Lee – lying research

The research about lying really is concerned with how children learn to communicate with others practically.  Sometimes we as parents and educators always think honesty is the ultimate goal, one of the most important moral characters is actually honesty.  Now we want our kids to be honest and that must be true all over the world.  But when you look at, in reality, when you interact with each other, you actually do not, as adults, we do not tell the truth all the time.   For example, we actually sometimes tell white lies, you know, you look great, your haircut is great, your dress is great and et cetera.   

Our kids, we don’t really teach our kids explicitly about these kinds of rules but at the same time we are teaching our kids not to lie.  And so then they come in to situations such as a politeness situation, they don’t know what to do and sometimes get punished, sometimes get scolded, sometimes get bad reactions from the people they have told the truth to.  But then the question is how do we learn in one situation we ought to be honest because we know that most of the adults are very, very honest.  But they occasionally tell lies and some of the lies are, you know, innocuous and some of the lies actually are told for politeness purposes. So then it becomes a very challenging, social task for a child and so that kind of intrigues me.  How do we crack this mystery, you know, as a child, while we are learning language, learning the rules of society, norms of society and how to read, how to write, math and all sorts of things you have to learn.  But how at the same time you also are learning this so that intrigues me. 

One of the things we were very surprised by was the age by which a child starts to tell a lie.  So it’s about two and a half years of age which interestingly was reported by Darwin about his first son and he wrote the very first report about kids telling lies in a scientific journal and that’s the very first… 1887, something like that, about his own son telling a lie to cover up his transgression which is to steal sugar from the kitchen at two and a half years of age, so interesting.  So many years later, you know, I actually found evidence to show that’s true.  But any case, so two and a half years of age kids start to tell lies.   

But another interesting thing is not everybody’s lying, not all the two year olds or three year olds are lying – only a small group of kids are lying.  So two years, two and a half years of age, it’s about 25% of the kids who are lying.  By three years of age there’s about 50% of kids lying.  By four years of age, is about 90% of kids lying, by seven years of age is about 100% of kids lying.  So you have this interesting development or change and we have replicated this finding in different countries.  Others have done so as well so it seems to be very universal, you know, when and how you develop the tendency to tell lies.