3 Lying

Lying is different to irony in that it doesn’t involve a public dissociation between the utterance and the facts, rather the intention is to keep the facts private and stands in direct contrast to the maxim, be truthful. In an experimental setting, Lewis and colleagues (1989) told the 3 year olds not to peek at a toy when the experimenter left the room. The majority of children peeked and as soon as they did, the experimenter returned to the room and asked the children if they had peeked; 38 per cent lied by denying they had peeked, 38 per cent confessed, and 24 per cent gave no verbal response.

In more naturalistic settings, diary studies report that most lying by children is not an effortful, premeditated fabrication, but rather an on-the-fly, quick manipulation of language to protect their immediate reputation and interests (McCornack et al., 2014). For example, a direct question such as ‘did you hit your brother?’ is much more likely to provoke a lie (e.g. ‘no’) than for this false information to be spontaneously offered. Much of the lying at this age takes place in the spirit of reputation management (e.g. to appear like a good person), for material gain (e.g. to play with a new toy) and the avoidance of physical or emotional pain (e.g. being punished or publicly shamed) – in short, for many of the same reasons adults lie. By 6 years of age children are routinely employing sophisticated linguistic strategies for lying or avoiding telling the truth, including so-called capability attribution ‘it was a reward for my hard work’, when in fact they cheated on a test, fortune attribution ‘I just found it’, when it fact it was stolen and topic shift ‘I don’t like you anymore’ in response to the question ‘are you lying to me?’ (Hu et al., 2020).

To maintain their lies, children must inhibit those thoughts and statements that are contrary to their lie and that would reveal their transgression, while maintaining in their memory the contents of their lie. Thus, to tell lies, and to lie well, children must be able to hold conflicting alternatives in their mind (i.e. what they actually did or thought, and what they said they did or thought). Not surprisingly then, inhibitory control and working memory play a significant role in children’s deception development and deceptive language use (Carlson and Moses, 2001).

Lying is of course not always a bad thing, as in the moral philosopher’s favourite example where you misdirect an axe-wielding maniac that asks you where your friend is hiding. So-called pro-social lying can be motivated by avoiding hurting the listener’s feelings or to avoid negative reactions from the listener if the truth is told. For instance, when a 5 year old says ‘thank you so much for the jumper, its lovely’ to the uncle who always buys the same jumper that they do not like. According to Talwar and Lee (2002), by 3 years old, children are capable of telling pro-social lies successfully, but might not be able to explain the reasons why they lied. By 7 years of age, not only are children capable of lying with the intention of improving someone else’s mood or to make someone feel better, they are also better at articulating the reasons for why they are doing so (Warneken and Orlins, 2015).