Teaching children with autism to detect and respond to deceptive statements

Abstract Previous research has shown that children with autism often have deficits in deception, both in the ability to lie to others and in the ability to detect when they are being lied to. Additionally, children with autism are frequently the victims of bullying and difficulty with understanding deception likely makes the population more vulnerable to bullying. The purpose of this study was to teach individuals with autism to identify when others were lying to them, specifically to exclude them or to take their possessions. The treatment package consisted of multiple exemplar training, including rules, modeling, role-play, and immediate feedback. The results indicated that the procedure was effective for all three participants. Additionally, generalization was demonstrated to novel, untrained lies and to same-age peer confederates who were not involved in training.