When I was a child, I used to believe that bullying consisted of people straight up disrespecting you or others with powerful and hurtful words. But now, I know that there are more factors of bullying than just physically or verbally showing hate. There are so called “innocent” ways to bully, and sometimes it is something you will never see coming.
The article, “Age Changes in the Detection of Deception,” written by authors Bella M. DePaulo, Audrey Jordan, Audrey Irvine, and Patricia S. Laser, is based on a study called “Child development” using multiple people all of different genders and age groups to determine the age of which lie detection appears. A video used in this experiment consisted of eight people, half men half women, and whether they liked, disliked, felt ambivalent about, or felt indifferent towards someone else. The experimenters looked for liking accuracy, deception accuracy, leakage accuracy, and judgement of mixed feelings, and the factors that determined these were three genders, (two in the video and the person watching) true affect, and sent affect.
From the results, the author determined that younger children such as six year olds perceived “naughty words” as lies. Therefore, showing that they do not understand what a lie is because of the “rose colored” view of the world their parents provide for them. As the age of subjects increased, ratings of deceptiveness did not correspond with the deceptiveness of the messages until the twelfth grade, and older subjects were better at differentiating overt expressions of liking from overt expressions of disliking.
These results above are the reasons why adults are able to figure out lies and protect children from a stressful reality. Although the author has these statistics and ways people who are older can detect more lies, they do not show how or when younger children to learn how to lie/detect lies over time. What that means is that the author does not explain when maturity affects a younger individual or the reactions of the first time children are exposed to this kind of behavior.
I very much agree with the author’s explanation for why children are less able to detect deception because just from personal experience, I can say that this is accurate. It is common to think that people’s brains do get sharper as they grow older, advancing their from experiences or learning. This was proved in the article as a result of the testing, summarizing that“ The three oldest groups also discriminated truth from deception by their “mixed-feelings” ratings-they perceived the speakers as having more mixed feelings when they were lying than when they were telling the truth. However, only the twelfth graders and college students perceived the dishonest messages as more deceptive than the honest messages” (pg 1). Although “mixed-feelings” are decreasing as age increases, students will tend to say what they think even if they are still unsure about the solution. These “mixed-feelings” are given off because younger students are taught that there has to be a right answer to every situation.
As a result of this study, we find that that deception is detected by almost all ages, but is just interpreted differently. Having different thoughts or feelings towards a subject can cause an individual to take it in differently, and therefore, causing different results or feelings towards a certain subject. After many tests, experimenters were able to determine that older students were able to better determine deception because of their word choice and more accurate descriptions. Even though every individual is different, the biggest difference between all the age groups was experience. Without this important piece, the individual will have nothing to relate to and therefore, interpret the description less with the lack of experience and passion.