Children's prepared and unprepared lies: can adults see through their strategies?

We investigated adults' ability to detect children's prepared and unprepared lies and truths. Furthermore, we examined children's strategies when lying. Thirty children (11–13 years) were interviewed about one self‐experienced and one invented event each. Half had prepared their statements, the other half not. Sixty adult observers assessed the veracity of 10 videotaped statements each. Overall deception detection accuracy (51.5%) was not better than chance. The adults showed higher accuracy for unprepared statements (56.6%), than prepared statements (46.1%). The adults reported to have used more verbal than nonverbal cues to deception, especially the Detail criterion. The most frequent verbal strategy reported by the children was to use real‐life components (e.g. own or others' experiences); the most frequent nonverbal strategy was to stay calm. Arguably, the low accuracy is due to adults' failure to see through the lying children's strategies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simulating social interaction to address deficits of autistic spectrum disorder in children.

Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of impairment in reciprocal social interaction and language, and rigidity of behavior. This brief paper describes the development of an experimental intervention for preschool children newly diagnosed with ASD. The rationale for this intervention is the hypothesis that failure to attend to social cues in very early life, of itself, may bear a large share of responsibility for core social and communicative deficits. The intervention, therefore, uses eye-tracking to monitor and trigger rewards for attention to facial expression and direction of gaze.     

Contractualism and Global Economic Justice

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples.