[roguecoder]

Depending on how young you mean by "young", young children don't have the cognitive capacity to fake emotional states, although many adults attribute that capacity to them. They don't even start understanding that it's a thing that is possible to do until five or six, much less understand their own performance of emotion sufficiently to convincingly portray a given emotion they decided they want someone else to believe that they feel. The first type of emotional deception children learn is suppressing their real feelings, rather than displaying sham feelings.

Instead, children are taught to perform emotion in ways that are legible and acceptable to adults by having their genuine emotional expressions misconstrued as manipulative.

[photochemsyn]

The concept is predicated upon the ability to create rational symbolic strings in your own mind. This of course is different from the non-symbolic instinctive desire to cry if one is hungry.

It's when these behaviors persist into adulthood, while also being amplified by the advertising industry who understands all this - and which is profoundly emotionally manipulative - that it becomes a problem.

Funny, doesn't the tech industry today get most of its money from advertising? That would explain some things.