Cognitive and Social Factors in Early Deception PDF
Preview Cognitive and Social Factors in Early Deception
COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL FACTORS IN EARLY DECEPTION COGNITNE AND SOCIAL FACTORS IN EARLY DECEPTIO.N Edited by Stephen J. Ceci Michelle DeSimone Leichtman Maribeth Putnick Cornell University M LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS 1992 Hillsdale, New Jersey Hove and London Copyright© 1992 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 365 Broadway Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cognitive and social factors in early deception I edited by Stephen J. Ceci, Michelle DeSimone Leichtman, Maribeth Putnick p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-0953-8 I. Truthfulness and falsehood in children. 2. Cognition in children. 3. Truthfulness and falsehood in children-Social aspects. BF723.T8C65 1992 155.4' 18-dc20 92-1120 CIP Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Contents Introduction: Ellie the Elephant Meets Mommy's Accuser vii 1 "I Know That You Know That I Know That You Broke the Toy": A Brief Report of Recursive Awareness Among 3-Year-Olds Stephen J Ceci and Michelle DeSimone Leichtman 1 2 Uar! Liar! Pants Afire! Roger V. Burton and Abigail F. Strichartz 11 3 Children and the Truth jeffrey J Haugaard and N. Dickon Reppucci 29 4 Believing and Deceiving: Steps to Becoming a Good Liar Susan R Leekam 47 5 Sex, Lies, and Smiling Faces: A Brief Report on Gender Differences in 3-Year-Olds' Deceptions Georgia N. Nigro and Andrea L. Snow 63 6 Adults' Liability for Children's "Lie-Ability": Can Adults Coach Children to Lie Successfully? Carol Satterfield Tate, Amye R Warren, and Thomas M Hess 69 7 Children's Lying and Truthfulness: Implications for Children's Testimony Kay Bussey 89 v vi CONTENTS 8 Other Minds, Obligation, and Honesty Owen Flanagan 111 9 Commentary: On the Structure of Lies and Deception Experiments Mark G. Frank 127 10 Commentary: The Occasions of Perjury Lucy S. McGough 147 Author Index 169 Subject Index 175 Introduction: Ellie the Elephant Meets Mommy's Accuser Our beliefs about children's use and understanding of deception have been forged largely from data gathered in emotionally neutral and motivationally weak stud ies. Like the decades of structuralist studies of children's logical abilities that started in Geneva but soon spread elsewhere, studies of deception have long been tests of whether children would be willing to tell small lies or recognize small deceits, with little or no motive for doing so. And like those studies of logical ability that were conducted in a limited range of contexts, studies of deception are being challenged by researchers who have added strong motives and supplied rich contexts. Recently, researchers using strong motivational manipulations (e.g., protecting loved ones, avoiding embarrassment, keeping a promise), have begun to provide evidence that even very young children use deception. What is not so clear is whether this same research demonstrates that these children understand their behavior as deceptive or whether it is merely an unwitting means to some end. This is a problem that has occupied the attention of some "theory-of-mind" researchers, who have debated the logical prerequisites and the developmental trajectory of understanding deception. But like their earlier counterparts, who were interested in the development of logical abilities, these researchers have forged their opinions on data gathered from emotionally neutral and motivationally weak settings. A contextualist account of cognitive develop ment suggests that children may be more likely to exhibit an understanding of deception when they are assessed in settings that are highly meaningful and affectively laden than when they are studied in weak or affectively limited con texts. Two years ago, a colleague recounted a humorous story involving his daughter and her 3-year-old son. The latter had been watching his favorite television vii viii INTRODUCTION program, "Mr. Rogers," when he went to his mother, who was in an adjoining room, and reported that "Mr. Rogers touched my pee-pee." The colleague thought his grandson's story was delightfully funny, though he realized the implications of such behavior for allegations of sexual abuse. (Suppose, for example, that his grandson had reported that his babysitter had touched his "pee pee" or took his photograph in the bathroom while the mother was gone; his mother's and grandfather's reactions might have been far different.) But it may be that a 3-year-old would never have made such an allegation about a "real" person, due to the belief that such a report would engender alarm rather than humor in a listener. If correct, this would imply that 3-year-old children have the ability to read the minds of their audiences and systematically differentiate their statements in light of such realizations. This is where Ellie the Elephant comes in. One of the most fundamental abilities an individual can possess is that of inferring the contents of another's mind. It is this ability more than any other that allows us to navigate our everyday social environment and accurately predict the cognitive and affective states of those around us. It is this ability that is said to be lacking in persons with autism and to be absent in very young children, though the latter claim is a source of current contention (see Harris, 1991). Theory-of-mind researchers have studied the ability of preschool-aged chil dren to infer the mental states of their listeners, employing paradigms that resem ble those used by early cognitive developmental researchers to study logical reasoning skills. And like the research on children's logical skills, each new claim about young children's theories of mind seems to arouse a counter-claim. In the typical study, a 4-year-old is told that Ellie the Elephant likes to drink Coca-Cola. As she is about to enter a room where there is a can of Coke, a mischievous monkey empties the Coke and replaces it with milk, a substance that Ellie does not like. Children are asked to judge how Ellie would feel when she first entered the room and spotted the can of Coca-Cola on the table (but before she actually took a sip and discovered the ruse), and they are also asked to judge how Ellie would feel after she drank from the Coca-Cola can and discovered the trick. Because knowledge of the second question requires only that children imagine Ellie's desires, it is cognitively less sophisticated than the first question (Harris, 1991), which requires not only that children imagine her desires but also her reaction to the ruse, given her belief in an alternate reality-namely, that the can contains Coca-Cola. Although 4-year-olds can answer the second question with a very high degree of accuracy, it is not until the age of 6 that they answer over 50% of the first type of question correctly. Thus, it is claimed that, prior to the age of 6 or 7, children substitute their own knowledge for another's ignorance when trying to read his or her mind. Accord ing to this genre of research, a full-blown theory of mind probably does not emerge before middle childhood, although Harris (1991) suggested that a INTRODUCTION ix "model of mind" exists much earlier that permits children to run mental simula tions of their listeners' desires. After nearly a half century of doing studies of this sort, psychologists are now discovering that the type of materials and procedures used to infer a theory of mind can greatly influence whether children will be able to read the mind of another. For example, Dias and Harris (1988) showed that young children could deduce from counterfactual premises (e.g., if all cats bark, and if Rex is a cat, then does Rex bark?) but only when the premises are presented as a story or with storylike intonation. When children are presented the same material in a matter of-fact tone of voice, they give no evidence of being able to re?.son from counter factuals. It is yet another illustration of the importance of context in cognitive development, a growing trend among cognitivists (Ceci, 1990). Several of the chapters of this volume provide evidence that even very young children demon strate a theory of mind when the motivational salience of the procedures is tilted toward mind reading. For children to engage in full-blown deception they must be able to read the listener's mind. And to read another's mind, they must be able to do two things at once. First, they must be able to conjure up an alternative reality that they can temporarily substitute for the reality they know to be authentic. (For example, they can appreciate that a sponge looks like a rock to someone viewing it from another angle.) Second, they must be able to set aside their own beliefs in the unreality of the alternative state (e.g., that it is a rock), and assume the perspec tive of the individual who believes this to be a reality. In short, they must be able to substitute belief for disbelief, in accepting the stance of another. This is also necessary for children to appreciate that their own prior mental states were false (e.g., realizing that at one time they also thought that the sponge was a rock). What is interesting about the new work on early deception, much of which is described in this volume, is that researchers have ventured outside the standard paradigms and started embedding their studies in affectively laden contexts, contexts that in some cases push the outer envelope of ethical permissability by subjecting young children to what seem like stressful and disturbing choices between protecting those they love and being honest. This is where "mommy's accuser" comes in. As can be seen in the following chapters, children's behav iors in such contexts have often resulted in a far different picture of their ability to infer the contents of their listener's minds than research has carried out in sani tized settings about mythical animals and games. For example, Haugaard and his colleagues (chapter 3) show that children who watch a film in which a child is told by his mother to tell a lie will often distort what the mother told the child in order to avoid disclosing the mother's lie. That is, they will claim that the fictional event that the mother told the child to say he saw, really did happen. These preschoolers seem to be saying that "mothers do not lie, therefore I must have seen it somewhere even though it did not appear to occur in the video." X INTRODUCTION Even if one contests this interpretation, it is clear that these young children do not substitute a character's ignorance with their own knowledge, but do exactly what has been the source of dispute; that is, they take the stance of another and imagine an alternate reality, one that they did not observe or even believe, but that they accept in order to conform to their stereotypes about mothers' honesty. To the extent that researchers have delved into emotionally strong contexts in which the protection of loved ones, the avoidance of embarrassment, and the acquisition of sought-after material rewards are at stake, the results suggest that preschool-aged children not only use deception but also understand it. Laypersons use the term lying promiscuously, to refer to false words or deeds. Little consideration is given to the intention or to the cognitive awareness of the "liar." Lay definitions of lies run into serious difficulty, because they do not distinguish statements that are obvious lies from those that are decidedly less than lies. In part, such definitional morass has spawned an entire industry of semiotic analysis. Unlike the layperson, psychological researchers often use the term lying to refer to the deliberate, conscious production of a response that the child believes to be incorrect for the purpose of achieving a goal, namely, misleading the listener to believe it is correct. They do not assume the malintent on the part of the "liar" that the term sometimes connotes, nor do they assume that the liar has solved the philosophical problem of inferring the contents of the listener's mind (Chandler, 1989). Their definition is operational and functional, as far as it goes. In chapter 8, Flanagan provides an interesting philosophical analysis of de ception. To engage in a minimal lie, he argues, the perpetrator who believes X must do something or omit something with the intent of making the listener think "not X." Thus, a minimal lie requires understanding the complex relation be tween actions (pointing in the wrong direction, speaking falsely), and the pro duction of false beliefs in one's audience. Flanagan's definition of deceit moves the debate over children's use and u.nderstanding of deception squarely into the realm of theory of mind. To deceive, according to his analysis, children must read at least some of their listener's mind. His analysis holds promise for re searchers in this area by posing the issue of what is meant by deception in more precise language than heretofore has been the case. A full-blown theory of mind allows individuals to engage in activities such as deception, impression management, marketing, and various forms of suasion. There are many methods of assessing whether a child possesses a theory of mind, depending on whether one wishes to examine the ability to infer emotions, beliefs, or perceptual knowledge. But, as was asserted earlier, most of what we know about this topic has been the product of fairly sanitized settings in which children are asked to make judgments about events that hold little interest or emotion for them. It is of interest, therefore, to examine whether very young children can exhibit a model of mind when the context is one that is highly meaningful to them, such as deceiving others to achieve some important goal.
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