The Early Deception Survey (EDS): Its Psychometric Properties in Children Aged 10 to 47 Months  

We developed the Early Deception Survey (EDS) to create an early deception taxonomy and measure. Study 1, which was exploratory, found N = 130 parents reported children engaged in 16 deception types before 47 months, with the earliest report at 8 months. Deception was frequent, typically produced within 4 hours of parents completing the survey, and understood within 5 hours. Parents’ deceptions towards children positively correlated with children’s deception understanding; and parents’ deception encouragement positively correlated with children’s deception production and understanding (although most parents did not report encouraging deception). Studies 2 (N = 167) and 3 (N = 382) found the 16-item EDS was unidimensional with good internal reliability for 10- to 47-month-olds. While Study 4 (N = 85) found the EDS was unrelated to deception lab tasks, additional analysis found convergent validity (N = 610), but not predictive (N = 203) validity with the Early Social Cognition Inventory, and good longitudinal stability (N = 203). While parent agreement (N = 28) was strong, parent-Early Year Educator agreement (N = 10) was poor. Furthermore, based on our sample, 25% of children were predicted to engage in at least one deception type by 10 months, 50% by 16 months, 75% by 24 months; and 97.5% by 38 months. We found only one demographic difference in how parents answered individual items, and found less educated and younger parents reported higher EDS scores.