Many adults will admit to telling white lies to children to make their lives a little easier.
But research has found children can spot this tactic, and can even tell when their parents or teachers are deliberately withholding information from them, reports Daily Mail.
Once spotted, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found children will then try to fill in the gaps in the information themselves.
Determining who to trust is an important skill to learn at an early age because so much of our knowledge about the world comes from other people, explained Hyowon Gweon, lead author of the paper which is published in the journal Cognition.
‘When someone provides us information, we not only learn about what is being taught, we also learn something about that person. If the information is accurate and complete, then you might also trust that person in the future,’ she said.
‘But if this person has taught you something wrong, has made a mistake, or has omitted something that’s
important for you to know, then you might want to suspend your trust, be sceptical of the information he provides in the future, and even seek other sources of information.’
The study builds on a 2011 paper in which the team of researchers investigated how children behave when a teacher explained only one function of a toy that can do four different things.
They found children spent most of their time exploring only the function the teacher had demonstrated.
However, children who received no instruction spent more time exploring all of the toy’s features and ended up discovering more of them.
In the new study, Dr Gweon wanted to investigate what children thought of the teacher who did not fully explain what the toy could do.
She said: ‘Previous studies about children’s trust in informants or teachers focused on whether children distinguish, and learn differentially from someone who says something false from someone who’s telling the truth.
‘Going beyond those sensitivities to truth and falseness, what I wanted to see in this study is whether children are also sensitive to someone who’s telling the truth but not the whole truth – someone who didn’t tell them everything that they ought to know.’
In the first experiment, children aged six and seven were given a toy to explore on their own until they discovered all of its functions.
One group of children received a toy that had four buttons, each of which activated a different function, while the other group was given a toy with only one button and function.
Then the children watched as a ‘teacher’ puppet demonstrated the toy to a ‘student’ puppet.
For both toys, the teacher’s instruction was the same. He demonstrated only one function – the windup mechanism.
After the demonstration, the children were asked to rate how helpful the teacher was, using a scale from one to 20.
Children who knew the toy had three more undemonstrated functions gave much lower ratings than children who knew it was the toy’s only function.
In a follow-up experiment, the same ‘teacher’ demonstrated a second toy and only demonstrated one of its four functions.
Children who had previously seen a demonstration they knew to be incomplete explored the toy more thoroughly, suggesting they did not trust the teacher to be fully informative.
‘This shows that children are not just sensitive to who’s right or wrong,’ Dr Gweon said.
‘[They] can evaluate others based on who’s providing information that is enough or not enough for accurate inference. They can also adjust how they learn from a teacher in the future, depending on whether the teacher has previously committed a sin of omission or not.’
