Exploring the ability to deceive in children with autism spectrum disorders.
Kids with autism can lie but struggle to keep their story straight—check for semantic leakage, not false-belief scores.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked kids with autism to tell a simple lie. They watched who could keep the story straight later.
Each child hid a toy while an adult left the room. When the adult returned, the child lied about where the toy was. The researchers checked if the child repeated the same lie minutes later.
What they found
Most kids with autism could tell the first lie. Fewer could repeat it the same way on the second try.
Surprise: the kids who passed standard false-belief tasks were not the better liars. Lie skill and theory-of-mind scores did not line up.
How this fits with other research
McGarty et al. (2018) later showed the flip side: adults with autism are also worse at spotting lies. Together the papers paint one picture—autism affects both making and detecting deception.
Naito et al. (2004) already found that autistic preschoolers can use real-world facts to understand sentences even when they fail false-belief tests. Keintz et al. (2011) now shows the same split in lie-telling: semantics hold, but mind-reading links break.
Carr (1994) warned that passing classic theory-of-mind tasks does not guarantee real-life social sense. The new data back him up—good false-belief scores did not predict who could keep a lie consistent.
Why it matters
When you suspect a child is lying, do not rely on false-belief test scores. Watch for semantic leakage—details that change between tellings. Probe with open questions and compare the answers. Drill self-monitoring scripts: “What did I just say? What will the other person think?” Practice retelling the same event twice and reward exact matches. These steps build the consistency that autism naturally makes hard.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study explored the relations among lie-telling ability, false belief understanding, and verbal mental age. We found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), like typically developing children, can and do tell antisocial lies (to conceal a transgression) and white lies (in politeness settings). However, children with ASD were less able than typically developing children to cover up their initial lie; that is, children with ASD had difficulty exercising semantic leakage control--the ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent statements. Furthermore, unlike in typically developing children, lie-telling ability in children with ASD was not found to be related to their false belief understanding. Future research should examine the underlying processes by which children with ASD tell lies.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2011 · doi:10.1007/s10803-010-1045-4