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Updated: May 15, 2026
06:51
The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling
Published on: April 6, 2018
Young children's trust in overtly misleading advice
Gail D Heyman1, Lalida Sritanyaratana, Kimberly E Vanderbilt
1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, USA. gheyman@ucsd.edu
Cognitive Science
|January 9, 2013
Summary
Young children struggle to reject misleading advice, especially when they believe it
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Child Psychology
Background:
- Previous research indicates young children have difficulty rejecting misleading advice.
- This difficulty may stem from an inability to reject specific directions or cues.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if children's limitations in rejecting advice are due to the communicative nature of the advice.
- To test the communicative intent hypothesis regarding children's response to deceptive information.
Main Methods:
- Five studies (N=212) involved 3- and 4-year-old children.
- Children received advice from a misleading informant (The Big Bad Wolf) about sticker locations.
- Study 5 contrasted advice from the informant with responses to a mechanical cue.
- Executive function measures were used to assess individual differences.
Main Results:
- Three-year-olds consistently failed to reject the puppet's misleading advice.
- Children were more successful in rejecting misleading information when they perceived it as a mechanical cue.
- Performance correlated with executive function measures.
Conclusions:
- Children's difficulty rejecting advice is linked to the perceived communicative intent of the informant.
- The findings support the communicative intent hypothesis.
- This highlights the importance of social-communicative factors in early cognitive development.
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