Young children discover how to deceive in 10 days: a microgenetic study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated how the ability to deceive emerges in early childhood among a sample of young preschoolers (Mean age = 34.7 months). We did this via a 10-session microgenetic method that took place over a 10-day period. In each session, children played a zero-sum game against an adult to win treats. In the game, children hid the treats and had opportunities (10 trials) to win them by providing deceptive information about their whereabouts to the adult. Although children initially showed little or no ability to deceive, most spontaneously discovered deception and systematically used it to win the game by the tenth day. Both theory of mind and executive function skills were predictive of relatively faster patterns of discovery. These results are the first to provide evidence for the importance of cognitive skills and social experience in the discovery of deception over time in early childhood.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it