The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children’s Strategic Lie-telling

The overall goal of this modified temptation resistance protocol is to elicit children's naturalistic lie-telling behaviors in a deliberately designed laboratory setting. Children's lie-telling behavior as an important aspect of their social development has been the focus of research interest for decades. Lie-telling is defined as the intentional delivery of a false statement by one person or group to another person or group¹. Lying to conceal one's own misdeeds is the most common and the earliest form of deception exhibited by children², although it is viewed very negatively by both children and adults³. This type of lie serves the interests of the tellers by protecting them from the consequences of their transgressions⁴, but it violates trust and breaks rules of communication by contravening the assumption of information equality⁵. Although often viewed as a type of antisocial behavior, lying is an important social skill⁶, and its emergence reflects children's flexibility in dealing with complex social situations to ensure their own preservation. Therefore, enlisting children's spontaneous lie-telling behavior in a laboratory setting not only enables studies to investigate the development of children's lie-telling as a social behavior itself in depth, but also allows investigations into the cognitive and social correlates of lie-telling behavior during childhood.

Though children's lie-telling behaviors have attracted research attention for a long time⁷, significant progress regarding spontaneous lie-telling was only made possible in recent decades with the development of innovative experimental procedures that create situations prompting children to lie spontaneously^{1,4,8,9,10,11}. Earlier studies asked children to "lie" about certain facts¹², which does not reflect the covert nature of lie-telling. Lie-telling is a deceptive behavior where the listener is not supposed to know that the liar is trying to mislead him or her; and the listener should not be able to detect the lies for them to be successful. Thus asking the children to "lie" about facts creates a counterfeit situation which is deviant from children's natural lie-telling scenarios. Similar challenge was also present in earlier observational studies of lie-telling¹³, which only captured the "lies" that were debunked by the observer.

Pioneered by Sears, Rau, and Alpert¹⁴, and subsequently by Lewis et al.⁸, the original temptation resistance paradigm provides method for ecologically valid explorations of children's naturalistic lie-telling behaviors. In this paradigm, children are given the opportunity to commit a transgression, for example, being left alone in room with an attractive toy and instructed not to peek or play with it. Due to the task's high demand on executive function, it is difficult for young children to resist the temptation to peek or play with the toy. As a result, when being asked whether they have peeked or played with the toy, children who have transgressed have an opportunity to lie spontaneously. Thus, the paradigm creates a situation to elicit children's spontaneous lies instead of instructing them to lie. More importantly, it mimics the nature of the most common children lies, which usually aim to conceal wrongdoings¹⁴. The paradigm was further modified by Polak and Harris⁹, in which they compared a permissive condition where children were allowed to play with the toy with a prohibitive condition where children were instructed not to touch the toy. The contrast between children's reactions in the two conditions highlighted the fact that children had the actual intention to lie rather than forgetting what they did.

The most cited version of the modified temptation resistance paradigm starts with a guessing game^1,10,15. Children are instructed to guess the identity of a toy by the sound it makes while facing away from the toy. After they get the first two trials correctly, they would be left alone in the room before they have a chance to guess the final one. They are instructed not to turn around to peek. Unlike the first two trials where the sound the toys make match the identities of the toys, the final toy makes a sound that is unrelated to the identity, therefore, it is unlikely to guess what the toy is simply through listening. Upon the experimenter's return, the child is asked what the toy is, and whether he/she has peeked. Follow-up questions would explore children's strategic lie-telling to cover up their transgression^1,9,10,16. Strategic lie-telling is when the lie-teller takes what the lie recipient knows into consideration and makes a false statement consistent with previous lies in order to cover up misdeeds⁴. In this case, those who falsely deny transgression would be asked to explain how they know the identity of the toy without peeking to test whether they could offer plausible explanations consistent with their initial false denial to avoid being exposed. Studies employing this version of the paradigm suggested that preschool children were hardly able to tell plausible strategic lies consistent with their false denial of transgression^1,9.

In addition to enlisting spontaneous and genuine lie that resembles those in the natural social exchange, the temptation resistance paradigm was further modified to confront children with the physical evidence of transgression to enlist cover-ups of the initial lies. A further modified version of the temptation resistance paradigm was developed by Evans, Xu, and Lee⁴ to examine children's strategic lie-telling behaviors in the presence of physical evidence. Different from semantic leakage control, the ability to maintain consistency between lies, strategic lie-telling requires a lie-teller to maintain consistency between a lie and the evidence that is available to the lie recipient, in this case, not only the verbal evidence, but also the physical evidence. In this version, children are asked to guess the identity of a toy hidden in an upside down cup for three times. The experimenter would give clues to ensure all children "guess" correctly in the first two trials. Subsequently, the children are instructed not to peek under the cup in the final trial while the experimenter briefly leaves the room. If they do transgress and peek, the content hidden in the cup would spill and leave physical evidence that is hard for children to clean up. Children are then asked to explain the physical evidence if they deny peeking. The advantage of this version over previous protocols is to reduce cognitive demand imposed by tracking changes in other people's beliefs as a result of the lies⁴. Instead, the presence of physical evidence of transgression functions as a reminder of previous behavior and contrasts directly with children's lies. That way children only need to fake their intentions to make a plausible explanation: the spill was an accident instead of the result of an intentional act. This is especially significant given that the mental state of intention is understood earlier in development than other people's beliefs¹⁷. Empirical studies using this version of the protocol demonstrate that young children are able to tell strategic lies consistent with the physical evidence of their transgression by 4- or 5-years of age⁴.

This paper introduces the modified version of the temptation resistance paradigm used in a recently published study¹⁸ in details with refined procedures and materials. The protocol is suitable for eliciting 2- to 8-year-old children's spontaneous lie-telling behavior. The recommended age range is based on the emergence of lie telling behavior in young children and their mental state understanding development during this period. Children as young as 2-year-old lie, and the level of sophistication of the lies is arguably associated with children's false belief understanding^1,16. Children pass the first order false belief task between 3- and 5-years of age¹⁹, and pass the second order false belief task around 7- and 8-years of age²⁰. The introduced protocol could be potentially used in areas of developmental psychology research related to children's social understanding and social behavior.