Playing by the rules: Self-interest information influences children’s trust and trustworthiness in the absence of feedback

Young children show more vigilance against individuals with poor knowledge than those with antisocial motives

“…This may be because there is a critical distinction to be made between understanding malevolent motives and understanding motives or desires that are more neutral in nature. It may also be difficult for young children to understand why individuals who act in ways that are generally helpful (such as giving advice) may be motivated to do something so unhelpful as to give antisocial advice (Heyman, Sritanyaratana, et al, 2013;Mascaro, Morin, & Sperber, 2017) unless the incentives for deception are made clear (see Reyes-Jaquez & Echols, 2015). Such difficulty reasoning about antisocial motives could reflect a general tendency to view people positively in a moral sense (Boseovski, 2010) or to make inferences about what people will actually do based on beliefs about what they should do (Heyman, Fu, & Lee, 2013;Heyman & Legare, 2005).…”

“…Such difficulty reasoning about antisocial motives could reflect a general tendency to view people positively in a moral sense (Boseovski, 2010) or to make inferences about what people will actually do based on beliefs about what they should do (Heyman, Fu, & Lee, 2013;Heyman & Legare, 2005). It may also be difficult for young children to understand why individuals who act in ways that are generally helpful (such as giving advice) may be motivated to do something so unhelpful as to give antisocial advice (Heyman, Sritanyaratana, et al, 2013;Mascaro, Morin, & Sperber, 2017) unless the incentives for deception are made clear (see Reyes-Jaquez & Echols, 2015). Future work will be needed to investigate these possibilities, and whether there are individual differences in social experience (e.g., being lied to) that might lead to greater scepticism of people with bad intentions (Hays & Carver, 2014;Heyman, Luu, & Lee, 2009).…”

“…This pattern has been observed with reference to a range of content domains, including novel object names (Clement, Koenig, & Harris, 2004;Koenig & Harris, 2005;Pasquini et al, 2007;Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001), novel object functions (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, 2008;DiYanni & Kelemen, 2008;Jaswal, 2006;Koenig & Harris, 2005), the location of hidden objects (Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009a;Robinson & Nurmsoo, 2009), and the contents of opaque containers (Robinson, Champion, & Mitchell, 1999). Some studies have asked children to consider informants' access to accurate knowledge (Einav & Robinson, 2011;Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009a;Robinson et al, 1999), whereas other studies have asked children to consider informants' motives (Heyman, Sritanyaratana, & Vanderbilt, 2013;Mascaro & Sperber, 2009;Reyes-Jaquez & Echols, 2015;Vanderbilt et al, 2011).…”

Young children discover how to deceive in 10 days: a microgenetic study

“…What the punitive environment reported in Talwar and Lee (2011) and the competitive game in the current study have in common is that children have repeated experiences with a situation where truthfulness leads to personal losses and deception leads to personal gains. Thus, self-interest incentives seem to play a special role in the discovery of deception (see Reyes-Jaquez & Echols, 2015). The unique contribution of the present study is that we showed that by exposing young children to a competitive situation, many quickly and spontaneously discovered deception as a viable strategy for personal gain.…”

“…In the present study, children played a zero-sum game against an adult experimenter that involved a form of hide and seek. We used this approach because it has been used successfully in previous deception research with older children (Ding et al, 2015; Reyes-Jaquez & Echols, 2015; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, & Tidswell, 1991; Yi et al, 2014). …”