The puzzle of early deception: Lying before belief representation.

Abstract

Early deception poses a representational puzzle: young children can strategically deny and conceal transgressions before they reliably succeed on standard measures of false-belief understanding. Standard interpretations often force a choice between two unsatisfying extremes: either early deceptive behavior is reduced to a routine punishment-avoidance response, or it is taken to imply a surprisingly rich capacity for belief representation. This paper develops an intermediate alternative. Early deception is argued to be better explained by an access-based epistemic policy that tracks another agent's epistemic standing, specifically whether that agent is in a position to know, on the basis of perceptual access, evidential availability, and blocking conditions. This proposal is developed as a policy framework in which actions such as denial, concealment, and withholding are selected under uncertainty as functions of graded epistemic standing. The developmental literature is treated not as the paper's main payload, but as a constraint on representational format. The resulting pattern is asymmetric: young children show flexible sensitivity to witness access, audience knowledge, and opportunities for concealment, yet remain brittle under follow-up questioning, semantic leakage, and evidence-coordinated cover-story demands. This pattern is best understood as evidence for a factive, access-based form of epistemic mindreading that precedes robust belief-based deception.