How Children Learn Deception: Developmental Science

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Background Section
Methods Section
Conclusion Section
Reference

Introduction

The goal of this assignment is to summarize the article Young Children Discover How to Deceive in 10 Days: A Microgenetic Study, authored by Xiao Pan Ding, Gail D. Heyman, Genyue Fu, Bo Zhu, and Kang Lee. The article covers a study during which children were asked to play a game of hide-and-seek in order to better comprehend how they learn deception and which skills play a role in the process. The following facets of the article will be discussed: the background, the methods used, and the conclusions.

Background Section

The authors were prompted to conduct this study in order to test what they call the Cognitive-Social Hypothesis of learning deception. This hypothesis posits “that both cognitive skills and social experience play an important role in this discovery process” (Ding, Heyman, Fu, et al., 2018). Moreover, another reason is that they identified a gap in the existing research on deception in children, specifically “its initial discovery and the roles that children’s social experience and cognitive skills play in its emergence” (Ding, Heyman, Fu, et al., 2018). Other studies on the subjects were conducted under conditions that did not align with what was questioned and therefore could not prove or disprove the Cognitive-Social Hypothesis.

Methods Section

As for the subjects of the study, they were Han Chinese children, aged approximately 36 months. The socioeconomic status of the families was diverse “in terms of parental income, occupation, and educational levels” (Ding, Heyman, Fu, et al., 2018). The number of children that participated in the study was 84, and the proportion of boys to girls was almost equal.

To test their theory that cognitive skills and social experience are the main skills that children need to learn deception, the authors needed a way to observe and measure both. For this reason the children were asked to participate in a series of tests. The cognitive skills were measured once by two tasks on the first day of the experiment.

A microgenetic method was used “to closely track how children of about 36 months of age discover deception in a competitive zero-sum game” (Ding, Heyman, Fu, et al., 2018). In order to gain social experience, the children played a game of hide-and-seek. They would be asked to hide a treat in one of two cups while the experimenter had her eyes closed. Then the experimenter would open their eyes and ask where the treat was. If the treat was found in the cup pointed out by the child, it would go to the experimenter. If it was not, the child would win and get to keep the treat. This game was repeated every day for the next nine consecutive days, save for weekends.

Conclusion Section

As per the results, it was found that most children did not lie on the first day. From the second day on, this started to shift gradually, and by the 10^th day of the study, most children did lie to get the treat. The authors identified three groups of children that showed different results: the fast-discovery group, the intermediate-group, and the slow-discovery group. These groups correlated with the results of the cognitive function tests: the children that scored high on those tasks were the ones to learn to lie faster and vice versa. This correlation shows that the initial hypothesis has been proven: cognitive function and social experience directly influence how children learn deception.

Among the most interesting findings of the study is that it is possible to directly observe children develop a skill quickly and measure the projects. Moreover, the authors acknowledged that their study had its limitations, namely, that it is impossible to tell whether the children truly learned how to lie or simply how to receive a treat in this particular situation. These factors provide room for further studies on this subject.

Reference

Ding, X. P., Heyman, G. D., Fu, G., Zhu, B., & Lee, K. (2018). Young children discover how to deceive in 10 days: A microgenetic study. Developmental Science, 21(3). Web.

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How Children Learn Deception: Developmental Science

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