The analyses in this dissertation were designed to identify 1) whether there is an age effect among three-, four-, and five-year-old preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 2) whether there is a gender effect among preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 3) whether there is a relationship between false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability in preschool children, and 4) whether there is a relationship between peer acceptance and false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability among preschool children. Participants were 78 (34 male, 44 female) preschool children of mixed ethnicity who were between three to five years of age. All subjects completed four tasks that assessed false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, deception detection ability, and peer acceptance. Results from the four-way repeated measures mixed-model analysis of variance (2 Gender x 3 Age x 2 False-Belief Understanding x 2 Deception) suggest that there is a task effect, age effect, gender effect, and false-belief understanding effect for deception among preschool children. Children received significantly higher scores on the deception detection ability task than they did on the deceptive ability task. This indicates that young children find deception detection to be easier than deceptive ability. In addition, this also provides evidence that deceptive ability and that deception detection are two separate constructs. This is further supported by the principal components analysis, which extracted two separate components for deception intelligence. In addition, three-year-old children perform significantly lower than four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. However, there is not a significant difference between the performances of four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. This supports previous research that four years of age appears to be the critical age for the emergence of Machiavellian Intelligence (Peskin, 1992; Peterson, 2003). Moreover, males perform significantly better on deception tasks than females. Furthermore, there is a significant positive correlation between deception detection ability and peer acceptance. Children who obtain higher deception detection ability scores are ranked as being more liked by their peers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/194285 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Parry, Melinda Ann |
| Contributors | Rosser, Rosemary A., Rosser, Rosemary A., D'Agostino, Jerome V., Meredith, Keith E. |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Dissertation |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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