Children make choices between generosity and greed every day. Often they must also choose between confession or denial of antisocial acts like greed, thereby displaying either honesty or hypocrisy. Such choices pose cognitive challenges that, in theory, might reflect children's developing social-cognitions and affect their daily social lives and…

Lying is an interpersonal exercise that requires the intentional creation of a false belief in another's mind. As such, children's development of lie-telling is related to their increasing understanding of others and may reflect the acquisition of basic social skills. Although certain types of lies may support social relationships, other types of…

Prior studies have demonstrated that social-cognitive factors such as children's false-belief understanding and parenting style are related to children's lie-telling behaviors. The present study aimed to investigate how earlier forms of theory-of-mind understanding contribute to children's lie-telling as well as how parenting practices are related…

Experimental research suggests the differentiation of "nice" and "nasty" theory of mind (ToM). Over 5000 parents from the Twins Early Development Study reported on nice (e.g., being considerate) and nasty (e.g., blaming others) behaviours following their twins' second, third, and fourth birthdays. Factor analyses yielded four factors and it was…