Right and Righteous: Children's Incipient Understanding and Evaluation of True and False Statements

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 label true and false (T/F) statements as truth and lie emerged in tandem with their positive evaluation of true statements and truth and their negative evaluation of false statements and lie. The findings suggest that children's early preference for factuality develops into a conception of truth and lie that is linked both to factuality and moral evaluation. Study 2 (one hundred twenty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds) revealed that whereas young children exhibited good understanding of the association of T/F statements with truth, lie, mistake, right, and wrong, they showed little awareness of assumptions about speaker knowledge underlying lie and mistake. The results further support the primacy of factuality in children's early understanding and evaluation of truth and lies.