Butter Wouldn’t Melt…Or So They’d Have You Believe

Kids are capable of thinking strategically, and will use competitiveness and lies to their own benefit, by the time they’re 7. These are the conclusions of a report carried out at the University of Minnesota in which researchers studied 69 children ages 3 to 9 as they played two games.

Kids typically figure out how to infer what others are thinking and what motivates them—and act strategically based on this information—somewhere between 6 and 7 years old, reports ABC Science. What’s more, by that ages they’ve sorted out that they don’t have to trust others, and they don’t have to be truthful themselves. The researchers call this the “strategic theory of mind.”

In the first game, kids play either sender or receiver; the sender knows which of two boxes contains sweets, and the receiver must guess after the sender points to one of the boxes. The sender keeps the sweets if the receiver guesses the wrong box, and the receiver keeps them if he or she picks the correct box.

In the second game, a kid and an experimenter are tasked with choosing one to five stickers simultaneously; the player who selects the fewest keeps that number of stickers, the other doesn’t get any, and neither gets any if they pick the same number. By 6.5 years of age, kids’ thinking while playing such games is sophisticated enough to resemble an adult’s and as they got older the strategies they employed to keep their rewards got more and more sophisticated.

The team says the study shows that children develop an ability to think strategically, understanding how to use deception and competitiveness to their advantage, at an unexpectedly young age. So next time you ruffle the hair your little cherubs beware they may have horns lurking there too.