On making a virtue out of telling lies - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

Social Research, Fall, 1996 by Michael J. Chandler, Jamie Afifi

TALK about the telling of lies is ordinarily made of stern stuff, full of "thou shall nots" and cautionary tales about the corrosive consequences of the bearing of false witness. At the same time, however, there are few among us who do not harbor a certain secret pride at having successfully lied our way out of some especially tight spot or a certain quiet admiration for someone else's especially well-crafted lie. Not to put too fine a point on it, a good lie is widely--but not publicly--counted as a point in one's intellectual favor and so is generally seen as deserving of at least our guarded respect. This essay is about just this up-side of the generally down-side business of lies and deceits.

Our ordinary intuition that the telling of successful lies requires a measure of admirable cognitive complexity is also typically matched by the corollary assumption that the ability to tell a really good journeyman sort of lie, one that will not come back to haunt you, is a skill that is slow to be acquired and perhaps altogether missing in children of a certain tender age. Consequently, most of us are prepared to believe that young children, like the Houynhnms of Gulliver's Travels (Swift, [1726]1983), neither know much about the process of detecting lies nor are initially very skilled at concocting lies of their own. Who is surprised, for example, by the success of the Santa Claus industry, or by Vasek's (1988) preschool subject who is quoted as saying, "I didn't break the lamp and I won't do it again?"

Although apparently ready, then, to grant that there is an age before which the competencies required for the telling and detecting of lies are yet in hand, and to suppose that the growing ability to tell a really well-crafted lie is something of a gradual intellectual accomplishment, most casual onlookers are happy enough to acknowledge a lot of ignorance regarding the details of what goes on in-between. Filling in some of these missing details is the point of this essay. The real problem in knowing how to best go about doing this is that the topic of lying is somehow both too big and too small. Too small for sure, if by lying we choose to mean only "lying through one's teeth." What about the several million deaf mutes in the world? Are they to be thrown out of the liar's club on what clearly amount to technical grounds? And what about the wordless ruses of pre-verbal children and all of those "lower" animals naturally designed for silent running? Rather than prejudging all of these cases right from the start, would it not be better all round if the notion of lying were simply taken more broadly so as to include any and all potentially culpable abuses of informational authority (voiced or unvoiced) that: (a) are false quite apart from any telling; (b) that are understood to be false by those putting them forward (by whatever means); and (c) that are promoted with the full intent of leading credulous others into false beliefs about some true state of affairs (Sweetser, 1987)?

Having advocated, as we do, a broadening of the subject of lying sufficient to also include non-verbal forms of deceit, the problem arises that things could quickly get out of hand, and so there is a need to set certain limits on what we mean to discuss. Our chosen way of doing this will be to look primarily inside the world of childhood where our own professional lights are brightest. Even this considerable narrowing of attention is not enough, however, since a good deal of what has been written on the subject of deception in young persons is only coincidentally about children, and tends to turn instead on the gradual ways in which persons of all ages go about the business of telling better and better lies. While it would be possible to regale you with a whole raft of such empirical accounts written in support of the mundane proposition that older is ordinarily better, our aim instead will be to gate out such practice-makes-perfect talk in favor of the more interesting possibility that there are identifiable moments in the changing architecture of cognitive development before and after which young people think and act very differently with regard to the prospect of deceit.

The first part of this slimmed down agenda will be taken up with first trying to get clear about what is ordinarily meant by the English word "lie," and why, given the complexities of this notion, the process of lie-detection is as complicated and difficult to master as it apparently is. Here, the central theme will be that the concept of lying is best understood as "prototypically organized," and why, given this fact, many of the oddities that mark young children's early confusion with the business of lying can be seen to make a certain new and more followable sense. The second part is an exploration of those aspects of the actual hands-on business of lying that practice apparently does not make perfect. Here, in a place close to the center of our own ongoing program of research, we mean to examine the question, not only of why humans may be unique in being consummate liars, but why, before a certain age, children seem less like their elders and otherwise more like birds of the air and beasts of the field. Finally, we mean to end by asking after some of the practical consequences of children's measured progress in meeting all of the membership requirements for joining our grownup liar's club.