While it’s impossible to always be a step ahead of our kids, especially when it comes to telling porkies, scientists have given parents a little bit of an advantage with a new piece of research.
A team from the psychology department at the University of Amsterdam has claimed to know the age at which children lie, and when people lie most successfully.
According to the study report, published in the journal Acta Psychologica, young children between the ages of six and eight years were found to be the most dishonest group, along with adults over 60.
Meanwhile, young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were found to be the most successful liars, according to the study.
The team looked at 1,005 kids and adults between the ages of 6 and 77, and asked each subject to self-report how many lies they had told in the previous 24 hours. The overall average was two lies per day.
In order to figure out who the best liars were, the team asked each subject to answer yes/no questions that each had an obvious correct answer. They were then able to judge how good people were at lying by the amount of time it took them to answer each question correctly.
Explaining the science behind this latter part of the experiment, study co-author Bruno Verscheure said: “Typically, people are slower and make more errors when lying, and this was taken as an index of the difficulty of lying.”
Unfortunately, the study authors were unable to come to a conclusion as to exactly why people lie!
