All humans are mechanisms, and developing a better understanding of how the mechanism works does not harm parenting.
You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge.
You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents.
I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.
I don't have any problem with studies of child development, and have found some of them quite interesting. The problem comes not from gaining knowledge, but from attempting to apply that knowledge inexpertly. Most humans are not equipped deceive at that level, and a child unconsciously can tell the difference between an authentic reaction and a deliberate one.
All humans are mechanisms in the physical sense, certainly. But unlike most mechanisms you might be accustomed to dealing with, they have self-will and can perceive differences in stimuli beyond your ability to control.
I have certainly set up no 'dichotomy' between goodness and knowledge - I have no issues with parents seeking to understand anything under the sun. (I do think that human nature causes parents to read correlative trends as consistent facts, which means that such studies are doomed to be misinterpreted by nearly all who read it).
I also don't specifically conflate 'goodness' (in whatever definition you choose to accept it) with any particular set of actions.
I (for example) have no reason to believe that you are a bad person, I just rationally consider the techniques you are defending to produce harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are applied. I have claimed no 'moral high ground', I am engaged in rational debate about the effects of certain types of behavior.
Hop down off that very tall horse, Defender Of Science.
You're clearly making value judgments when you use words like "manipulate" and "deceive," neither of which occur literally or conceptually in the article.
Edit: the article does use the word "tricks", although I would argue as shorthand for technique rather than deceive. Nevertheless to be fair I replaced it above with "manipulate".
It's exactly the kind of junk I invariably see when a good journalist attempts to write about any kind of science - they try to draw conclusions from the study that the study does not draw, because the conclusions drawn from a real study are never interesting to a normal readership.
The study most likely does not prescribe behaviors or approaches on the parts of parents when raising their children. The study ought to be purely about how individuals react to controlled and described stimuli - the study will draw reasonable conclusions, make appropriate cautions about the mapping between reality and experiment, and be very careful about inferring any real-world implications. I haven't purchased a copy of this particular study, so I can't judge it on its own merits, but it's from a reputable source, and the abstract makes reasonable claims.
You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge.
You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents.
I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.