Lying

I'm filling it up is after the holidays. So you're in my head, Dan, You're in my head. That's Dan Arielli, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University in North Carolina, calling me out in a lie. High stakes lies have all sorts of consequences. Perjurors are imprisoned,

slanderers are sued. In the eighteen hundreds, liars and gossips in Scotland could be punished by being forced to wear a scolds bridle, a middle cage worn over the head with a painful bit to stop the tone from moving. But little lies they sometimes feel almost obligatory, like if your coworker Andy asks do you like my haircut? And you say yes, It adds a new shortness to the ends of it. Un Lying to children can be a joyful community activity. Good news, little Maxie. There's someone who

would like to buy your old teeth. She's nocturnal, she could fly, but she deals exclusively with unconscious clientele, So you will just have to trust that you are receiving market rate, b Lie detector tests, child psychology, moral vigilance, bad haircuts. We're here to explore why lying is a developmental milestone for toddlers, but maybe a slippery slope for you. Honestly is a really good thing, and most people acknowledge

it and they want to be honest. But in the day to day basis, we have lots of other motivation that play out as well. So motivation to be honest is one of them. Motivation to gain money is an under one. Motivation to have our political party be successful, motivation to decrease global warming, motivation to whatever whatever I mean. There's lots of them. Dan is the author of a book called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. How we lie

to everyone, especially ourselves. Most of us want to be honest, but we also want to find love, we want financial security, we want the best for our kids, and not all of these desires are compatible all of the time. The team here at deeply human. So let's they did some lives from friends and colleagues and strangers on the Internet.

And here's one that I found very clever. So my senior year of college, I had a truly all consuming crush on the teaching assistant for the photography seminar that I was taking, and near the end of the year I was applying for jobs. I got a bunch of professors to write me letters of recommendation, and once I had them all, I was like, you know, this is a really easy way to get people to give me

a bunch of compliments. So I told the t A that I needed an additional letter of recommendation from him, even though I did not. Our liar Allison found a way to extract two full written pages of compliments from her crush. If you could somehow force a letter of wreck out of someone in your life now, in the same circumstances, who would it be? Oh my god, um Curtis sit and felt maybe me too. She's the best God is my favorite mort how did you get so smart?

And just one life? I have absolutely idea, but every time I read one of her books, I'm just like, every sentence is perfect. How listener if you're unfamiliar. Curtis Sittenfeld is the name of a best selling fiction writer. Highly recommend her short stories. All right back to Dan Arielli are lying expert on how we conceptualize dishonesty. So in general, when we think about this honesty, we think

about people as being either good open. We tend to consider honesty as a character trait, a fixed feature, like I am good at languages and bad at directions. I prefer cheap milk chocolate to the fancy dark stuff, and I am honest. But this kind of thinking can cause problems because if we consider our honesty as intrinsic and constant, then it's like a tattoo. It's permanently part of who we are. And with that attitude, we might get lax

in policing our actual behavior. And we're really good at preserving the idea of our ourselves as honest people even while we're telling a lie. Imagine that you're late for meeting some friends, right, you could say, oh, you know, I left too late, or I didn't check my watch or something like that, or you could say the subway was too busy. You have a motivation to lie, and what our amazing brain can do is to allow us

to rationalize things that are not exactly perfect. So you can go to your friends and say, oh, yes, you know, the traffic was terrible. Now the traffic is thats not really the traffic that is terrible, but the traffic was not great. So you basically add this up and in your mind the moment you finished telling this lie, you're not a liar. You just slightly exaggerated. As we tell more and more lies of a certain type, we get more and more used to it, and by the end

our brain stopped reacting. Dan and several colleagues put research subjects into an fMRI machine to watch their brain activity when they behaved it dishonestly, and they found that usually when someone first lied for personal gain, they felt bad about it, and there was this big bloom of activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with fear and emotion. But as people continued to lie, that brain activity declined, and this may be evidence that lying

is a slippery slope. We're telling little lies can desensitize us and make it easier to tell bigger ones in the future. But the news from Dan's research isn't all bad. He also found ways to promote honest behavior by priming people with cues that put morality a top of mind. We asked people to do things like try to recall the Ten Commandments or right down an owner code, and we saw that those things increased honesty. This might have

implications for how our important documents are designed. A small change in the layout of our forms might get us to fill them out more honestly. Will you tell me about where the signature line should be on a form? So the signature line should be in the beginning of the form? Why okay? So think about what what do we usually do when we write a form? We write and you fill it up, and then at the end I said, please sign You know the line has been

done already, it's over. You did it. You rationalize that you forgot about it. Instead, what priming tells us is that we should start by getting people to be at the higher level of thinking about their morality. Right, So what we want is to get people to be aware of their own honesty, so we want people to do it first. At this point, if you're feeling pangs of guilt about having been dishonest in the past, well it's another thing. You might be able to blame my mom

or dad. We teach our kids to be dishonest in the social politeness world. It's the first time that you tell a kid don't always tell the truth. For example, you don't want to offend somebody else's feeling, you don't like this kid, don't tell it to them. Other things

are more important. So I'm wondering whether this is kind of the beginning of the way that we teach kids this very very delicate calculus about how much to care about the truth, how much to care about themselves, and how much to care about other people, and how to make this very delicate trade of you don't want your kid at the mall announcing who's old and who's smelling

in a fit of unchecked honesty. On the other hand, a lot of parents actually talk to us about how they are so worried that kids are lying at such a young age, and they're worried they're going to turn into some kind of psychopaths. When they grow up. My name is Candy. I'm a professor at the University of Toronto. I've been studying how children learned to tell lies for the last twenty five years, calling himself was not a master of deception as a boy, or was a terrible

liar as a child. So my sister always could figure out one I lied and she always say, you know, when you lie, your eyes turned the red. So I don't that's true or not, but thoughts. That's how she cut meat. And a lab outfitted with hidden cameras coming and his team tried to discover why some kids start lying earlier than others. We wanted to find out, you know, who are these two yold's who already lie at this tender age, you know, but the majority of them actually

were very honest. So then we measure their i Q. There's no difference between those kids who lied and those kids who did not lie. And then we look at the onion moral and standing line. You know, there's no difference. So and then well maybe just gender, you know, maybe boys are more likely to lie then girls, or vice versa. And turned out that there's no difference between boys and girls. So then we looked closely at two very important count

if skills. Tiny kids don't fully grasp that other people are having their own, unique, subjective experiences. They just presume that you know their grandma, that you're also caught up on the most recent episodes of pat Patrol, that you, too, my enjoy a bite of room temperature period pumpkin. But to lie, they've got to develop what's called theory of mind. They have to realize that each of us has different

motives and thoughts and perceptions. They have to understand that the thoughts in their heads aren't the thoughts in moms or yours or mine. They've also got to develop executive function that allows them to strategize and inhibit any impulse to just blurt out the truth. Both theory of mind and executive function take time to develop. We know that kids begin to tell lies around two and a half years of age, but at that time only about two

and a half year olds would lie. But when the child reaches three years of age, about kids will lie. By the time the kids reach four years of age, about the eight percent of kids will lie, and by seven years of age, almost kids would like Basically, the story is almost all kids at some point in their life and then seemed to be this kind of very universal developmental trajectory. And turn out, these young two year olds who lied how much better exactly functioning abilities than

those kids who are honest. So it's almost like there's a precociousness that's indicated by lying early. It's not like these two year olds are all smoking cigarettes behind the schoolyard a little other jackets, Like they're developing theory of mind early. Yeah, exactly, So am I correct in thinking

your father? So when I hang around my friends who have young kids, it's easy for them to to brag a little bit about like my kids recognizing shapes and letters and she's only nine months old, and my kid is walking and my kid is reading, and we're beating all the milestones. Were you like hoping that your kid was gonna lie really early? So, because I have a lab for testing kids, line when Nathan turns, that's his name.

So when he turned three exactly on his third year birthday, I brought him to my lap and I had my students testing him, and I watched with anxiety. You know, I thought, is he going to be honest? So he is going to tell a lie, and he lied, so I was very happy. So so he figured out, you know, the theory of mind and figure out the exactive functioning at three years of age exactly. I have for a video recording of that. So you throw a hell of

a birthday party. Indeed, when my son was little, I told him that when the ice cream van drove down our street playing its music, that meant it had run out of ice cream. Meal times are a classic setting for parental lies. No, that is clearly not an airplane. That is a rubberized spoon. Dad, if that is your real name, I like to my daughter all day long. Okay, how old is your daughter? Two? And like, what are the kind of wies that you're telling your daughter? Oh?

This tastes great. Yeah, you could definitely have some vetchables. Oh. The woman gleefully deceiving her daughter is Sophie Vanderzi of the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands. She runs experiments to study how we lie to one another. I remember my mom lying to me when I was given a jump rope as a present as a little girl. She was worried that her muscular, not very coordinator daughter was going to spin herself upside down and knock her

teeth out with it. And so she lied to me and told me that the way to use the toy it was to lay it gently on the ground and then jump all around it. And so when my dad came home, he found me playing with my jump rope as one would stamp out of fire. But I could never tell when my mom was lying. And if she still lies, then I still can't. Well, we're basically terrible allied dettection, and we're quite good at lying, and that's

quite problematic. Experiments suggest that humans suck at spotting lies, like genuinely suck. When research participants were asked to identify the liars among a group of people half of whom we're telling the truth and half of whom we're lying, they were right only fifty percent of the time, which is an abysmal success rate. It's just barely better than chance. And as for all that stuff on forensic TV shows, forget about it. One of the first comments you usually

cantus that liars look away. Something you often hear is that they look to the top left corner. They behave a bit sort of shiftly, But those are not actually cutes to the seats, as we know from research and from metal analysis, but that does mean that because people think it's acute. One of the cues that we did find is that looking someone like really in the eye, like sort of uncomfortable eye contact, can be acute to

the seats. So that makes it really complicated. And one of the other problems is that lying is that through something you get better at with practice, So the more you lie, the emotional responses to the line become less and less severe. YEA, when I was five or six, and my uncle took me aside and he had a chalkboard and he did all these drawings of all the trees that we could see around where he lived, and he said, have you ever seen the trees at night?

And I said, well, well no, because I'm asleep. And he said, well you know what happens to trees at night? And I said no, and he said, well, they turned upside down and they're actually rockets and they fly into space and then they come back before the morning and get him planted, and that's what trees do. Polygraph machines, the favorite lie detection devices of TV dramas, are legitimately better than humans. It's spotting to see, but they're not

perfectly reliable either. A polygraph doesn't directly test the truthfulness of a statement. It measures our physical arousal through blood pressure and breathing patterns and perspiration. The idea is that lying usually stresses us out, and we can measure stress. But sometimes, of course, we can be stressed out for other reasons as well, so it's not a perfect indicator,

and polygraph examination involves some interpretation. Two different examiners given the exact same polygraph output might come back with conflicting results. As a kid, I designed my own lie detector test

to be used exclusively on my little brother Max. I drew a series of buttons and dials onto an index card, added a bright red circle where the suspected liar was to place his thumb, and my tiny brown eyed brother dutifully submitted pressing his thumb on the circle, at which point I whisked the index card into my room, shut the door, and turned on my lie detector machine, which ran with a horrible roar. In truth, I was really

running the vacuum cleaner listener. I cannot tell you how guilty I am in recalling this story Maxie, I am so sorry. Next time we hang out, I am buying every round. As Professor Conley pointed out, children's first lives should be celebrated as a milestone, not interrogated with the hoover. But by the time you grow up, you might lie

more than you realize. In an experimental setting where people have to talk for ten minutes to someone they didn't know in a waiting room that was secretly recorded, that people already lied twice on average in this ten minutes conversation with a stranger. So we all lie much more than we think we do. So there was an experimental design that put people in a room with a stranger for ten minutes, and even in the course of that ten minute conversation, they collocked two lies on average. And

what's interesting is they didn't have to impress. They were just in the waiting room waiting to take part in an experiment, not realizing that was already the experiments that they were secretly being filmed. So to your point, you're saying, there's nothing to be gained, right, like, this isn't your boss, this isn't your mom, this isn't your lover, there's no real social stakes here, and we still do benefits, and

we still lie. Remember Allison, the liar that we met at the very beginning of this episode, the one who got the letter of rec from a crush. We dragged her back into the studio to present a little gift for serving as the liar laureate of this episode of Deeply Human. Okay, well, thanks so much Allison for coming in again. No problem, Why am I back? Actually? I

had just wanted to play you some audio. Oh all right, To whomsoever it may concern, I hereby commend Alison Cherry on the slide design and flawless execution of her elegant con May her work serve as an inspiration for future generations of scheming love sick co eds. Sincerely, Curtis Sittenfeld, Are you kidding me? What? How did you make that happen? I wish you could see my face right now. Thank

you so much for that, Curtis Sittenfeld. In addition to being a best selling fiction writer, you are a total boss. And next time we meet, I am buying every round. Allison, for her part, has zero regrets about lying to obtain her letter from her crush worthy t A, and she rereads it every few years. Come, our expert on children's lives, thinks that lying can actually be an important part of a happy life. The fact that the lies exists in our society is because sometimes they serve as lubricant of

social interaction and it makes our lives better. But you put yourself in this situation. Just think about this. If you are honest all the time, all minute, think about what kind of person you're going to be. Just try it the full warm day. I can't guarantee you you're going to be friendless, spouseless, and then it may be jobless. You know, you just nobody would like you if you're always very, very honest. You know you mentioned that you were a lousy liar when you were a kid. Are

you any better now? No? I'm not. You know what's funny is I don't know if I should believe you or not. There's no way, there's no way. Embarrassingly, I'm pretty sure that I lied during the course of this podcast. Remember when Dan Ariali, the Duke Professor, asked me about dating sites and I admitted to shaving off a few pounds. After we spoke, I thought to myself, Wait, which dating site asks for an exact weight. I mean, I know I fibbed on that stuff before, but I think it

was like on my driver's license. I just I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the conversation, and I didn't stop to really make sure I had my facts rate. And just like that, I'm sucked up in this metavortex lying to a lying expert about lying. It's not all intentional, it's not all perfectly calculated. The temptations to be dishonest, right, they just shop all the time, and net means we

need to be very careful. That asks for vigilance, tremendous vigilance. Dan, I'm sorry about the fib If we ever meet in person, I'm buying every round. Man, this is becoming like the most expensive podcast ever. Learning about Dan's research on how little transgressions can pave the way for bigger ones, it's changed the way I behave just a little bit. I'm more likely to pause during an anecdote to get the

names right, even if it dampens the comic timing. And when declining an invitation to hang out, I'm trying to lean less on the old excuse of having work to do, which is always sort of true, but rarely the whole story. And if you'd like to lie less, it might be that honest answers about the daily, unimportant stuff can serve as cross train for the muscles that we need to answer the hard questions truthfully. If lying is a slippery slope,

we can at least work cleats. So to co worker Andy, I don't love the haircut, but you are awesome and I like you no matter what is on or near your head. To the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles on last way in, I was one d and forty six and a half pounds to my mom, so you totally made the right call about the jump rope. I would have knocked my theory of mind right out the back of my little head. On the next Deeply Human, we'll ask why do humans have sex at times that our

fellow mammals don't. So for most female ammost it's two or three days out of a cycle that they have sex, and otherwise they're not willing to have sex with males that initiate it. And there really are that attractive to males either. Males seem to know. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public Media co production with iHeartMedia, and it's hosted by me Dessa