Born Liars (3 page)

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.

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.

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.