Children who have good memory are good liars

Children who have good memory are good liars

A I have been wondering many times why my son Tobias sometimes constructs his own ‘truth’. Then I read an article which explained that children, who have a good memory, are better at telling lies. According to this article, scientists tested six and seven-year-old children who were given the opportunity to cheat in trivia games and then they lied about their activities. Those children, who were good liars, coped better with verbal memory. They remembered a larger number of words. This means they are good at managing lots of information, even when they tell porkies.

B The experiment recruited 114 children from four British schools. The children were asked to play a question and answer game, and some hidden cameras were placed to shoot the children. It was found that the children were secretly looking at the answers. It was really surprising for the parents to see that a quarter of children were found cheating.

C The researchers from the Universities of North Florida, Sheffield and Stirling also wanted to find out who was a good or a bad liar. They were especially interested in children’s ability to keep a good cover story for their lie. In memory tests, the good liars showed they had a better memory for words. But they didn’t show any evidence of having a better visuo-spatial memory, that means they didn’t remember pictures better. The research showed that this was because lying involves remembering lots of verbal information, whereas remembering images is less important.

D The parents were surprised that the children maintained their good image even after telling porkies. They are usually not too proud when their children lie, they can at least be pleased to find out that when their children lie well, it means their children are becoming better at thinking and have good memory skills. Adults themselves lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes.

E My son Tobias himself lies when doing forbidden things at school, when breaking something, and when speaking about food. He is not a keen eater, so he tries to avoid meals all the time. I am not proud of his lying. To be true, it drives me mad. Now, I can calm myself down, because he might be clever.

Adjusted to (1)

1) Read the article and match each of the headings to a paragraph.

1 Good liars have better verbal and worse visuo-spatial memory

2 Research in lying among British children

3 Toby’s lying

4 Parents, adults and lying

5 Introduction

2) Read the article and answer the questions.

1 What was the research about?

2 What were the results of the experiment?

3 When did children lie according to this article?

4 How often do adults lie?

5 How are intelligence and lying connected?

3) Explain the following words and phrases.

1 trivia game

2 cover story

3 visuo-spatial memory

4 social exchange

5 keen eater

Source: (1) Children with good memories 'tell better porkies'. BBC News [online]. 2015 [cit. 2015-09-21]. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33204165

Answer the following questions. Find tips and sources of information in the following links:

1 https://goo.gl/v38n6K

2 http://goo.gl/JcyOSJ

3 http://goo.gl/cCsfSR

1 What is social intelligence? What are its key elements? How can we develop it?

2 Is social intelligence connected with lying? How? Why do we lie? When do children start lying? What should parents do in case their child lies? 

3 What is IQ? What do you know about IQ tests? What do they test? What are levels of IQ?