Born Liars

by Ian Leslie

  Not only that, but children start telling lies more or less at the point they learn language. Between two and four these lies are usually self-serving and very simple, told to avoid punishment or to hide a minor transgression, as in the case of Darwin’s son. Very young children tend not to be very good at lying. A three-year-old might say ‘I didn’t hit her’ right after his father has witnessed him smacking his sister. A parent who enters the kitchen to find his daughter standing on a chair and reaching for the shelf where the chocolate is kept might find that she denies everything – but when he asks her why she’s standing on a chair, she’ll say ‘I needed to reach . . .’ The psychologist Josef Perner remembers his son Jacob trying to avoid going to bed by using an excuse he’d successfully adopted on past occasions – ‘I’m so tired’ – without realising that in this context he wasn’t doing his case any favours. Very young children’s lies are designed to achieve simple, defensive goals, and are quickly confessed to. The lying of a three-year-old is instinctive and spontaneous; there’s little method to it.

  Then, at around the age of four, something changes.

  In a survey carried out by a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, parents and teachers were asked at what age they thought children were able to tell a considered lie – the kind where the child knows exactly what he or she is doing. The answers varied. Some mothers thought that children aged as old as five-and-a-half were incapable of such dishonesty (nobody disagreed that kids are lying by the time they reach six). Generally speaking, however, parents reported that their children started to lie more and lie better around their fourth birthday. What parents notice intuitively, psychologists have identified methodically in study after study: somewhere between the ages of three and a half and four and a half, children learn how to lie with much greater skill and enthusiasm. On being caught reaching for the chocolate, that same child might claim that she is standing on the chair to return the cereal box to its rightful place. She will also maintain her story when challenged. And she’ll do it all with a straight face.

  Victoria Talwar has spent much of her professional life watching young children tell lies. An assistant professor of child psychology at McGill University in Montreal, she is interested in when and how children develop a sense of right and wrong, and specifically how they learn to employ deceit. To test a child’s propensity to deceive – and his ability to do so convincingly – Talwar uses a well-established experiment known as the temptation resistance paradigm or, more informally, as the ‘Peeking Game’.

  It works like this. After meeting the researcher and playing a few games to establish a relationship, the child is introduced to a guessing game. He is asked to sit facing the wall. Behind him, the researcher brings out a toy and asks the child to guess what it is from the noise it makes. If the child gets it right three times, he wins a prize. After a couple of easy noises (a police car, a crying-baby doll) comes a deliberately baffling one. Talwar usually brings out a toy that makes no noise, like a stuffed cat, while at the same time opening a greetings card that plays a tinny tune. Understandably, the child is stumped by this. Before he attempts an answer, the researcher says that she has to leave the room for a minute, warning him not to peek whilst she’s out. Children invariably find this instruction impossible to obey, and turn around a few seconds after the door has closed, unaware that they’re being filmed. The researcher returns to the room, making enough noise on her way in to give the child time to swivel back to the wall. When he triumphantly gives the right answer, the researcher asks if he peeked. Does he tell the truth, or does he lie?

  Generally speaking, three-year-olds confess immediately, whereas a majority of children aged four lie and say they didn’t. By the time they’re six, ninety-five per cent of children tell this lie. That some kind of Rubicon is crossed between the ages of three and five seems to be a universal truth: a similar pattern has been observed among American, British, Chinese, and Japanese children.

  So what happens to children at the age of four? According to Talwar, it’s only then that they truly grasp there are other people to lie to. As they approach their first birthday, children have already learnt that people want things, that they act in order to get those things, and that sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, studies have shown that nine-month-old babies expect an adult to reach for an object at which they have previously looked and smiled. Toddlers younger than two can tell the difference between what they want, and what happens – and they certainly know how to scream about it. Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.

  But what children don’t have in these first years, what they can’t even conceive of yet, are beliefs. A three-year-old might believe that the chocolate is in the cupboard, but she won’t grasp that this is a belief – that’s to say, that other people might believe something different. As far as a very young child is concerned, what’s in his or her mind is the same as what’s in everyone else’s mind; that’s why toddlers will sometimes come up to you and start discussing, in great detail, a TV show of which you’ve never heard. It’s not until they are three or four that children discover other people have minds of their own.

  In the story of Snow White, the Queen – Snow White’s wicked stepmother – repeatedly fools our heroine by disguising herself as a harmless peasant woman. When Snow White accepts her seemingly kind offer of a delicious apple, the Queen attacks her. At the moment that Snow White opens the door to the Wicked Queen, she has a false belief about the world – she believes that she is opening the door to a peasant woman, and not to her stepmother. Her reason for believing this seems obvious to us, as it does to four-year-olds. We know that Snow White didn’t see what we’ve seen – the Queen putting on her disguise – and this forms part of the story’s drama for us. Children under three, however, tend not to enjoy Snow White, even though they may already be enjoying other stories their parents read to them. Why, they wonder, does Snow White allow that woman into her house when we all know it’s the Wicked Queen in different clothes?

  Developmental psychologists use a more formal test of the ability to take other people’s perspectives: the Sally-Anne False Belief Test. This typically involves two characters, played by dolls. Sally has a basket, Anne has a box. Sally also has a marble, and before going out she puts her marble in her basket for safekeeping. With Sally gone, Anne takes the marble from Sally’s basket and places it in her box. Where will Sally look for her marble when she returns? Adults know that Sally is going to head straight for her basket. Five-year-olds work this out too – they point to Sally’s basket straight away. But three-year-olds predict the opposite. They point to Anne’s box, where the ball really is. They don’t see that Sally might have a false belief about the world. Of course, until you grasp that other people sometimes believe different things from you, it’s impossible to think about deceiving them. There’s no point telling a lie if everyone believes the same things.

  Most children acquire what psychologists call a ‘theory of mind’ aged between three and four years old. More colloquially, they learn to ‘mind-read’. Mind-reading is something all of us do, every day, while barely noticing that we’re doing it. We size up the salesman on our doorstep and decide whether or not we should trust him. We worry about whether our boss thinks we’ve done a good job. At the movies, we notice the way the heroine turns back to glance at her former lover as she walks away from him, and conclude that she’s still in love. Our mind-reading habit is so deeply ingrained that we attribute human mental states to animals, believing our dog to be contrite, and even to inanimate phenomena, blaming the sun for not wanting to come out today, or accusing the sea of cruelty.

  The importance of this ability to the way we see the world becomes clearer if you try and imagine living without it. Here’s the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik:
r />   This is what it’s like to sit round the dinner table. At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of nose, in front are waving hands . . . Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways . . . Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved toward you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.

  Actually, Gopnik’s description is itself an impressive feat of mind-reading. What she’s attempting here is to put herself – and us – into the shoes of somebody with a severe case of autism. People with autism (or its higher-functioning variant, Asperger’s Syndrome) find it hard to grasp what most of us learn as young children: that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, and their own perspective on reality. As a consequence, they make terrible liars.

  Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge, is one of the world’s leading authorities on autism. He was the first to identify a lack of mind-reading ability as being the key cognitive deficit suffered by autistic children. As a young PhD student, he played the ‘penny-hiding game’ with children to check for the symptoms of autism. He sat opposite the child and showed him or her that he had a penny. Then he put his hands behind his back before bringing them out in front of him and asking the child to guess which of his closed hands was holding it. Then he swapped roles.

  For most children aged four and over, playing the trickster was easy, and a lot of fun. Children with autism, however, didn’t play it very well. They would transfer the penny from one hand to the other in full view, or invite Baron-Cohen to guess while leaving one hand open. They made these simple mistakes because they weren’t used to keeping track of what was in another person’s mind. They were befuddled by the very idea that somebody might try to persuade them to believe in a different version of reality.

  This innocence can leave children open to exploitation. Baron-Cohen tells the story of a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome who was approached by a gang of boys in the playground asking to see his wallet. He handed it over without hesitation, and was shocked when they ran off with it. Being a stranger to deceit can also pose problems of etiquette: an autistic person may tell you that the shirt you are wearing is repulsive to him. He doesn’t mean to offend you, says Baron-Cohen, he’s simply telling the truth – and it’s beyond him that anyone would ever do anything else. Although they can learn to read people better as they get older, autistic people retain a very different perspective on life. Baron-Cohen recalls a graduate student of his with Asperger’s Syndrome saying to him, ‘I’ve just discovered that people don’t always say what they mean. So how do you know how to trust language?’ As Baron-Cohen points out, her discovery is one that the typical child makes at the age of four, in the teasing back-and-forth of the playground.

  Of course, all mind-reading is flawed and erratic; that’s why successful lying is possible in the first place. None of us ever quite cracks the great mystery of what makes other people do the things they do, or fathom what Philip Roth calls ‘this terribly significant business of “other people”’. As a species we are just good enough at mind-reading to construct sophisticated ideas about what other people believe, and just bad enough at it to make errors. Much of life’s comedy derives from our misreadings of other people’s mental states. In Jane Austen’s Emma, the eponymous heroine reads Mr Elton’s attentions as a signal of his intentions towards her friend Harriet, although it turns out that the simpler interpretation was the right one: he has designs on Emma. Such mistakes can be a source of tragedy too: King Lear cannot discern the affection behind Cordelia’s formal declaration of love, nor the calculations lying behind the fulsome tributes of his other daughters. Such errors of interpretation are the very stuff of life. Here’s Roth again: ‘The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.’

  Although none of us is perfect at it, some people are better at mind-reading than others, and the better they are, the better liars they will be, if and when they choose to lie. When Charlotte’s son Tom sees her walk into the room, he knows she will be wondering if he knocked the lamp over, and he is betting that by pointing the finger at his sister he can change his mother’s mind. If you’re going to convince me that you are Marie of Romania, you’ll have to have a rough idea of how I think Marie of Romania might conduct herself. If a fifteen-year-old is going to convince her parents that she doesn’t smoke dope, she’ll need a keen understanding of what will set their minds at rest. One definition of a bad liar is somebody who lies without being very good at guessing what’s in the other person’s mind. (If you take a moment to think of a time you witnessed somebody telling a comically obvious lie, you’ll see what I mean.) Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.

  Other than mind-reading, there are two other key mental abilities involved in mature lying. One of them is what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function’, a cluster of higher-order mental skills related to thinking ahead, strategising and reasoning (although the word ‘executive’ has a distinct meaning in psychology, these are precisely the abilities that enable children to grow up and enjoy successful careers, running large organisations or figuring out complicated engineering problems). A four-year-old engaged in a lie has to run different mental processes in parallel: he or she must establish their goal, work out how it might be achieved with the aid of a false statement, and then execute their strategy without giving the game away via facial or verbal leakage – that’s to say, looking shifty, or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. They have to combine intellectual agility with physical and emotional self-control.

  A child who lies well is also demonstrating a creative intellect – the ability to imagine those alternative versions of reality in the first place. Even very simple lies can require a leap of imagination. Tom has to be able to see it was plausible that Ella might have crawled across the room and knocked over the lamp even if, in truth, she has been sitting quietly on the sofa all along. In the Peeking Game, the more intellectually sophisticated children will stitch together an answer of some sort when challenged by the researcher. Victoria Talwar recalls how a Canadian boy tried to rationalise his ‘guess that the toy behind him was a stuffed football, based on the sound of a greeting card tune. He explained that the music ‘sounded squeaky, like the soccer balls at the school gym’. It was an impressive display of lateral thinking.

  Lying is hard. Children who lie well must be able to recognise the truth, conceive of an alternative false but coherent story, and juggle those two versions in their mind while selling the alternative reality to someone else – all the time bearing in mind what that person is likely to be thinking and feeling. It is wondrous that a child of four should be able to do this. If you catch your three-year-old in a well-told lie, allow yourself to be impressed.

  Learning Not to Lie

  Of course, you can admire the skill in a three-year-old’s lie without wanting to congratulate them on it. The number of lies told by children tends to spike upwards in children aged four as they exercise their amazing new-found powers. Then, during the first school years, as the child receives an increased amount of what Talwar calls ‘social feedback’, the lying usually declines. In the classroom and the playground, children learn that the benefits of lying come with some pretty hefty costs. They find out that if they lie too much, teachers and friends lose faith in their credibility, and they become
unpopular.

  This is an important point, and one that applies to adults as much as children. Truth-telling works, most of the time. For intensely social creatures like ourselves it’s an efficient default mode, if only because, as Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English thinker and prose stylist, offered a take on truth and lies that both contrasts with and complements that of Machiavelli’s:

  So large is the Empire of Truth, that it hath place within the walls of Hell, and the Devils themselves are daily forced to practise it; . . . in Moral verities, although they deceive us, they lie not unto each other; as well understanding that all community is continued by Truth, and that of Hell cannot consist without it.

  Whereas the Italian sought to remind us that deceit is ever-present, and that it is therefore necessary for rulers to employ it on occasion, Browne saw things the other way round. Isn’t the truly remarkable thing the fact that truth is so powerful? Even devils rely on it when they’re among their own, because ‘all community is continued by truth’. The subversive implication of Browne’s argument is that our general aversion to deceit does not stem from a God-given morality or an innate instinct for truth so much as the need to keep the wheels of social life turning. Most decisions about whether or not to lie have little to do with whether the person concerned is an angel or a devil. We tell the truth because it suits us. And when it suits us, we lie.