ARQUITECTURA DE LOS DEPÓSITOS CENOZOICOS DEL

As discussed on p. 48, the reporting of behaviour to a third party seems to imply some awareness of the audience‘s likely attitudes to the information that they are given. This seems to implicate a theory of mind: some notion on the part of the reporter that the information they give to the audience will change the intentional

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behaviour of the audience. There is a vast developmental literature on theory of mind, and it is difficult to do more than scratch the surface of it here (for concise reviews, see Flavell, 1999; Wellman, 2002). The term ―theory of mind,‖ in its developmental usage, was coined by Premack and Woodruff (1978), who used it to refer to chimpanzees‘ ascription of intentions to human agents. However, research on theory of mind soon became strongly associated with the false belief task, which measures children‘s ability to represent other agents‘ beliefs where these do not accord with their own (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; see Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001, for an extensive meta-analysis). This is clearly a more complex mental activity; and in recent years, there has been a growing consensus that the development of theory of mind in young children is a gradual process consisting of a series of stages, beginning with the ascription of goals and intentions and moving onto the ascription of higher-level constructs such as desires and then beliefs (see, e.g., Bloom & German, 2000; Bogdan, 2003; Tomasello, 1999).

At what stage of theory of mind development do children begin to tattle? It is probably not necessary for the tattler to possess a full-blown ―belief/desire‖ theory of mind, which allows children to pass the false belief task, and which typically develops around the age of 3 to 4 (Wellman, 1990, 2002). This would be problematic, for tattling is known to be very common already among 2-year-olds (den Bak & Ross, 1996). Instead, it is probably sufficient for the tattler to be aware that seeing leads to knowing—and therefore that if an audience has not seen a transgression, they probably do not know about it, and may well change their behaviour if they are told about it. Children as young as 2 years have been shown to be aware of the link between seeing and knowing, since they are sensitive to an adult partner‘s knowledge state when indicating where the latter should look for a toy,

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tending to provide information about the toy‘s location only if the adult did not witness the toy being hidden (O‘Neill, 1996). Children as young as 22 months are also aware of the related distinction between new information and information that is ―given‖, or already known (O‘Neill, 2005; O‘Neill & Happé, 2000). It is an interesting empirical question whether, in everyday social contexts such as tattling in preschool classrooms, children are also more likely to give more details about events that are news to their audience than about events that their audience has witnessed directly.

In comparison to the truthful reporting of others‘ behaviour, one social practice that may require a more highly-developed theory of mind is deception. Opinion is divided on whether deception requires a concept of false beliefs. Some have claimed that deceptive behaviour is fully developed only by the time children are 4, since only then do they understand the effects of their deception on the beliefs of their audience (Sodian, 1991; Sodian, Taylor, Harris, & Perner, 1991). Others have argued that informal acts of social deception are frequently observed in the home and classroom from the age of 2—and hence if deception is not observed in an experimental situation, that may be due to the constraints of the laboratory environment (Newton, Reddy, & Bull, 2000; Reddy, 2007). Indeed, deception in 3- year-olds has been observed under several experimental paradigms (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Hala, Chandler, & Fritz, 1991; Lewis, Stanger, & Sullivan, 1989; Polak & Harris, 1999; Talwar & Lee, 2002, 2008; see reviews by Subbotsky, n.d.; Lee & Talwar, 2008). One possible explanation for the appearance of deception only in certain experimental contexts is that some experimental tasks impose more executive demands than others: Carlson, Moses, and Hix (1998) found that 3-year- old children deceived more frequently in a task which required high inhibitory

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control (deceptive pointing) than in a task which did not require such control (the use of misleading pictorial cues).20 Further, 3-year-olds‘ frequent failure on false-belief tasks may also be due to the high levels of executive functioning—in terms of suppressing the true location of an object—typically demanded by these tasks (Carlson et al., 1998; Carlson & Moses, 2001).

Although deception has been systematically observed in everyday social situations (e.g., Newton et al., 2000), studies have tended to focus on parent/child interactions, which are likely to be dominated by games of pretence and by denials of personal wrongdoing on the part of the child (see Lewis et al., 1989; Polak & Harris, 1999; Talwar & Lee, 2002).21 Studies of deception in the context of children‘s naturalistic peer interactions are harder to find. Indeed, I know of no systematic study of truthfulness and deception in the context of adult gossip—a lacuna that presumably reflects the difficulty of ascertaining the truth value of everyday statements about other people‘s activities. It thus seems worthwhile to examine the truthfulness and accuracy of children‘s reporting of peers‘ behaviour— properties that clearly feed into the reliability of tattling as an evolutionarily relevant system of communication about norm violations. Study of the everyday uses of truthfulness and deception in complex social contexts may also shed light on the development of different stages of theory of mind.

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20

See also Hala and Russell (2001).

21

In this context, it is noteworthy that children were more likely to lie in defence of a parent if they themselves were unlikely to get the blame for a transgression that had occurred out of sight of the experimenter (Talwar, Lee, Bala, & Lindsay, 2004).

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In this section, I have sketched out three psychological domains that are implicated in children‘s reporting of others‘ behaviour. In each case, I have argued that children‘s evolved cognitive mechanisms may generate biases in the information that is communicated. Firstly, young children‘s egocentrism may lead them to narrate events that had negative consequences for themselves, rather than for other individuals. Secondly, a general sensitivity to norm violations may cause tattling to make up a disproportionate part of reports about others‘ behaviour; and a specific sensitivity to moral rather than conventional violations may cause reports of these transgressions to make up a disproportionate part of tattling. Thirdly, an immature theory of mind may mean that children find it difficult to tattle deceptively. The literature reviewed in this section fed into the research design for my behavioural ecological study of tattling: in particular, it helped to shape some of the predictions that are outlined in Section 3.1.