Mistrust and Deception in Hai||om Hunter-Gatherer Children

Humans across the globe depend on information obtained from others through social learning. Accepting information provided by others allows us to avoid the costs of trial-and-error learning. Such information can, however, be misleading especially when the informant has incentives to mislead the recipient. To allow recipients to avoid being taken advantage of, a capacity for epistemic vigilance and selective mistrust may have been particularly adaptive in the evolution of social learning (Sperber et al., 2010). If so, the recipient's ability to mistrust an informant depending on whether their self-interests are aligned (cooperative contexts) or conflicting (competitive contexts) should evolve and emerge hand-in-hand with the informant's tendency to deceive selectively in competitive contexts (Sperber, 2013). In line with this interdependency of deception and mistrust, developmental studies have shown that children ability to mistrust informants with competing interests undergoes a significant shift between ages 5 and 7 (Stengelin, Grueneisen, & Tomasello, 2018; Sher, Koenig, Rustichini, 2014), an age at which their deceptive behaviors also become more frequent and elaborate (Talwar, Gordon, & Lee, 2007; Sher, Koenig, Rustichini, 2014). To date, however, evidence on young children's deception and mistrust is largely limited to samples from western and/or urban backgrounds. This sampling bias impedes the generalization of results on the evolution of mistrust and deception because such cultural contexts are highly distinct from the cultural circumstances under which modern humans evolved. In this study, we thus want to investigate the ontogeny of mistrust and deception in young children from a recent hunter-gatherer community, the Hai||om of northern Namibia.