Abstract
Children lie in the interests of others, sometimes to the point of putting their own interests at risk. But why? There is agreement in the literature that the emergence of these lies, also known as 'prosocial lies', can be influenced by a variety of factors, but our knowledge is quite rudimentary and needs to be further developed. The aim of this thesis is therefore to increase our knowledge by examining the influence of several original emotional, dispositional, and family factors on the emergence and development of such lies in children aged 4-12 years. Specifically, we wished to examine the extent to which emotional understanding, empathy, personality, attachment style and sibling could predict prosocial lie-telling in children. In this thesis, we used the Helping Scenario experimental paradigm, which elicits lies from the child to help others at their own expense. Children's emotional understanding was measured using the Test of Emotion Comprehension, empathy using the Griffith Empathy Measure, personality using the Big Five Questionnaire for Children, and siblings using a questionnaire constructed based on several studies examining the role of siblings in various behaviors. Attachment style was to be measured using the Échelle de sécurité. The results of our experimental studies confirm that from the age of 4, children can produce prosocial lies aimed at helping others at their own expense and that with age these lies tend to become more frequent and consistent. Furthermore, our experimental studies show for the first time that (1) children with higher emotional understanding produce more prosocial lies compared to children with lower emotional understanding (2) some personality traits such as Agreeableness and Conscientiousness can predict, to some extent, prosocial lying behaviors in children and (3) children with younger siblings are less likely to lie to help a third party compared to children with no younger siblings. Although this thesis work significantly increases our knowledge of prosocial lie-telling in children, much more work is needed to further our knowledge of such lying.