Teaching deception skills in a game-play context to three adolescents with autism.

Three autistic teens played a simple hand game with a teacher. The teen hid a coin in one fist and the teacher guessed which hand.

The goal was to teach the teens to trick the teacher by putting the coin in the opposite hand. The team used shaping. They praised every tiny step toward hiding the coin in the “wrong” hand.

Sessions lasted only five minutes. The study used a multiple-baseline design across the three students.

All three teens learned to deceive. They began to pick the opposite hand on purpose.

The teacher’s correct guesses dropped from 50 % to almost 0 %. The teens smiled or laughed when they tricked the adult.

Skill appeared after 6–9 short sessions for each student.

Cox et al. (2017) used the same shaping logic to teach kids with autism to lie still for an MRI. Both studies break a hard skill into tiny pieces and reward each step.

Laposa et al. (2017) used differential reinforcement with detained teens. Like R et al., they saw quick drops in problem behavior and big gains in rule following. The method works across settings.

TCruz-Montecinos et al. (2024) used DRL as a group contingency in an autism classroom. Their result shows the procedure scales from one teen to a whole table.

You can teach subtle social skills like deception in minutes with a pocket coin. Shaping plus praise works for teens who rarely lie on purpose. Try it during break time to build flexible thinking. The same steps—watch, wait, reward closer tries—fit any new social play you want to seed.