NurtureShock (11 page)

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 pure 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.

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.