Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany.
Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Jul;207:105125. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105125. Epub 2021 Mar 21.
Previous research has investigated children's lying and its motivational and social-cognitive correlates mostly through explicit tasks. The current study used an anticipatory interaction-based paradigm adopted from research with preverbal infants. We investigated 3-year-olds' spontaneous lying within interaction and its motivational basis and relations to explicit skills of lying, false belief understanding, inhibitory control, and socialization. Children interacted with puppets to secure stickers that were hidden in one of two boxes. Either a friend or a competitor puppet tried to obtain the stickers. Nearly all children helpfully provided information about the sticker's location to the friend, and about half of the sample anticipatorily provided false information to the competitor. Children misinformed the competitor significantly more often than the friend, both when the reward was for themselves and when it was for someone else. Explicitly planning to lie in response to a question occurred significantly less often but predicted spontaneous lying, as did passing the explicit standard false belief task. Thus, by 3 years of age, children spontaneously invoke false beliefs in others. This communicative skill reveals an interactional use of false belief understanding in that it requires holding one's perspective to pursue one's goal while providing a different perspective to distract a competitor. Findings support the view that practical theory of mind skills emerge for social coordination and serve as a basis for developing explicit false belief reasoning.
先前的研究主要通过明确的任务来探究儿童说谎及其动机和社会认知相关性。本研究采用了一种源自对前语言婴儿研究的基于预期互动的范式。我们在互动中调查了 3 岁儿童的自发性说谎行为及其动机基础，并探讨了其与说谎的明确技能、错误信念理解、抑制控制和社会化之间的关系。儿童与木偶互动以获取隐藏在两个盒子之一中的贴纸。朋友或竞争对手的木偶试图获得贴纸。几乎所有的孩子都主动向朋友提供有关贴纸位置的信息，而样本中有一半的孩子会主动向竞争对手提供虚假信息。儿童向竞争对手提供错误信息的频率明显高于向朋友提供错误信息，无论是对自己还是对他人的奖励。明确计划回答问题时说谎的情况明显较少，但会预测自发性说谎，通过明确的错误信念任务标准也一样。因此，到 3 岁时，儿童会自发地将错误信念归因于他人。这种交际技能揭示了错误信念理解在互动中的运用，因为它需要在追求自己的目标时保持自己的观点，同时提供不同的观点来分散竞争对手的注意力。研究结果支持这样一种观点，即实用的心理理论技能是为了社会协调而出现的，并为发展明确的错误信念推理奠定了基础。
