Born Liars (2 page)

Dunbar, also inspired by Humphrey's theory of social intelligence, noted that although all primates have big brains related to their body size, baboons, who live in large groups, have very big brains, while vervets, who live in smaller groups, have smaller brains. He wondered if bigger brains were required to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships in order to successfully navigate its social dynamics – that is, to know who is allied with who, who is worthy of your time and attention and who is not. That is difficult enough. But if you belong to a group of twenty, you have one hundred and ninety two-way relationships to keep track of: nineteen involving yourself and one hundred and seventy-one involving the rest of the group. The group has increased fourfold, but the number of relationships – and thus the intellectual burden of tracking them – has increased nearly twentyfold.

Dunbar plunged into the vast accumulation of data on primates from around the world, searching for a statistical relationship between the size of an animal's brain and the size of the social group the animal typically lived in. He took as his proxy for brain size the volume of a species' neo-cortex – the outer layer of the brain. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘thinking' part of the brain, because it deals with abstraction, self-reflection and forward planning. These are the kind of skills that Humphrey had argued were necessary to cope with the confusing whirl of social life, and it was this brain region that showed such a rapid expansion amongst primates – and especially humans – two million years ago.

Dunbar found just such a correlation; one so strong, in fact, that he was able to predict with impressive accuracy the group size of a species just by knowing the typical size of its neo-cortex. He even came up with a prediction for human beings. Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.

Encouraged by Dunbar's findings, Richard Byrne, now working with a young researcher called Nadia Corp, set out to see if he could prove a link between
deception
and brain size. Byrne and Corp studied a catalogue of observations of deceptive behaviours in wild primates that had been greatly expanded since the publication of Byrne and Whiten's groundbreaking hypothesis. They found that the frequency of deception in a species is directly proportional to the size of the neo-cortex. Bush babies and lemurs, which have a relatively small neo-cortex, were among the least sneaky. The most deceptive primates, including the great apes, also had the largest neo-cortex. The original theory held up: the better the liar, the bigger the brain.

Byrne didn't attempt to measure the capacity for deception of the animal that has the largest neo-cortex of all:
homo sapiens
. But then, he didn't need to. There's no doubt about which species takes the prize for deceit.

* * *

In the middle of the nineteenth century, P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York housed an exotic collection of human and animal oddities, including the original bearded lady, a great white whale, and a pair of very argumentative Siamese twins. Naturally, the exhibition was hugely popular. But success brought difficulties. Barnum realised he had a problem with what modern retailers term ‘traffic flow': the exhibition was getting congested because people were lingering too long in front of the attractions. Barnum's solution was to use a deliberately obscure term for exit, posting signs that read ‘
To The Egress
'. Excited at the prospect of witnessing yet another bizarre beast, customers would follow the signs and find themselves in the street outside.

The generally accepted definition of a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. If I tell you that Paris is the capital of Belgium, you'll know it's not true, but you won't accuse me of lying. You'll just assume I'm mistaken, or that I'm making a joke. Telling somebody something false isn't a lie if the person doing the telling believes it to be true. But if you know that I know Paris is not the capital of Belgium, and you know that it's in my interest to persuade you otherwise (maybe I'm trying to make you lose at Trivial Pursuit) then you'll know I'm lying.

As Barnum's example shows, you can lie by telling the truth. You can also lie to somebody without deceiving them. In Jean-Paul Sartre's short story
The Wall
, set during the Spanish Civil War, Pablo Ibbieta, a prisoner sentenced to be executed by the Fascists, is interrogated by his guards as to the whereabouts of his comrade Ramon Gris. Mistakenly believing Gris to be hiding with his cousins, he plays for time by telling them that Gris is hiding in the cemetery. He then has a night to ponder his impending execution once the guards discover he has deceived them. Yet when dawn breaks he discovers to his horror that Gris had moved to the very location he reported to the guards. Gris is arrested at the cemetery and Ibbieta is released. Ibbieta lied to his interrogators with the intention of deceiving them but told them the truth.

Lies are slippery things, and endlessly various. There are the little lies we tell to simplify a complicated story or to protect our own privacy, and lies we tell to get out of unwelcome social situations (‘Thursday? I have a bassoon lesson that night'). Then there are the more serious lies: the ones we tell to cover up misdemeanours or to get what we want – lies about illicit affairs or workplace manoeuvrings. There are lies of commission (I tell you I'm a policeman) and lies of omission (you tell me about your scorching love life without mentioning that your partner in sexual acrobatics is my wife). There are lies told to win admiration (the abnormally large fish you caught and threw back; a soldier's exaggerated account of his valour), and lies told to shield oneself or another person from physical or emotional harm.

There are also lies told for the sheer fun of it: we have all come across people who embroider their stories with a fictional filigree simply because they're more interesting that way. ‘I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful,' says Holden Caulfield, the fourteen-year-old hero of
Catcher In The Rye
. ‘If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.'

In this book I often use the words ‘deception' and ‘lie' interchangeably, but there is a distinction. Jerry Andrus, the great and eccentric American magician, made it a point of principle throughout his career never to lie, despite the fact that his act depended, as with all conjurors, on deception. But Andrus constructed his tricks so that he always spoke the truth, even as he was deceiving with his hands. He would say, ‘It may appear as though I'm putting the card in the centre of the deck' rather than ‘I am putting the card in the centre of the deck,' before producing said card from the top. This made his tricks more difficult to perform because he was alerting his audience to the possibility of deception, but that was the challenge Andrus set himself. Deception can involve any attempt to mislead: it could be a tone of voice, a smile, a faked signature or a white flag. A lie involves words – a specifically verbal form of deceit.

Indeed, the human knack for dissembling, born of the demands of Palaeolithic social life, was supercharged by the invention of language. Estimates of when this happened vary wildly, from fifty thousand to half a million years ago, but what's certain is that it was a giant leap forward for deceit, because it detached communication from deed. When I don't have to point to food to make you think there's food there – when I can just
tell
you and let you discover the truth later – then the possibilities for deception become infinitely more diverse and elaborate.
¹

Reading tales of primate deceit inspires two feelings at once: discomfort, because of the suggestion that such behaviour is bred in our bones, and admiration at the guile, creativity and intelligence on display. Something like those two antithetical responses runs through the history of our attitudes to lying. We are simultaneously appalled with ourselves for being able to make up things that aren't true, and impressed by our capacity for inventiveness; uneasy about our ease with falsity, yet certain that lies of some kind are necessary.

‘Lying is indeed an accursed vice,' wrote the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. ‘If we realised the horror and gravity of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.' Theologians from Augustine onwards have condemned lying as a heinous sin. Immanuel Kant pronounced that there was no such thing as a white lie; that lying could never be justified under any circumstance.

Other thinkers have argued it is absurd to propose that we can, or should, live without deceit. ‘There is only one world,' said Nietzsche, ‘and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading, senseless . . . We need lies to vanquish this reality, this “truth”, we need lies in order to live.' Oscar Wilde, in his more playful style, suggested that lying is a welcome escape route from the insufferable dullness of real life, cautioning only that it should be done with flair; he lamented ‘the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure'. Kant and Montaigne might have agreed with Achilles, the hero of the
Iliad,
who says, ‘For I hate him like the gates of death who thinks one thing and says another.' Yet in the
Odyssey
Homer contrasts Achilles with a hero who is a ‘master deceiver among mortals'; a man who skilfully and proudly wields deceit in battle and in love. In the end, it's Odysseus who comes across as the more attractive – more human – hero.

There's no settling the debate over lying. It's been part of the buzz and thrum of human conversation ever since we started talking, and it contains just about everything: our ideas about what kind of creatures we are, what it means to be a good person, and what on earth all those other people are saying about us. What's certain is that our ability to deceive is innate, and false speech comes naturally to our lips. ‘The human capacity to lie,' says the literary critic and humanist philosopher George Steiner, is ‘indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and the development of man in society.' Like it or not, we are all born liars.

How our children learn to lie (and why we should be impressed when they do)

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Joseph Brodsky

Charlotte's four-year-old son Tom has a rather casual way with the truth. Tom has no compunction whatsoever in blaming his one-year-old sister Ella for anything that goes wrong, even if that means lying through his baby teeth. If Charlotte is in the kitchen and hears a crash in the living room, she knows that when she walks in she'll find an upended lamp on the floor and Tom, pointing to Ella, inviting his mother to share his exasperation with his sister. Ella will be on the other side of the room, oblivious to the fuss, but Tom will be adamant that she knocked over the lamp while looking for her favourite doll. If it weren't that Ella can't crawl fast enough to get away from the scene of a crime so quickly, Charlotte might be tempted to believe him. ‘He's so
convincing
,' she tells me. ‘He's a scarily good liar.'

Should Charlotte be worried about Tom's lying? Browse the voluminous literature on child-rearing, and you might conclude that she should. Authors of how-to guides to parenting call for vigilance on the matter. Here's a typical extract from one of the many internet guides to raising

children:

Before we consider why children lie, it is essential to recognise that lying may be an early indicator of a more severe problem. Compulsive lying has often been indicated in the early stages of children suffering from social behaviour disorders, primarily that of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and Conduct Disorder.

The author is careful to distinguish between ordinary, harmless lying, and compulsive lying, where a child lies ‘frequently and for no apparent reason'. On this basis, Charlotte might be concerned: after all, Tom lies frequently, sometimes without obvious motive. But when I ask her if she's considered seeing a child counsellor about Tom's trouble with the truth, she laughs. ‘He's no worse than I am,' she says.

Charlotte's relaxed attitude to Tom's deceit is shared by the author of this passage:

A little later (2 years and 7.5 months old) I met him coming out of the dining room with his eyes unnaturally bright, and an odd unnatural or affected manner, so that I went into the room to see who was there, and found that he had been taking pounded sugar, which he had been told not to do. As he had never been in any way punished, his odd manner certainly was not due to fear, and I suppose it was pleasurable excitement struggling with conscience. A fortnight afterwards, I met him coming out of the same room, and he was eyeing his pinafore which he had carefully rolled up; and again his manner was so odd that I determined to see what was within his pinafore, notwithstanding that he said there was nothing and repeatedly commanded me to ‘go away', and I found it stained with pickle-juice; so that here was carefully planned deceit. As this child was educated solely by working on his good feelings, he soon became as truthful, open, and tender, as anyone could desire.

This is from a short essay Charles Darwin published in 1877 entitled
A
Biographical Sketch of an Infant.
Darwin, nearly seventy when he wrote it, had read an account of a child's mental development by the French naturalist Hippolyte Taine and was inspired to dig out the notes he had kept about the early years of his first child, William Erasmus, or ‘Doddy'. Enraptured by the experience of fatherhood, Darwin was as intensely curious about his children as he was about the rest of the natural world. He was, of course, a great noticer, and the essay is alive with tenderly observed detail, such as Doddy's ‘unnaturally bright eyes' as he scampers out of the pantry, high on sugar. Although Darwin attends to the first signs of a ‘moral sense' in his child, he doesn't
judge
his young son in moral terms; he gives no indication that Doddy's ‘carefully planned deceit' perturbed or angered him.

Darwin's essay was largely neglected by those in the field of what became known as ‘developmental psychology', the study of children's mental development, which didn't really get going until well into the twentieth century. Even then, until the end of the that century little attention was paid to the question of when and why children lie. When it
was
discussed, it was usually as a disorder – a sign of delinquency. In our everyday lives we still think in similar terms, and few parents are comfortable with the notion that their child is a liar. But if you notice your three-year-old telling lies, you needn't be unduly concerned. In fact, it may be that parents should celebrate a child's first lie, just as they celebrate their child's first words.

We exert our powers of deception virtually from birth: even babies seem to engage in pre-verbal forms of fakery. During her research with the parents of very young children, Vasudevi Reddy of the University of Portsmouth found examples of baby behaviour that fit the taxonomy of deception in non-human primates put together by Byrne and Whiten: Teasing, Pretending, Concealing and Distracting. A baby girl repeatedly puts her hands out as if to join her welcoming mother but then backs away, laughing. A nine-month-old appears to fake laughter as a way of signalling that he wants to join in with others who are laughing. An eleven-month-old baby, being made to eat, watches her mother carefully, and as soon as her back is turned throws the toast away. The simplest acts of deception, says Reddy, ‘seem to happen more or less simultaneously with the earliest attempts to communicate anything at all'.

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: