Abstract

Two groups of children (younger: mean age 2; 9 years, range 2; 7-3; 3, n = 25; older: mean age 3; 8 years, range 3; 4-3; 11, n = 20) were tested with three tasks to assess their ability to deceive another person. At the end of each task a false belief question was administered. Results show that older children chose the deceptive object significantly more often that it would be expected by chance. Moreover, the majority of these subjects correctly performed in all three different tasks. The same children, however, showed a dissociation between their deceptive behavior (correct) and their answer (incorrect) to the false belief question. The findings are interpreted in the frame of a multi-level theory of the understanding of others' mental states in children.