Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 112, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 367-380
Cognition

The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.05.012Get rights and content

Abstract

Vigilance towards deception is investigated in 3- to-5-year-old children: (i) In Study 1, children as young as 3 years of age prefer the testimony of a benevolent rather than of a malevolent communicator. (ii) In Study 2, only at the age of four do children show understanding of the falsity of a lie uttered by a communicator described as a liar. (iii) In Study 3, the ability to recognize a lie when the communicator is described as intending to deceive the child emerges around four and improves throughout the fifth and sixth year of life. On the basis of this evidence, we suggest that preference for the testimony of a benevolent communicator, understanding of the epistemic aspects of deception, and understanding of its intentional aspects are three functionally and developmentally distinct components of epistemic vigilance.

Section snippets

Vigilance towards deception: part of human communicative abilities

Communication gives access to a vast amount of information, much wider than what could have ever been acquired through direct individual learning. While providing extraordinary benefits, communication is also a source of vulnerability to misinformation.

Competent communicators must exert what we propose to call “epistemic vigilance”, that is, an ability aimed at filtering out misinformation from communicated contents. How does epistemic vigilance develop in childhood? Our goal here is to help

A three step model for vigilance towards deception

Despite its theoretical relevance, young children’s ability to be vigilant towards lying, as opposed to their ability to lie themselves, has hardly ever been studied. There are studies that are indirectly relevant to the issue and on which we have drawn in designing our own experiments (Couillard and Woodward, 1999, Freire A. et al., 2004, Lee and Cameron, 2000, Shultz and Cloghesy, 1981); and recent researches have targeted 6- to 10-year-olds’ sensitivity to honesty in a particular domain:

Testing the model

A series of studies was designed to investigate more precisely the developmental tendencies suggested by the existing literature. Study 1 asks at what age children show a preference for benevolent as opposed to malevolent informants. Study 2 asks at what age children are capable of judging that the claim made by a liar is false and to infer true information from this judgment. Study 3 asks at what age children’s vigilance towards lying relies on both the intentional and the epistemic features

Study 1: Choosing an informant on moral grounds

As we mentioned in introduction, there is good experimental evidence that very young children do distinguish ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘nice’ and ‘mean’ characters. What is not obvious is whether these children would draw on this distinction in deciding whom to believe. To find out we designed an experiment where participants had to choose between the testimony of a ‘nice’ agent, and that of ‘mean’ one.

Study 2: Treating lies as false

Whereas in Study 1, participants were presented with the testimony of two communicators about the content of one box, in Studies 2 and 3, they were presented with the testimony of a single dishonest communicator about the location of an object that could be in one of two boxes. Participants were asked in which box the object was. These paradigms were adapted from Couillard and Woodward (1999). To succeed in these tasks, children had to understand that the testimony was false and to use this

Study 3: Understanding the intention to deceive

We developed and used in Study 3 a FCT designed to test participants’ ability to use mindreading understanding of deception in filtering information. The structure of the task remained similar to that of the big liar FC task used in Study 2, thereby precluding the use of mere moral preferences for passing the test. This time however, the communicator was not described as a liar, but merely as a very mean character who did not want the child to find a sweet hidden in one of two boxes. Children

General discussion

Children engage in cooperative forms of communication at the beginning of their second year of life if not earlier. For instance, preverbal children as young as 12 months of age help people find the objects they are looking for by pointing (Liszkowski, Carpenter, Striano, & Tomasello, 2006) and seem to be motivated to provide people with relevant information (Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2007). These young children are typically as trusting in matters of communication as they are in all

Assessing the developmental course of the model

Overall, the developmental pattern we observed differentiated three abilities relevant to children’s epistemic vigilance:

  • (1)

    A moral/affective ability to prefer the testimony of a nice informant over that of a mean one, already in place at the age of three.

  • (2)

    An epistemic ability to recognize the falsity of lies on the basis of testifiers’ dispositions, evidenced around the age of four.

  • (3)

    A mindreading ability to understand that an agent may intend to misinform his audience and do so by producing a lie,

Acknowledgements

This research forms part of M. Mascaro doctoral thesis. It was supported by a grant from the Direction Générale de l’Armement to the first author and by the Center for the Study of the Mind in Nature (University of Oslo). The authors are indebted to Nicolas Baumard, Nicolas Claidière, Fabrice Clément, Coralie Chevallier, Maria Fusaro, Paul Harris, Christophe Heintz, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin, Gloria Origgi, Guy Politzer and Deirdre Wilson for invaluable inputs at different stages of this

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