A number of scholars have used variations of this temptation paradigm to test thousands of children over the last few years. What they’ve learned has turned conventional assumptions upside down.
The first thing they’ve learned is that children learn to lie much earlier than we presumed. In Talwar’s peeking game, only a third of the three-year-olds will peek, and when asked if they peeked, most of them will admit it. But over 80% of the four-year-olds peek. Of those, over 80% will lie when asked, asserting they haven’t peeked. By their fourth birthday, almost all kids will start experimenting with lying. Children with older siblings seem to learn it slightly earlier.
Parents often fail to address early childhood lying, since the lying is almost innocent—their child’s too young to know what lies are, or that lying’s wrong. When their child gets older and learns those distinctions, the parents believe, the lying will stop. This is dead wrong, according to Dr. Talwar. The better a young child can distinguish a lie from the truth, the more likely she is to lie given the chance. Researchers test children with elegant anecdotes, and ask, “Did Suzy tell a lie or tell the truth?” The kids who know the difference are also the most prone to lie. Ignorant of this scholarship, many parenting web sites and books advise parents to just let lies go—kids will grow out of it. The truth is, kids grow into it.
In studies where children are observed in their homes, four-year-olds will lie once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour. Few kids are an exception. In these same studies, 96% of all kids offer up lies.
Most lies to parents are a cover-up of a transgression. First, the kid does something he shouldn’t; then, to squirm out of trouble, he denies doing it. But this denial is so expected, and so common, that it’s usually dismissed by parents. In those same observational studies, researchers report that in less than one percent of such situations does a parent use the tacked-on lie as a chance to teach a lesson about lying. The parent censures the original transgression, but not the failed cover-up. From the kid’s point of view, his attempted lie didn’t cost him extra.
Simultaneously as they learn to craft and maintain a lie, kids also learn what it’s like to be lied to. But children don’t start out thinking lies are okay, and gradually realize they’re bad. The opposite is true. They start out thinking all deception—of any sort—is bad, and slowly realize that some types are okay.
In a now classic study by University of Queensland’s Dr. Candida Peterson, adults and children of different ages watched ten video-taped scenarios of different lies—from benevolent white lies to manipulative whoppers. Children are much more disapproving of lies and liars than adults are; children are more likely to think the liar is a bad person and the lie is morally wrong.
The qualifying role of intent seems to be the most difficult variable for children to grasp. Kids don’t even believe a mistake is an acceptable excuse. The only thing that matters is that the information was wrong.
According to Dr. Paul Ekman, a pioneer of lying research at UC San Francisco, here’s an example of how that plays out. On the way home from school on Tuesday, a dad promises his five-year-old son that he’ll take him to the baseball game on Saturday afternoon. When they get home, Dad learns from Mom that earlier in the day, she had scheduled a swim lesson for Saturday afternoon and can’t change it. When they tell their son, he gets terribly upset, and the situation melts down. Why is the kid so upset? Dad didn’t know about the swim lesson. By the adult definition, Dad did not lie. But by the kid definition, Dad did lie. Any false statement—regardless of intent or belief—is a lie. Therefore, unwittingly, Dad has given his child the message that he condones lies.
The second lesson is that while we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it’s lying that is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
Indeed, kids who start lying at two or three—or who can control verbal leakage at four or five—do better on other tests of academic prowess. “Lying is related to intelligence,” confirmed Talwar, “but you still have to deal with it.”
When children first begin lying, they lie to avoid punishment, and because of that, they lie indiscriminately—whenever punishment seems to be a possibility. A three-year-old will say, “I didn’t hit my sister,” even though a parent witnessed the child hit her sibling. A six-year-old won’t make that mistake—she’ll lie only about a punch that occurred when the parent was out of the room.
By the time a child reaches school age, her reasons for lying are more complex. Punishment is a primary catalyst for lying, but as kids develop empathy and become more aware of social relations, they start to consider others when they lie. They may lie to spare a friend’s feelings. In grade school, said Talwar, “secret keeping becomes an important part of friendship—and so lying may be a part of that.”
Lying also becomes a way to increase a child’s power and sense of control—by manipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert his status, and by learning that he can fool his parents.
Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism: it’s a way to vent frustration or get attention. They might be attempting to compensate, feeling they’re slipping behind their peers. Any sudden spate of lying, or dramatic increase in lying, is a sign that something has changed in that child’s life, in a way that troubles him: “Lying is a symptom—often of a bigger problem behavior,” explained Talwar. “It’s a strategy to keep themselves afloat.”
In longitudinal studies, a six-year-old who lies frequently could just as simply grow out of it. But if lying has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations, she’ll stick with it. About one-third of kids do—and if they’re still lying at seven, then it seems likely to continue. They’re hooked.
In Talwar’s peeking game, sometimes the researcher pauses the game with, “I’m about to ask you a question. But before I do that, will you promise to tell the truth?” (Yes, the child answers.) “Okay, did you peek at the toy when I was out of the room?” This promise cuts down lying by 25%.
In other scenarios, Talwar’s researcher will read the child a short storybook before she asks about the peeking. One of the stories read aloud is The Boy Who Cried Wolf—the version in which both the boy and the sheep get eaten because of his repeated lies. Alternatively, they read the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, in which young George confesses to his father that he chopped down the prized tree with his new hatchet. The story ends with his father’s reply: “George, I’m glad that you cut down that cherry tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.”
Now if you had to guess, which story would you think reduced lying more? We ran a poll on our web site, receiving over a thousand responses to that question. Of them, 75% said The Boy Who Cried Wolf would work better. However, this famous fable, told all around the world, actually did not cut down lying at all in Talwar’s experiments. In fact, after hearing the story, kids lied even a little more than usual.
Meanwhile, hearing George Washington and the Cherry Tree reduced lying a whopping 75% in boys, and 50% in girls.
We might think that the story works because Washington’s a national icon—that kids are taught to emulate the honesty of our nation’s founder—but Talwar’s kids are Canadian, and the youngest kids have never even heard of him. To determine if Washington’s celebrity was an influential factor for the older kids, Talwar re-ran the experiment, replacing Washington with a nondescript character, and otherwise leaving the story intact. The story’s generic version had the same result.
Why does one fable work so well, while the other doesn’t—and what does this tell
us about how to teach kids to lie less?
The shepherd boy ends up suffering the ultimate punishment, but that lies get punished is not news to children. When asked if lies are always wrong, 92% of five-year-olds say yes. And when asked why lies are wrong, most say the problem with lying is you get punished for it. In that sense, young kids process the risk of lying by considering only their own self-protection. It takes years for the children to understand lying on a more sophisticated moral ground. It isn’t until age eleven that the majority demonstrate awareness of its harm to others; at that point, 48% say the problem with lying is that it destroys trust, and 22% say it carries guilt. Even then, a third still say the problem with lying is being punished.
As an example of how strongly young kids associate lying with punishment, consider this: 38% of five-year-olds rate profanity as a lie. Why would kids think swearing is a lie? It’s because in their minds, lies are the things you say that get you punished or admonished. Swearing gets you admonished. Therefore, swearing is a lie.
Increasing the threat of punishment for lying only makes children hyperaware of the potential personal cost. It distracts the child from learning how his lies impact others. In studies, scholars find that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often. Talwar did a version of the peeking game in western Africa, with children who attend a traditional colonial school. In this school, Talwar described, “The teachers would slap the children’s heads, hit them with switches, pinch them, for anything—forgetting a pencil, getting homework wrong. Sometimes, a good child would be made to enforce the bad kid.” While the North American kids usually peek within five seconds, “Children in this school took longer to peek—35 seconds, even 58 seconds. But just as many peeked. Then they lied and continued to lie. They go for broke because of the severe consequences of getting caught.” Even three-year-olds pretended they didn’t know what the toy was, though they’d just peeked. They understood that naming the toy was to drop a clue, and the temptation of being right didn’t outweigh the risk of being caught. They were able to completely control their verbal leakage—an ability that still eluded six-year-old Nick.
But just removing the threat of punishment is not enough to extract honesty from kids. In yet another variation, Talwar’s researchers promise the children, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked. It doesn’t matter if you did.” Parents try a version of this routinely. But this alone doesn’t reduce lying at all. The children are still wary; they don’t trust the promise of immunity. They’re thinking, “My parent really wishes I didn’t do it in the first place; if I say I didn’t, that’s my best chance of making my parent happy.”
Meaning, in these decisive moments, they want to know how to get back into your good graces. So it’s not enough to say to a six-year-old, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked, and if you tell the truth you’ll be really happy with yourself.” That does reduce lying—quite a bit—but a six-year-old doesn’t want to make himself happy. He wants to make the parent happy.
What really works is to tell the child, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked, and if you tell the truth, I will be really happy.” This is an offer of both immunity and a clear route back to good standing. Talwar explained this latest finding: “Young kids are lying to make you happy—trying to please you.” So telling kids that the truth will make a parent happy challenges the kid’s original thought that hearing good news—not the truth—is what will please the parent.
That’s why George Washington and the Cherry Tree works so well. Little George receives both immunity and praise for telling the truth.
Ultimately, it’s not fairy tales that stop kids from lying—it’s the process of socialization. But the wisdom in The Cherry Tree applies: according to Talwar, parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say that lying is wrong. The more kids hear that message, the more quickly they will take this lesson to heart.
The other reason children lie, according to Talwar, is that they learn it from us.
Talwar challenged that parents need to really consider the importance of honesty in their own lives. Too often, she finds, parents’ own actions show kids an ad hoc appreciation of honesty. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We expect him to swallow all his honest reactions—anger, disappointment, frustration—and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play various games to win a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap. After giving the kids a moment to overcome the shock, a researcher asks them how they like it. Talwar is testing their ability to offer a white lie, verbally, and also to control the disappointment in their body language. About a quarter of preschoolers can lie that they like the gift—by elementary school, about half. Telling this lie makes them extremely uncomfortable, especially when pressed to offer a few reasons for why they like the bar of soap. They frown; they stare at the soap and can’t bring themselves to look the researcher in the eye. Kids who shouted with glee when they won the peeking game suddenly mumble quietly and fidget.
Meanwhile, the child’s parent is watching. They almost cheer when the child comes up with the white lie. “Often the parents are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying,” Talwar remarked. Despite the number of times she’s seen it happen, she’s regularly amazed at parents’ apparent inability to recognize that a white lie is still a lie.
When adults are asked to keep diaries of their own lies, they admit to about one lie per every five social interactions, which works out to about one per day, on average. (College students are double that.) The vast majority of these lies are white lies meant to make others feel good, like telling the woman at work who brought in muffins that they taste great.
Encouraged to tell so many white lies, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, while dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, “Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!,” this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario—he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.
Now, compare this to the way children are taught not to tattle. Children will actually start tattling even before they can talk—at around the age of fourteen months, they’ll cry, point, and use their gaze to signal their mother for help when another child has stolen a toy or cookie. Appealing to grownups becomes a habit, and around the age of four, children start to hear a rule to rid them of this habit: “Don’t Tell,” or “Don’t Tattle.”
What grownups really mean by “Don’t Tell” is we want children to learn to work it out with one another, first. Kids need the social skills to resolve problems, and they won’t develop these skills if a parent always intrudes. Kids’ tattles are, occasionally, outright lies, and children can use tattling as a way to get even. When parents preach “Don’t Tell,” we’re trying to get all these power games to stop.
Preschool and elementary school teachers proclaim tattling to be the bane of their existence. One of the largest teachers’ training programs in the United States ranks children’s tattling as one of the top five classroom concerns—as disruptive as fighting or biting another classmate.
But tattling has received some scientific interest, and researchers have spent hours observing kids at play. They’ve learned that nine out of
ten times a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest. And while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every one time a child seeks a parent for help, there were fourteen other instances when he was wronged and did not run to the parent for aid.
When the child—who’s put up with as much as he can handle—finally comes to tell the parent the honest truth, he hears, in effect, “Stop bringing me your problems!” According to one researcher’s work, parents are ten times more likely to chastise a child for tattling than they are to chide a child who lied.
Kids pick up on the power of “Don’t Tell” and learn they can silence one another with it. By the middle years of elementary school, being labeled a tattler is about the worst thing a kid can be called on the playground. So a child considering reporting a problem to an adult not only faces peer condemnation as a traitor and the schoolyard equivalent of the death penalty—ostracism—but he also recalls every time he’s heard teachers and parents say, “Work it out on your own.”
Each year, the problems kids deal with become exponentially bigger. They watch other kids vandalize walls, shoplift, cut class, and climb fences into places they shouldn’t be. To tattle about any of it is to act like a little kid, mortifying to any self-respecting tweener. Keeping their mouth shut is easy; they’ve been encouraged to do so since they were little.
The era of holding information back from parents has begun.
For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most want in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98% said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their age, 96% to 98% will say lying is morally wrong.
NurtureShock Page 8