The development of deception in young children

The ability of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children to deceive a competitor in a hiding game was studied in three experiments in a paradigm similar to the one introduced by Woodruff & Premack (1979) for the study of deception in chimpanzees. The first two experiments showed a significant increase with age in the frequency of deceptive pointing, with children below the age of about 3 1/2 years consistently failing to deceive a competitor even under very conducive conditions. The third experiment showed that two deception tasks (deceptive pointing and telling a lie) were significantly more difficult for 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children than parallel ‘sabotage’ tasks (i.e. tasks testing the ability to physically prevent a competitor from gaining a reward). These findings are consistent with previous research on false belief representation in indicating a conceptual deficit in 3‐year‐old children. They are discussed with regard to recent controversies on the early acquisition of a theory of mind.