NurtureShock

by Po Bronson; Ashley Merryman

  It being December—just one month after Copenhaver’s project had begun—the teachers both decided to follow up a few other Santa stories they’d read to their classes with Twas the Night B’fore Christmas, Melodye Rosales’ retelling of the Clement C. Moore classic.

  The room already dotted with holiday paraphernalia, Johnson had all of her first graders gather around the carpet for story time. As she began reading, the kids were excited by the book’s depiction of a family waiting for Santa to come. A couple children burst out with stories of planned Christmas decorations and expectations for Santa’s arrival to their own houses. A few of the children, however, quietly fidgeted. They seemed puzzled that this storybook was different: in this one, it was a black family all snug in their beds.

  Then, there was the famed clatter on the roof. The children leaned in to get their first view of Santa and the sleigh as Johnson turned the page—

  And they saw that Santa was black.

  “He’s black!” gasped a white little girl.

  Another white boy exclaimed, “I thought he was white!”

  Immediately, the children began to chatter about the stunning development.

  At the ripe old ages of six and seven, the children had no doubt that there was a Real Santa. Of that fact, they were absolutely sure. But suddenly—there was this huge question mark. Could Santa be black? And if so, what did that mean?

  While some of the black children were delighted with the idea that Santa could be black, still others were unsure. Some of the white children initially rejected this idea out of hand: a black Santa couldn’t be real. But even the little girl who was the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white considered the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt. And she still gleefully yelled along with the black Santa’s final “Merry Christmas to All! Y’all Sleep Tight.” Still another of the white girls progressed from initially rejecting a black Santa outright to conceding that maybe Black Santa was a “Helper Santa.” By the end of the story, she was asking if this black Santa couldn’t somehow be a cousin or brother to the white Santa they already knew about. Her strong need that it was a white Santa who came to her house was clearly still intact—but those concessions were quite a switch in about ten pages.

  Later that week, Copenhaver returned to see this play out again in another teacher’s class. Similar debates ensued. A couple of the children offered the idea that perhaps Santa’s “mixed with black and white”—perhaps Santa was something in the middle, like an Indian. One boy went with a Two-Santa Hypothesis: White Santa and Black Santa must be friends who take turns visiting children, he concluded. When Bowman made the apparently huge mistake of saying that she’d never seen Santa, the children all quickly corrected her: they knew everyone had seen Santa at the mall. Not that that clarified the situation any.

  In both classes, the debate raged off-and-on for a week, until a school party. Santa was coming. And they were all sure it was the Real Santa who was coming.

  Then Santa arrived at the party—and he was black. Just like in the picture book.

  The black children were exultant—since this proved that Santa was black. Some of the white children said that this black Santa was too thin, and that meant that the Real Santa was the fat white one at Kmart. But one of the white girls retorted that she had met the man and was convinced. Santa was brown.

  Amy, one of the white children who’d come up with the mixed-race Santa theory, abandoned that idea upon meeting Black Santa. But she wondered if maybe Black Santa went to the black kids’ houses while White Santa delivered the white kids’ presents. A black child also wondered if this Santa would take care of the white kids himself, or if perhaps he would pass along their toy requests to a white Santa hidden somewhere else.

  Another black child, Brent, still doubted. He really wanted a black Santa to be true, but he wasn’t convinced. So he bravely confronted Santa. “There ain’t no black Santas!” Brent insisted.

  “Son, what color do you see?” Santa replied.

  “Black—but under your socks you might not be!”

  “Lookit here.” Santa pulled up a pant leg, to let Brent see the skin underneath.

  A thrilled Brent was sold. “This is a black Santa!” he yelled. “He’s got black skin and his black boots are like the white Santa’s boots.”

  A black Santa storybook wasn’t enough to change the children’s mindsets. It didn’t crush every stereotype. Even the black kids who were excited about a black Santa—when Johnson asked them to draw Santa—they still depicted a Santa whose skin was as snowy-white as his beard.

  But the shock of the Santa storybook did allow the children to start talking about race in a way that had never before occurred to them. And their questions started a year-long dialogue about race issues.

  By the end of the year, the teachers were regularly incorporating books that dealt directly with issues of racism into their reading. Both black and white children were collaborating on book projects on Martin Luther King Jr. And when the kids read one book about the civil rights movement, both a black and a white child noticed that white people were nowhere to be found in the story, and, troubled, they decided to find out just where in history both peoples were.

  FOUR

  Why Kids Lie

  We may treasure honesty, but the research is clear. Most classic strategies to promote truthfulness just encourage kids to be better liars.

  Ashley and I went to Montreal to visit the lab and operations of Dr. Victoria Talwar, one of the world’s leading experts on children’s lying behavior. Talwar is raven-haired and youthful, with an unusual accent—the combined result of Irish and Indian family ancestry, a British upbringing, and stints in American, Scottish, and Quebeçois academia. Her lab is in a Gothic Revival limestone mansion, overlooking the main campus of McGill University.

  Almost immediately, Talwar recruited us for one of her ongoing experiments. She threw us in a small room with two of her students, Simone Muir and Sarah-Jane Renaud, who showed Ashley and me eight videos of children telling a story about a time they were bullied. Our role was to determine which kids were telling the truth and which had made their story up, as well as to rate how confident we were that our determination was correct.

  The children ranged in age from seven to eleven years old. Each video segment began with an offscreen adult asking the child a leading question to get the story started, such as, “So tell me what happened when you went to Burger King?” In response, the child told her story over the next two and a half minutes, with the occasional gentle prod for details by the adult who was interviewing her. Those two-plus minutes were an extensive length of time for the child, offering plenty of chances to include contradictory details or hints that might give away her lie.

  This format was crafted to simulate the conditions of children testifying in court cases, which is where the modern science of kids’ lies began. Over 100,000 children testify in American courts every year, usually in custody disputes and abuse cases.

  In those cases, children are frequently coached by someone to shape their story, so the children in Talwar’s experiment were also coached, briefly, by their parents the night before. To prepare the videotape, each child rehearsed a true story and a fabricated tale, and told both stories to the interviewer on camera. The interviewer herself did not know which story was true. Then, one of the child’s stories was included in the videotapes of eight. The stories chosen for the tapes were not picked because the child did an especially great job of lying. They were merely picked at random.

  The adorable little girl with the Burger King story told how she was teased by a boy for being Chinese, and how he threw some French fries in her hair. I froze—would a total stranger throw fries in a girl’s hair? She looked so young, and yet the story came out in full, complete—rehearsed? Just guessing, I marked this as a fabrication, but noted my confidence was nil. My confidence didn’t improve with the next two children’s stories.

 
; “This is hard,” I murmured, surprised that I didn’t have the answers immediately. I pushed myself closer to the video monitor and cranked the volume up as loud as it could go.

  Another girl told of being teased and left out of her group of friends after she scored 100 on a math test. She told her story with scant details and needed a lot of prodding; to me, that seemed genuine, childlike.

  After the test, Ashley and I were scored. To my dismay, I got only four right. Ashley got only three correct.

  Our results were not unusual. Talwar has run hundreds of people through this test, and on the whole, their results are no better than chance. People simply cannot tell when kids are lying. Their scores also tend to reveal some biases. They believe girls are telling the truth more than boys, when in fact boys do not lie more often. They believe younger kids are more prone to lying, whereas the opposite is true. And they believe introverts are less trustworthy, when introverts actually lie less often, lacking the social skills to pull off a lie.

  There are many lie-detection systems created from the patterns in verbal and nonverbal behavior in adult lies, but these provide only small statistical advantages. Voice pitch, pupil dilation, eye tracking, lack of sensory details, and chronological storytelling are some indication of lying in adults. However, when accounting for the wild standard deviation of these behaviors in kids, those higher-than-average indicators become not much more reliable than flipping a coin.

  Thus, police officers score worse than chance—at about 45%. Customs officers are trained to interview children during immigration processing and instantly determine if a child has been taken from his parents. Yet they, too, only score at chance on Talwar’s test.

  Talwar’s students Muir and Renaud have run several versions of the experiment with both parents and teachers. “The teachers will score above chance—60%—but they get really upset if they didn’t get 100%,” said Muir. “They insist they’d do better with their own students.”

  Similarly, the parent’s first defense against his child’s tendency to lie is, “Well, I can tell when they’re lying.” Talwar’s proven that to be a myth.

  One might object that these bullying videotapes aren’t like real lies, invented under pressure. They were coached, and the kid wasn’t trying to get away with anything.

  But Talwar has a variety of experiments where she tempts children to cheat in a game, which puts them in a position to offer real lies about their cheating. She videotapes these, too, and when she shows those videotapes to the child’s own parent—and asks, “Is your child telling the truth?”—the parents score only slightly better than chance.

  They don’t take it well, either. When Renaud’s on the telephone with parents to schedule the experiments, “They all believe that their kids aren’t going to lie.” Talwar explained that a number of parents come to her lab really wanting to use their kids’ performance to prove to a verified expert what a terrific parent they are.

  The truth bias is a painful one to overcome.

  The next day, we saw that in action.

  “My son doesn’t lie,” insisted Steve, a slightly frazzled father in his mid-thirties, as he watched Nick, his eager six-year-old, enthralled in a game of marbles with a McGill student. Steve was quite proud of his son, describing him as easygoing and very social. He had Nick bark out an impressive series of addition problems that Nick had memorized, as if that was somehow proof of Nick’s sincerity.

  Steve then took his assertion down a notch. “Well, I’ve never heard him lie.” Perhaps that, too, was a little strong. “I’m sure he must lie, some, but when I hear it, I’ll still be surprised.” He had brought his son in after seeing an advertisement of Talwar’s in a local parenting magazine, which had the headline, “Can your child tell the difference between the truth and a lie?” The truth was, Steve was torn. He was curious if Nick would lie, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. The idea of his son being dishonest with him was profoundly troubling.

  Steve had an interesting week ahead of him, because Dr. Talwar had just asked Steve to keep a diary for the coming week, documenting every lie that his son told over the next seven days. And I knew for a fact his son did lie—I’d seen him do it.

  Nick thought he’d spent the hour playing a series of games with a couple of nice women. First having played marbles in the cheery playroom, Nick then played more games with the women, one-on-one. He was in no real hurry to leave the lab, with its yellow-painted walls decorated with dozens of children’s drawings and shelves full of toys. He’d won two prizes, a cool toy car and a bag of plastic dinosaurs, and everyone said he did very well.

  What the first-grader didn’t know was that those games—fun as they were—were really a battery of psychological tests, and the women were Talwar’s trained researchers earning doctorates in child psychology. The other key fact Nick didn’t know was that when he was playing games one-on-one, there was a hidden camera taping his every move and word. In an adjacent room, Ashley and I watched the whole thing from a monitor.

  Nick cheated, then he lied, and then he lied again. He did so unhesitatingly, without a single glimmer of remorse. Instead, he later beamed as everyone congratulated him on winning the games: he told me he couldn’t wait to come back the next weekend to play more games. If I didn’t know what was going on, I’d have thought he was a young sociopath in the making. I still actually wonder if that’s the case, despite Talwar’s assurances to the contrary.

  One of Talwar’s experiments, a variation on a classic experiment known as the temptation paradigm, is known in the lab as “The Peeking Game.” Courtesy of the hidden camera, we’d watched Nick play it with another one of Talwar’s graduate students, Cindy Arruda. She took Nick into a very small private room and told him they were going to play a guessing game. Nick turned and straddled his chair to face the wall, while Arruda would bring out a toy that made a sound. Nick had to guess the identity of the toy based on the sound that it had made. If he was right three times, he’d win a prize.

  The first toy was easy. Nick bounced in his chair with excitement when he’d figured out that the siren was from a police car. The second toy emitted a baby’s cry—it took Nick a couple tries before he landed on “baby doll.” He was relieved to finally be right.

  “Does it get harder every time?” he asked, obviously concerned, as he pressed the baby doll’s tummy to trigger another cry.

  “Uh, no,” Arruda stammered, despite knowing it was indeed about to get harder for Nick.

  Nick turned back to the wall, waiting for the last toy. His small figure curled up over the back of the chair as if he was playing a wonderful game of hide-and-seek.

  Arruda brought out a soft, stuffed soccer ball, and placed it on top of a greeting card that played music. She cracked the card for a moment, triggering it to play a music box jingle of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

  Nick, of course, was stumped.

  Before he had a chance to guess, Arruda suddenly said that she’d forgotten something and had to leave the room for a little bit, promising to be right back. She admonished Nick not to peek at the toy while she was gone.

  Five seconds in, Nick was struggling not to peek—he started to turn around but fought the urge and looked back at the wall before he saw anything. He held out for another eight seconds, but the temptation was too great. At thirteen seconds, he gave in. Turning to look, he saw the soccer ball, then immediately returned to his “hide-and-seek” position.

  When Arruda returned, she’d barely come through the door before Nick—still facing the wall as if he had never peeked—burst out with the fact that the toy was a soccer ball. We could hear the triumph in his voice—until Arruda stopped him short, telling Nick to wait for her to get seated.

  That mere split-second gave Nick just enough time to realize that he should sound unsure of his answer, or else she would know he’d peeked. Suddenly, the glee was gone, and he sounded a little more hesitant. “A soccer ball?” he asked, making it sound like a pu
re guess.

  When he turned around to face Arruda and see the revealed toy, Arruda told Nick he was right, and he acted very pleased.

  Arruda then asked Nick if he had peeked when she was away.

  “No,” he said, quick and expressionless. Then a big smile spread across his face.

  Without challenging him, or even letting a note of suspicion creep into her voice, Arruda asked Nick how he’d figured out the sound came from a soccer ball.

  Nick shrank down in his seat for a second, cupping his chin in his hands. He knew he needed a plausible answer, but his first attempt wasn’t close. With a perfectly straight face he said, “The music had sounded like a ball.” Hunting for a better answer, but not getting any closer to it, he added, “The ball sounded black and white.” His face gave no outward indication that he realized this made no sense, but he kept on talking, as if he felt he needed something better. Then Nick said that the music sounded like the soccer balls he played with at school: they squeaked. He nodded—this was the good one to go with—and then further explained that the music sounded like the squeak he heard when he kicked a ball. To emphasize this, his winning point, he brushed his hand against the side of the toy ball, as if to demonstrate the way his foot kicking the side of the ball produces a squeaking sound.

  This experiment was not just a test to see if children cheat and lie under temptation. It’s also designed to test children’s ability to extend a lie, offering plausible explanations and avoiding what the scientists call “leakage”—inconsistencies that reveal the lie for what it is. Nick’s whiffs at covering up his lie would be scored later by coders who watched the videotape. So Arruda accepted without question the fact that soccer balls play Beethoven when they’re kicked and gave Nick his prize. He was thrilled.