don’t know, I just thought of it.” So we were able to establish a link between having good Working Memory and being able to come up with a very plausible or believable lie. So if you are a parent, and your child does like, take heart – at least they are smart.