Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:36:41.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

OLIVIER MASCARO ,
OLIVIER MORIN  and
DAN SPERBER
OLIVIER MASCARO*
Affiliation:
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS UMR5304/Université de Lyon); Central European University, Budapest; Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129), Paris
OLIVIER MORIN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena; Central European University, Budapest; Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129), Paris
DAN SPERBER
Affiliation:
Central European University, Budapest; Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129), Paris
*
e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We suggest that preschoolers’ frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies (N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and 2). Similarly, four-year-olds, though capable of treating assertions as false, trust deceptive informants (Study 3). We suggest that children's reduced sensitivity to the opportunities of lying, and to the risks of being lied to might help explain their difficulties on standard false belief tasks.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 1041 - 1064
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a PhD grant from the Direction Générale de l'Armement, by a grant from the Agence nationale de la recherche (grant number: ANR-14-ACHN-0020, PRAGmatics and Trust In Commnication in eArly Life), and by a grant from the European Research Council (grant number: ERC-2013-SyG, Constructing Social Minds: Communication, Coordination and Cultural Transmission, ERC, grant agreement n° [609819]). Data collection was also supported by the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature from the University of Oslo. The authors thank the members of the Naturalism in Human Sciences (NaSH) research group of the Jean Nicod Institute, as well as the children, parents, and teachers of the schools that participated in the study.

References

REFERENCES

Austin, K., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2014). Young children's understanding of denial. Developmental Psychology 50(8), 2061–70.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R. M., Scott, R. & He, Z. (2010). False belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, 110–8.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M. & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’. Cognition 21(1), 37–46.Google Scholar
Begus, K. & Southgate, V. (2012). Infant pointing serves an interrogative function. Developmental Science 15(5), 611–7.Google Scholar
Bergstrom, B., Moehlmann, B. & Boyer, P. (2006). Extending the testimony problem: evaluating the truth, scope, and source of cultural information. Child Development 77(3), 531–8.Google Scholar
Bowler, D. M., Briskman, J., Gurvidi, N. & Fornells-Ambrojo, M. (2005). Understanding the mind or predicting signal-dependent action? Performance of children with and without autism on analogues of the false-belief task. Journal of Cognition and Development 6(2), 259–83.Google Scholar
Bradmetz, J. & Schneider, R. (1999). Is Little Red Riding Hood afraid of her grandmother? Cognitive vs. emotional response to a false belief. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 17(4), 501–14.Google Scholar
Call, J. & Tomasello, M. (1999). A nonverbal false belief task: the performance of children and great apes. Child Development 70(2), 381–95.Google Scholar
Carlson, S., Moses, L. & Hix, H. (1998). The role of inhibitory processes in young children's difficulties with deception and false belief. Child Development 69(3), 672–91.Google Scholar
Carroll, D. J., Apperly, I. A. & Riggs, K. J. (2007). The executive demands of strategic reasoning are modified by the way in which children are prompted to think about the task: evidence from 3-to 4-year-olds. Cognitive Development 22(1), 142–8.Google Scholar
Carroll, D. J., Riggs, K. J., Apperly, I. A., Graham, K. & Geoghegan, C. (2012). How do alternative ways of responding influence 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance on test of executive function and theory of mind? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 112, 312–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, S. (1988). The semantic development of negation: a cross-linguistic longitudinal study. Journal of Child Language 15(3), 517–31.Google Scholar
Couillard, N. L. & Woodward, A. L. (1999). Children's comprehension of deceptive points. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 17, 515–21.Google Scholar
Evans, A. D. & Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of lying in very young children. Developmental Psychology 49(10), 1958–63.Google Scholar
Flavell, J. H., Shipstead, S. G. & Croft, K. (1978). Young children's knowledge about visual perception: hiding objects from others. Child Development 49, 1208–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Global Deception Research Team. (2006). A world of lies. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 37(1), 60–74.Google Scholar
Grosse, G., Scott-Phillips, T. C. & Tomasello, M. (2013). Three-year-olds hide their communicative intentions in appropriate contexts. Developmental Psychology 49(11), 2095–101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guidetti, M. (2005). Yes or no? How young French children combine gestures and speech to agree and refuse. Journal of Child Language 32(4), 911–24.Google Scholar
Hala, S. & Russell, J. (2001). Executive control within strategic deception: A window on early cognitive development? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 80(2), 112–41.Google Scholar
Hansen, M. B. (2010). If you know something, say something: young children's problem with false beliefs. Frontiers in Psychology, online: <http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00023>..' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Hansen,+M.+B.+(2010).+If+you+know+something,+say+something:+young+children's+problem+with+false+beliefs.+Frontiers+in+Psychology,+online:+.>Google Scholar
He, Z., Bolz, M. & Baillargeon, R. (2011). False-belief understanding in 2·5-year-olds: evidence from violation-of-expectation change-of-location and unexpected-contents tasks. Developmental Science 14(2), 292–305.Google Scholar
Helming, K., Strickland, B. & Jacob, P. (in press). Solving the puzzle about early belief ascription. Mind & Language.Google Scholar
Heyman, G. D., Sritanyaratana, L. & Vanderbilt, K. E. (2013). Young children trust in overtly misleading advice. Cognitive Science 37, 646–67.Google Scholar
Hummer, P., Wimmer, H. & Antes, G. (1993). On the origin of truth-functional negation. Journal of Child Language 20, 607–18.Google Scholar
Jaswal, V. K., Carrington Croft, A. A., Setia, A. R. & Cole, C. A. (2010). Young children have a specific, highly robust bias to trust testimony. Psychological Science 21, 1541–7.Google Scholar
Knudsen, B. & Liszkowski, U. (2012). 18-month-olds predict specific action mistakes through attribution of false belief, not ignorance, and intervene accordingly. Infancy 17(6), 672–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A., Clément, F. & Harris, P. L. (2004). Trust in testimony. Psychological Science 15, 694–8.Google Scholar
Koenig, M. A. & Echols, C. H. (2003). Infants’ understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them. Cognition 87(3), 179–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kovács, Á. M., Tauzin, T., Téglás, E., Gergely, G. & Csibra, G. (2014). Pointing as epistemic request: 12-month-olds point to receive new information. Infancy 19(6), 543–57.Google Scholar
Krehm, M., Onishi, K. H. & Vouloumanos, A. (2014). I see your point: infants under 12 months understand that pointing is communicative. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(4), 527–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leekam, S., Perner, J., Healey, L. & Sewell, C. (2008). False signs and the non-specificity of theory of mind: evidence that preschoolers have general difficulties in understanding representations. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 26(4), 485–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, A. M. & Polizzi, P. (1998). Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: two conjectures. Developmental Science 1(2), 247–53.Google Scholar
Lewis, M., Stanger, C. & Sullivan, M. W. (1989). Deception in 3-year-olds. Developmental Psychology 25(3), 439–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M. & Tomasello, M. (2007). Pointing out new news, old news, and absent referents at 12 months of age. Developmental Science 10(2), F1–7.Google Scholar
Martin, A., Onishi, K. H. & Vouloumanos, A. (2012). Understanding the abstract role of speech in communication at 12 months. Cognition 123(1), 50–60.Google Scholar
Mascaro, O., and Morin, O. (2014). Gullible's travel: how honest and trustful children become vigilant communicators. In Einav, S. & Robinson, E. (eds), Trust in testimony, 69–82. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Mascaro, O. & Morin, O. (2015). Epistemology for beginners: two- to five-year-old children's representation of falsity. PloS one 10(10), e0140658.Google Scholar
Mascaro, O. & Sperber, D. (2009). The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children's vigilance towards deception. Cognition 112(3), 367–80.Google Scholar
McGuigan, N. & Doherty, M. J. (2002). The relation between hiding skill and judgment of eye direction in preschool children. Developmental Psychology 38(3), 418–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Melis, A. P., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. (2010). 36-month-olds conceal visual and auditory information from others. Developmental Science 13(3), 479–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newton, P., Reddy, V. & Bull, R. (2000). Children's everyday deception and performance on false-belief tasks. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 18(2), 297–317.Google Scholar
Palmquist, C. M. & Jaswal, V. K. (2012). Preschoolers expect pointers (even ignorant ones) to be knowledgeable. Psychological Science 22, 230–1.Google Scholar
Pea, R. D. (1982). Origins of verbal logic: spontaneous denials by two- and three-year-olds. Journal of Child Language 9(3), 597–626.Google Scholar
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Perner, J., Frith, U., Leslie, A. M. & Leekam, S. R. (1989). Exploration of the autistic child's theory of mind: knowledge, belief, and communication. Child Development 60, 689–700.Google Scholar
Perner, J. & Roessler, J. (2012). From infants’ to children's appreciation of belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, 519–25.Google Scholar
Peskin, J. (1992). Ruse and representations: on children's ability to conceal information. Developmental Psychology 28(1), 84–9.Google Scholar
Peskin, J. (1996). Guise and guile: children's understanding of narratives in which the purpose of pretense is deception. Child Development 67(4), 1735–51.Google Scholar
Peskin, J. & Ardino, V. (2003). Representing the mental world in children's social behavior: playing hide-and-seek and keeping a secret. Social Development 12(4), 496–512.Google Scholar
Polak, A. & Harris, P. L. (1999). Deception by young children following noncompliance. Developmental Psychology 35(2), 561–8.Google Scholar
Rakoczy, H. & Tomasello, M. (2009). Done wrong or said wrong? Young children understand the normative directions of fit of different speech acts. Cognition 113(2), 205–12.Google Scholar
Reboul, A. (1993). The description of lies in speech acts theory. In Parret, H. (ed.), Pretending to communicate, 292–9. New York: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Reddy, V. (2007). Getting back to the rough ground: deception and ‘social living’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362, 621–37.Google Scholar
Rubio-Fernández, P. & Geurts, B. (2013). How to pass the false-belief task before your fourth birthday. Psychological Science 24(1), 27–33.Google Scholar
Rubio-Fernández, P. & Geurts, B. (2015). Don't mention the marble! The role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, online: doi: 10.1007/s13164-015-0290-z.Google Scholar
Ruffman, T., Olson, D. R., Ash, T. & Keenan, T. (1993). The ABCs of deception: Do young children understand deception in the same way as adults? Developmental Psychology 29(1), 74–87.Google Scholar
Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S. & Tidswell, T. (1991). The ‘windows task’ as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 9(2), 331–49.Google Scholar
Sabbagh, M. A., Moses, L. J. & Shiverick, S. (2006). Executive functioning and preschoolers’ understanding of false beliefs, false photographs, and false signs. Child Development 77(4), 1034–49.Google Scholar
Samuels, M. C., Brooks, P. J. & Frye, D. (1996). Strategic game playing in children through the windows task. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 14(2), 159–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, R. M., He, Z., Baillargeon, R. & Cummins, D. (2012). False-belief understanding in 2·5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks. Developmental Science 15(2), 181–93.Google Scholar
Scott, R. M. & Roby, E. (2015). Processing demands impact 3-year-olds’ performance in a spontaneous-response task: new evidence for the processing-load account of early false-belief understanding. PloS one 10(11), e0142405.Google Scholar
Siegal, M. & Beattie, K. (1991). Where to look first for children's knowledge of false beliefs. Cognition 38(1), 1–12.Google Scholar
Sinclair, A. (1996). Young children's practical deceptions and their understanding of false belief. New Ideas in Psychology 14(2), 157–73.Google Scholar
Sodian, B. (1991). The development of deception in young children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 9, 173–88.Google Scholar
Sodian, B. & Frith, U. (1992). Deception and sabotage in autistic, retarded and normal children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 33(3), 591–605.Google Scholar
Song, H. J., Onishi, K. H., Baillargeon, R. & Fisher, C. (2008). Can an agent's false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants. Cognition 109(3), 295–315.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In Khalfa, J. (ed.), What is intelligence, 179–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (2001). An evolutionary perspective on testimony and argumentation. Philosophical Topics 29, 401–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G. & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language 25(4), 359–93.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: communication and cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stern, C. & Stern, W. (1999 [1914]). Recollection, testimony, and lying in early childhood, trans. Lamiell, J. T.. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Surian, L. & Leslie, A. M. (1999). Competence and performance in false belief understanding: a comparison of autistic and normal 3-year-old children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 17(1), 141–55.Google Scholar
Talwar, V. & Lee, K. (2002). Emergence of white-lie telling in children between 3 and 7 years of age. Merrill Palmer Quarterly 48(2), 160–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talwar, V. & Lee, K. (2008). Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior. Child Development 79(4), 866–81.Google Scholar
Vanderbilt, K. E., Heyman, G. D. & Liu, D. (2014). In the absence of conflicting testimony young children trust inaccurate informants. Developmental Science 17(3), 443–51.Google Scholar
Vanderbilt, K. E., Liu, D. & Heyman, G. D. (2011). The development of distrust. Child Development 82, 1372–80.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A., Martin, A. & Onishi, K. H. (2014). Do 6-month-olds understand that speech can communicate? Developmental Science 17(6), 872–9.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A., Onishi, K. H. & Pogue, A. (2012). Twelve-month-old infants recognize that speech can communicate unobservable intentions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(32), 12933–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D. & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: the truth about false belief. Child Development 72(3), 655–84.Google Scholar
Wimmer, H. & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition 13(1), 103–28.Google Scholar
Yazdi, A. A., German, T. P., Defeyter, M. A. & Siegal, M. (2006). Competence and performance in belief-desire reasoning across two cultures: the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about false belief? Cognition 100(2), 343–68.Google Scholar