Teaching children with autism to challenge lies while playing board games

Children with autism may have difficulties identifying and responding to lies, which can leave them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Ranick et al. (2013) described efficacious procedures for teaching children with autism to identify deceptive statements. We replicated Ranick et al. with procedural modifications that included incorporating naturalistic differential reinforcement baselines, evaluating for faulty stimulus control, and including naturalistic probes in training. The treatment package consisted of multiple-exemplar training while the investigator and the participant played board games. Three boys between the ages of 6 and 9 years, diagnosed with autism, were presented with five trained deceptive statements and five probe deceptive statements. All three participants learned to challenge deceptive statements and distinguish them from nondeceptive statements, and all three maintained the skill after 1 month and generalized to novel deceivers.