to deceive when they’re still in
the cradle, according to a new
book. Honest, says Jo Carlowe
“I did not have a biscuit,” says the toddler, his
face the picture of innocence, despite the chocolate
and crumbs smeared around his lips.
Such fibs are a universal feature of childhood;
we’ve all told porkies, or heard them
from our youngsters. But a controversial new
book suggests that children start fibbing at a
much younger age than previously thought,
even as young as eight months old.
Published this week by Harvard University
Press, How Infants Know Minds, by Vasudevi
Reddy, a professor of developmental and cultural
psychology at the University of Portsmouth,
details how children use deception.
Reddy describes how babies as young as eight months
can fake crying and laughter. She talks of ninemonth-
olds who, unwilling to stop playing,
feign deafness despite their mothers’ calls; and
of babies not yet one year old acting innocent
when caught doing something forbidden. By
the time the children in Reddy’s studies were
2½ they were indulging in face-saving lies, often
ready to blame siblings, to avoid punishment.
However, as familiar as Reddy’s observations
may seem to many of us, she is challenging
the established line.
The conventional view suggests that children are capable of genuine
deception only once they have developed a
“theory of mind”. This means they understand
that people have different beliefs from their
own. This develops from about four years old,
and so, according to exponents of the theory,
children cannot lie until that age.
Even infants try to fool their parents
The theory stems from a series of experimental
tests carried out by the psychologists H. Wimmer
and J. Perner in the early 1980s to see if
young children could attribute a false belief to
other people.
But having watched more than 50 children,
ranging from seven weeks old to pre-school
age, in a series of studies, Reddy says her observations
do not tally with the textbook view.
Most of her work has involved observing
infants in their homes, sometimes every week.
She recently published her findings, Deception
and Social Living, in the Royal Society journal
Philosophical Transactions.
From Reddy’s studies, it soon became clear
that infants were attempting to fool parents at
a far younger age than predicted. “We spend
too much of our time treating infants as preparing
to live social lives when they “grow up”
rather than acknowledging that they are
already living such lives now,” she says.
Reddy’s work is controversial
However, many child experts remain sceptical
about her claims. Dr Richard Woolfson, a child
psychologist, writer and honorary lecturer at
the University of Strathclyde, believes that
adults sometimes misconstrue signals. “When a
baby ‘feigns deafness’ the child is saying, ‘I am
concentrating on what I am doing’ rather than,
‘I’ll pretend not to hear you’. Being egocentric,
she thinks she is the centre of the world and will
do what she wants.”
However, while Professor David Messer, of
the Open University Centre for Childhood Development
and Learning, accepts that babies do
engage in “social referencing” from about nine
or ten months—which means that they look to
others to see how to react to events—he is not
sure that this means they are capable of deception.
He does, however, support Reddy’s belief
that the capacity to deceive occurs at a younger
age than previously thought.
“Children over 16 to 18 months use pretend
play, which suggests that they can distinguish
a switch over at 4; it is a more gradual process.”
But why do youngsters deceive us, and
should parents be worried? Research has
shown that children are rubbish liars — they
succeed in convincing us less than 15 per cent of
the time, and yet they persist. Reddy says this
must mean that deception in babies and toddlers
is not just about self-preservation or
pursuit of gain. Instead, she believes they
deceive to learn about the world. What starts
out as a game, or a way to avoid punishment,
becomes a route by which they can test which
behaviours elicit approval or success and which
failure or reproach.
Woolfson cautions against taking too punitive
a line. Infants do not lie to be bad. They
deceive to be playful or in response to an outside
threat (such as a parent getting angry).
That said, he says some lies should be taken seriously.
So, if your child falsely blames a sibling,
Woolfson says you should calmly state: “It was
not your sister. Do not do it again.”
And while Reddy accepts that parents
should help their children to understand the difference
between truth and falsehood, she says
this should not override any more immediate
needs that a child may have.
Reddy’s research focused mainly on infants
aged six months to three years. They deceive in
an attempt to engage others in emotional dialogue,
says Reddy, which may take the form of
getting attention, or enjoying the parents’ reactions
of surprise or amusement. Deception is
about playfulness and social experimentation
rather than anything sinister.“If the child is
weaving an intricate fantasy with great seriousness,
it is far more important to trust your sympathetic
response and respect the fantasy than
to clarify its untruth. Similarly, if the child is
seeking help or attention by using some fake expression
or excuse, it is likely to be more important
to be sensitive to what that other need is in
the child and try to meet it, than to put the child
right about ‘knowing the truth’.”
And she points out the importance of taking
a light-hearted approach to playful tricks. “It is
more important to let yourself appear to be
taken by surprise than to reveal that you know
the truth. The key thing is to respect the child’s
motivations, to enjoy their creativity and be
loving in response to their needs,” she says.
And yet, reassuring as this sounds, I worry
that my three-year-old son’s liberal take on
truthfulness could carry forward into adulthood.
Reddy’s views on early deception are recent;
as yet, there have been no studies exploring
why some children lie but others don’t, and
whether those that do continue to do so when
they are older. The experts say parents should
not panic; children use deception to learn about
the world. But if, in a few decades, I find my son
in Parliament, I won’t be overly surprised.
SOURCE:
JAMES CLARKE. THE TIMES Saturday April 19 2008
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