Getting back to the rough ground: deception and ‘social living’

Abstract

At the heart of the social intelligence hypothesis is the central role of 'social living'. But living is messy and psychologists generally seek to avoid this mess in the interests of getting clean data and cleaner logical explanations. The study of deception as intelligent action is a good example of the dangers of such avoidance. We still do not have a full picture of the development of deceptive actions in human infants and toddlers or an explanation of why it emerges. This paper applies Byrne & Whiten's functional taxonomy of tactical deception to the social behaviour of human infants and toddlers using data from three previous studies. The data include a variety of acts, such as teasing, pretending, distracting and concealing, which are not typically considered in relation to human deception. This functional analysis shows the onset of non-verbal deceptive acts to be surprisingly early. Infants and toddlers seem to be able to communicate false information (about themselves, about shared meanings and about events) as early as true information. It is argued that the development of deception must be a fundamentally social and communicative process and that if we are to understand why deception emerges at all, the scientist needs to get 'back to the rough ground' as Wittgenstein called it and explore the messy social lives in which it develops.

The Use of Skilled Strategies in Social Interactions by Groups High and Low in Self-Reported Social Skill

“…Feldman et al 1999). Normal infants show very early evidence of ability to communicate false information, and the simultaneous development of the capacity to deceive alongside communicative skill is regarded as providing support for the role of deception in social skill ability (Reddy 2007). On the other hand, although capacity to lie appears to be linked to greater social skill, actual lying behaviour is associated with poorer social skill, since individuals who lie more frequently typically score lower in assessments of social skills (Harman et al 2005;Kashy and DePaulo 1996).…”

The roles of liar intention, lie content, and theory of mind in children’s evaluation of lies

“…Lie-telling is commonplace among 3-and 4-year-olds (Reddy, 2007;. One recent study reported that children start to tell lies to conceal transgressions before their third birthday (Evans & Lee, 2013).…”

Variation in withholding of information in three monkey species

“…Although withholding of information has also been documented in a few species other than non-human primates (including ravens and human infants from a very young age: Bugnyar & Kotrschal 2004;Bugnyar & Heinrich 2005;Reddy 2007), no systematic comparison following exactly the same paradigm has ever been conducted across species. To fill this gap, we followed Menzel's (1974) withholding-of-information procedure and tested spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi ), brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis).…”