Four-year-olds adapt their deception to the epistemic states of others

Abstract

The study tested whether young children adapt their deceptive communication spontaneously to the subjective representations of a recipient, and how this relates to passing the explicit standard false belief task. Four-year-olds ( n = 65) participated in an interaction-based paradigm, in which a confederate hid a toy in one of two boxes and then changed its location. A competitor tried to steal the toy. He was either ignorant about the toy’s location or held a true belief or a false belief about it. Children withheld information from the competitor by remaining silent more often in the false belief condition than in the true belief and in the ignorance conditions. Only children who passed the explicit false belief task, but not children who failed it, lied more often in the true belief than in the false belief condition by referring the competitor to the empty box. This finding suggests that 4-year-olds use the same understanding of subjective representations in practical spontaneous communication and in elicited explicit reasoning. • 4-year-olds adapted their communication to the mental state of a competitor. • They withheld information more often when he held false belief than a true belief. • Adaptive lying was only present in children who passed the explicit false belief task. • Children used a common understanding for spontaneous lying and explicit reasoning.