by Ian Leslie
The majority of children learn what we might call ‘Browne’s Law’ instinctively, at home and in school. But a few remain impervious to it; they take a wrong turning. Persistent lying in older children is usually the sign of a deeper malaise: a way of venting frustrations, winning attention, or coping with deep insecurity. ‘Lying is a symptom,’ says Victoria Talwar. Children of parents in the process of divorcing, for example, often resort to manipulative lying to assert some control over a situation in the face of which they would otherwise feel helpless.
In the words of Dr Nancy Darling of Oberlin University, Ohio, who specialises in the moral development of older children, lying is a ‘self-reinforcing activity’. Lies beget lies. If a lie works to get a child out of trouble, she might try it again, then she might need more lies to sustain her first lie. We all know how powerful the momentum of deceit can be: once a lie is told, it often requires another. When you’re knee-deep in lies it can seem easier to wade in further than to attempt an escape; before you know it you are reliant on them just to stay afloat. If a child’s whole sense of himself comes to depend on lies, it’s very hard for him to let go of them. ‘The time to catch a liar is before eight years of age,’ says Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study. If a child is still lying habitually after the age of seven, she (or he) will probably continue to do so for years to come, even into adulthood; she’s hooked.
The sooner a child learns that lying can be self-destructive, the better. The question of how children learn not to lie is as interesting as how they learn to lie in the first place. It’s also controversial. Do children require strict moral instruction and harsh punishment for lying – or should they be left to work it out as they go along?
In 2009 Victoria Talwar was working on a study of the development of moral behaviour in children around the world, including in non-Western cultures. Having already visited China and Thailand, she was introduced by a friend of a friend to a school in West Africa. The school – let’s call it School A – was run along lines familiar to anyone with experience of a mainstream school in Britain or Canada. It was strict but not unreasonably so; misdemeanours were punished with verbal admonishments, the withdrawal of privileges, or detentions. There was no corporal punishment.
When Talwar visited another school nearby, however, she encountered a stark contrast of methods. This school – School B – took a much more draconian approach to discipline, sticking closely to traditions established by the country’s former colonial masters, the French, in the first half of the twentieth century. The children were expected to conform to a strict code of behaviour and transgressions were harshly punished, often violently. Simply getting an answer wrong in class earned you a smack around the head. It was the job of one staff member – whom Talwar privately nicknamed ‘the enforcer’ – to go from class to class asking the teachers if any of their pupils had misbehaved. Twice a day, those named by the class teacher were taken out into the school courtyard and beaten with a wooden bat in front of the other children. Punishable offences included a failure to do homework, forgetting to bring a pencil to class or – worst of all – lying.
Here were two schools, only a few miles apart, with pupils from similar social backgrounds, but with vastly different approaches to discipline. In other words, near-perfect conditions in which to explore the effect of different moral codes on deceitful behaviour. Both schools were happy to have Talwar carry out her experiment; each was supremely confident in the moral fibre of the students they turned out. The teachers in School B were unembarrassed about their methods and disparaging of School A’s approach, which they regarded as hopelessly lax. They sincerely believed that theirs was the most reliable method for raising honest children.
Along with her frequent collaborator, Kang Lee, Talwar set about interviewing pupils between the ages of three and six years old from both schools. She introduced the guessing game to each child, brought out the easy-to-guess toys, and then the stuffed toy with its tinny accompaniment. Back in her hotel room, as she played back the interviews on her camcorder, she noticed something remarkable: School B’s children seemed to be lying with far greater consistency and conviction than any children with whom she had ever worked.
To ensure a robust set of data, Talwar returned to both schools the following day and carried out more interviews. When she analysed the results, the first thing that struck her was the length of time the pupils from School B waited before they turned around to peek. Most children who play the peeking game wait less than ten seconds before taking their chance, and the children of School A conformed to this pattern. But School B’s kids waited much longer – for up to a minute – before sneaking a peek. Perhaps School B’s teachers would have felt proud at such evidence of inner discipline, but they would have been less pleased with Talwar’s most striking finding: regardless of age, all their pupils lied, instinctively and immediately. The alacrity with which they did so seemed to have nothing to do with their cultural background; the results from School A were very similar to those from schools in North America or Europe.
Not only were the School B pupils all lying, they were brilliant at it. Wherever the peeking game is played, younger children tend to confess to their lie immediately, or make such a flimsy defence that it barely counts. (‘When I say, “Well, how did you know it was a football?” a three-year-old will often say, “Because I saw it,”’ Talwar told me.) Lying involves a considerable amount of physical and emotional discipline, as well as mental dexterity. The child has to control his expression and body language so as not to give himself away with a stray smile, a tell-tale flash of the eyes or a wince of anxiety – all while keeping his story straight. As you’d expect, such skills tend to improve with age: three-year-olds get their story mixed up or laugh at their own fibs, whereas four- and five-year-olds are better at making their stories believable, and telling them with a poker face.
This pattern was reflected in the results from School A. The School B pupils, however, were all masterful liars. Whether aged three or six, they denied having peeked with impenetrable conviction, and confidently maintained their story when challenged. The slightly older children were even careful not to guess correctly first time around, in order to give the false impression that they were groping towards an answer by a process of intuition and deduction. ‘I thought it sounded a bit like a cellphone. But I know you’re not allowed to have a cellphone in school. So then I thought it must be something else . . . an animal maybe . . .’ These were skilful performances, requiring psychological nous, creative thinking and dramatic flair.
In the early 1990s Talwar studied at St Andrew’s University, where her tutor was Andrew Whiten. What she learnt from the work of Whiten and Byrne was that lying is an inescapable part of being a social animal, and that children are likely to find the lying strategy that best helps them adapt to their social environment. Whiten and Byrne observed that it is young or low-ranked chimps that are most likely to engage in tactical deception, and the philosopher Sisella Bok has speculated that children develop the habit of lying as a last line of defence against the overwhelming physical and social power of adults. ‘The weak cannot be sincere,’ said François de La Rochefoucauld. By ratcheting up the punishments for lying, teachers and parents can force children further on to the defensive – with unintended consequences.
For the children in School A it made sense to tell the truth most of the time and lie occasionally. They knew they might get into trouble if caught out, but not too much. The children in School B, however, had adapted their behaviour to life in what Talwar described as a ‘punitive environment’, in which self-defence was the highest priority. They knew that telling the truth would often get them into trouble; they also knew that getting caught out in any type of lie, however small, would lead to a painful punishment. So they had learned, even at the age of three, to gamble on deception, employing a logic that went something like, ‘I
f there’s any possibility at all of getting into trouble, then tell a lie – just be sure to do it well.’ As Talwar put it to me, ‘If you’re going to get into trouble for small things, you may as well go for broke.’
School B’s approach, based on a regime designed by Catholic missionaries, was intended as a harsh but effective way of instilling good moral habits into children. Talwar’s research revealed that its regime hadn’t succeeded in knocking all the lies out of School B’s children. Quite the opposite: it turned out to be the perfect method for producing habitual, highly skilled little liars.
Learning When to Lie
Children get mixed messages from their parents about lying. On the one hand, they’re taught that lying is bad; on the other they’re admonished when they tell grandma, truthfully, that they have never worn the scarf she bought them for Christmas. Kids note that when they lie in certain circumstances, their parents applaud them for it, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Being observant creatures, they also notice their parents telling lies to others, whether it be the telemarketer on the phone or the friend who asks an awkward question. As they grow up, they learn to manage the ideas that lying is both wrong, and necessary. In one of Talwar’s experiments, a child receives a present that looks like it’s going to be a toy but turns out, on unwrapping, to be a bar of soap. The overwhelming majority of seven-year-olds openly express their displeasure. By the time they’re eleven, about half of children will lie convincingly and say they like it.2 As they grow up, it’s not so much that children learn not to lie, as when to lie.
Nancy Darling has studied the social lives of adolescents for nearly twenty years in countries including Chile, the Philippines, Italy and the United States. In every society, nearly all teens will admit, in interviews, to lying at home. Their lies are usually limited to a few issues: romantic relationships, the use of alcohol or other substances, the violation of rules about where and with whom they’re allowed to hang out. At the same time, most teenagers profess to valuing honesty, and many boast of having strong, open relationships with their parents. It’s only when researchers ask about it in detail that the extent of their dishonesty is revealed, even to themselves. ‘They’re surprised by it,’ Darling tells me. ‘They don’t like to think of themselves as liars.’
As with the rest of us, teenagers’ attitudes to lying are complicated. On the one hand, they lie for reasons of straightforward self-interest – to avoid punishment, and to maintain a carefully managed image for the audience of their parents. On the other, they are lying to protect their parents, reasoning that the truth would upset them unnecessarily. Parents often collude in such deceptions, tacitly agreeing not to probe into areas of their child’s life that they may not wish to know too much about. Darling remarks about her own teenage son, ‘He doesn’t lie to me about his sex life, because I don’t ask him.’
At school, as at home, there are certain circumstances in which lying regularly pays off. For instance, the stigma attached to being a ‘snitch’ or a ‘grass’ is near-universal, and it can put kids in uncomfortable situations as they try to balance conflicting obligations to teachers, parents, and peers. A classic experiment from 1969, staged in an American high-school, illustrates the subtlety of the social calculations involved. During a history lesson, the teacher was called out of the classroom, apparently to take an important phone call. One of the students got up from his seat, strode up to the teacher’s desk and swiped a pile of money that the teacher had left there. ‘How about that?’ he exclaimed triumphantly to the class, returning to his seat. The other students didn’t know it, but the thieving student was playing out a role agreed earlier with the researchers.
The scenario was played out twice in different classes, with two different students playing the role of transgressor. In one, the student chosen was the boy whose name came up most often when classmates were asked to list five people whom they considered worthy to represent the class at a banquet for school representatives. He was the ‘high status’ student. In the other scenario, a ‘low status’ student, considered less trustworthy by his peers, played the role. After both incidents, the students from each classroom were interviewed by one of the psychologists, either singly or in pairs. They were asked three questions: ‘Do you know whether someone took some change from the teacher’s desk today? Do you know who took it? If so, who took it?’ All the students interviewed alone told the truth, regardless of whether the classmate in question was high or low in status. But when students were interviewed in pairs, things were different. Now, when the culprit was high in status, nobody told the truth. Everyone denied that they even knew about any money being stolen. When it came to the low status culprit, however, everyone told the truth, and named him. The students had an instinct for honesty, but they were prepared to forego it in order to avoid being seen to betray the most popular kid in class.
The reason lying doesn’t become a problem for most children isn’t simply that they get taught that lying is wrong, and so stop. It’s that they learn the unwritten social rules of when to tell the truth and when to lie. Parents can help them learn these rules, but only if they allow their children to feel trusted. Most children’s lies are told in order to avoid embarrassment or to stay out of trouble, rather than to manipulate others, and punishing these dodges too vigorously can trap kids into a cycle of dishonesty. ‘If you walk into a room to find your five-year-old with milk spattered everywhere and ask ‘Did you do that?’ you’re inviting them to lie,’ says Darling. ‘If you say, ‘Ah, you spilt the milk. Let’s clean it up,’ she’s less likely to lie. If she still does, it’s best to laugh it off – whilst making it clear you know she’s lying. There’s no point telling her she’s a bad person because she lied.’ If a child feels her character is constantly under assault she will quickly build a protective carapace of deceit around herself. Children who live with the threat of heavy punishment for lying may simply become better liars.
It’s sometimes said that the best approach for parents to adopt when it comes to their children’s lying is to simply let it go and wait for them to grow out of it. But to Darling, this is a betrayal of the child: ‘If they get away with a lie, they’ll lie some more, and pretty soon they won’t know when to stop.’ The best parents, she says, are warm but strict. She recalls that when she was young her father told her that he could tell when she was lying just by smelling her elbows. ‘It was years before I realised this wasn’t actually true,’ she laughs. Now, she admires his shrewdness; he’d created an ostensibly objective test (itself a benign lie) to detect her lies, one that allowed them both to acknowledge the transgression without throwing her moral character into question or threatening punishment.
Victoria Talwar runs a version of the Peeking Game in which the researcher reads the child a short story before the game begins. One story is The Boy Who Cried Wolf, in a version that sees the boy get eaten along with the sheep because of his repeated lies. Another is George Washington and the Cherry Tree, in which the young George confesses to hacking down the tree with his shiny new axe. The story ends with his father’s words: ‘George, I’m glad that you cut down the tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.’ Talwar was interested to see if the stories had any effect on the willingness of children to lie during the subsequent game and, if so, which story was more effective. You might imagine that The Boy Who Cried Wolf would work better. After all, it ends with a vision of terrifying punishment. But in fact, children who were read this story were more likely to lie than normal. By contrast, the story of George Washington’s truthfulness inspired children to follow suit – even when Washington was replaced by a nondescript name in order to eliminate the potential for the first president’s fame to influence the child. According to Talwar, the power of the story is that it teaches children to take pleasure in honesty, rather than instilling in them the fear of being found out.
The research of Darling, T
alwar and others suggests that the most reliable way to raise a trustworthy child is to trust them; to work on their best instincts rather than attempting to eradicate their worst – in short, to create an environment that makes honesty feel like the best policy.
Though he was writing in an age of strict and often punitive moral instruction, Charles Darwin had arrived at the same conclusion long before:
‘As this child was educated solely by working on his good feelings, he soon became as truthful, open, and tender, as anyone could desire.’
Confabulators
Liars, artists, madmen
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
In 2004 the satellite broadcaster Sky launched a legal action against one of its suppliers, Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The case rested on Sky’s charge that EDS had deceived them over the length and cost of an IT project. Sky was demanding hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. Industry observers were sceptical about Sky’s chances of success; a case on this scale had never been won before, and it would be very hard to prove that fraudulent misrepresentation, rather than simple misunderstanding, was at the root of the dispute.
On day thirty-seven of the trial, Joe Galloway, the EDS executive whose integrity was most at issue, faced Sky’s barrister Mark Howard across the courtroom. Taking a break from the complex substance of the allegations, Howard questioned Galloway about the Masters in Business Administration he had been awarded by Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands, mentioned by Galloway in his witness statement. Galloway needed little prompting to expand on his year of study on the beautiful island of St John. He said that he had attended Concordia College while on the island in the service of a previous, Texas-based employer who had tasked him with overseeing a project for a number of Coca-Cola distributors based on St John. This required him to fly to and from the island by plane, on ‘a small commuter flight . . . a four or six-seater airplane’ . He described the three main college buildings, which he had got to know well – a rigorous progamme of evening classes required him to spend three hours a night on campus, several evenings a week. He promised to provide textbooks from the course to the court, and eventually did submit one.
