Audience Control over Children's Honest Reports.
An adult’s mere presence is a powerful cue for honest reporting in young kids—use it when you need accurate self-report data.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cortez et al. (2022) asked four kids to play a game and then report their score. Sometimes an adult stayed in the room. Sometimes the child was alone.
The team flipped these conditions back and forth in an ABAB design. They simply counted whether the child told the truth about the score.
What they found
Every child told the truth only when the adult was physically present. Once the adult left, honest reports dropped to almost zero.
The adult’s body alone acted like a green light for honest talking.
How this fits with other research
Najafichaghabouri et al. (2024) tried a similar idea but saw mixed results. Only two of five kids changed their answers when the interviewer acted differently. Both papers show that adult cues matter, yet some children tune in more than others.
Hall (1992) went further, teaching kids with ADHD to match what they said with what they did. Reinforcing those matches cut hyperactivity. Cortez et al. (2022) now shows that just having an adult nearby can trigger honest reports without any extra training.
Lord et al. (1986) proved that preschoolers can learn to follow their own plans even when no one is watching. Cortez et al. (2022) flips that idea: when no adult is present, kids may drop honest reporting unless they already have strong self-management skills.
Why it matters
If you need accurate self-report from young clients, stay in the room. Your physical presence is a cheap, fast cue for truth-telling. When you must leave, add a quick correspondence check when you return: ask what happened and immediately verify it. This keeps the honesty loop strong even without you.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We evaluated audience control over children's honest reports using a reversal (ABA or ABAB) design. Four typically developing children performed a computer game in which they had to shoot a target and then report on their performance during and at the end of each session. Baseline assessed the accuracy of their reports in the absence of an experimenter. During the audience condition, an adult was present in the room and observed the child during the task. Participants accurately reported their errors when an adult was present, whereas they lied about their performance by systematically reporting errors as correct responses when an adult was absent. Honest reports about their total score at the end of the session also increased in the presence of the audience member. These results suggest that the presence of an adult exerted control over children's honest/accurate reports. We discussed the reasons why the presence of an adult may have served as a discriminative stimulus for honest reports.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2022 · doi:10.1016/0272-7358(86)90002-4