It's kind of hard to imagine a child lying who barely understands language and is even less able to produce something understandable. And babies certainly don't have a very developed theory of mind! But like all areas of developmental psychology the trend is for people to be able to do things earlier and earlier and deception seems to be one of those universal abilities all humans have very early on. A Psychologist, Vasudevi Reddy, from the University of Portsmouth has identified seven different categories of ways that babies can deceive. The ways that babies deceive are essentially (according to the Telegraph - I only could find 5?) fake crying, pretend laughing, concealing forbidden activies, distract parents attention and bluffing when threatened with punishment.

Here's an excerpt from the Globe and Mail story with some examples of actual children's behavior:

There was the 11-month-old who, caught in the act of reaching for the forbidden soil of a house plant, quickly turned his outstretched hand into a wave, his mother reported to Dr. Reddy, "as though he was saying, 'Oh, I wasn't really going to touch the soil, Mom, I was waving at you.' "

Babies also seem to think they are masters of the Jedi mind trick, using steady eye contact as a distraction technique. Another 11-month-old, upon being presented with toast she didn't want to eat, would hold eye contact with her mother while discreetly chucking the toast onto the floor.

"She's very sneaky," the mother told Dr. Reddy, "she thinks you can't see it."

Fake crying is another trick babies learn early on to get attention, Dr. Reddy says. The researcher defines "fake" crying as being more calculated than the usual "I'm tired/hungry/wet/hurt/lonely" cries.

"In one case the mother thought it sounded 'put on,' but watched from a crack in the door, and noticed that there were pauses in the crying which seemed rather like waiting to see if it worked," Dr. Reddy wrote in an e-mail.

There is a great article today on Slate about why the pretty ridiculous idea that vaccinations containing trace amounts of mercury cause autism will never go away. Here's the first little part of the article:

At the recent 12-day hearing into theories that vaccines cause autism, the link between the disorder and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine came across as shaky at best. As for the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which was used in other vaccines, witnesses showed that in all known cases of actual mercury poisoning (none of which caused autism), the dose was hundreds or thousands of times higher than what kids got during the 1990s. Powerful population studies showed no link to either MMR or thimerosal-containing shots.

None of that moves Mary Wildman, 47, whose son's case is before the court and who drove from her home near Pittsburgh to watch the hearing, which ended this week. "I know what happened to my son after he got his MMR shot," she told me. "I have no doubt. There's no way they'll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines."

It is difficult to challenge a mother's knowledge of her own child. And also to fight off the staying power of the vaccines-cause-autism theory and other such notions that verge on the irrational.
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People who study irrational beliefs have a variety of ways of explaining why we cling to them. In rational choice theory, what appear to be crazy choices are actually rational, in that they maximize an individual's benefit--or at least make him or her feel good.

Continue reading at Slate. Make sure you check out the parody Mad Magazine cover by an autistic blogger named Bev Harp.