This Attitude Is Reflected In The Views Of Many Parents

Our educational system, with its emphasis on creativity and individual attention, is largely based on the idea that a child’s natural disposition is toward the good. She would play the sounds of toys behind Jonah’s back, and all he had to do was guess what each toy was. The initial two sounds were easy for him to identify. The second sound was a recorded voice saying, To infinity and beyond! As Jonah knew, this is the motto of Disney’s Buzz Lightyear. The sound of the third toy, though, left Jonah stumped. It was a simple melody that Jonah couldn’t associate with any particular toy. Just as he was about to give up, the woman playing the sounds was told by an assistant that she had a phone call. She prepared to leave Jonah alone in the room, instructing him not to peek at the mysterious toy behind his back while she was gone. As she left, she warned him again, Remember, no peeking! For a minute or so, Jonah held out, but finally the temptation was too great. He turned around and saw that the toy was a Barney doll. Then he heard the doorknob rattling, and he turned back around quickly. The friendly woman returned to the room and asked him if he had figured out what the toy was.

Do Yourself A Favour

He happily declared that it was a Barney doll. While the ubiquity of cheating is probably surprising, the fact that it goes on may not be. Our preconceived notions about teenagers probably allow for the fact that they cheat in high school. As any teenager who has been followed around an electronics store by a salesclerk can tell you, adult attitudes toward children once they reach thirteen are less than wholly trusting. But let’s turn the child development clock back a few stages and look at our attitudes toward younger children. The idea of young children as innocents, unsullied by the experiences of later life, is a common one. It also has an impressive philosophical pedigree. American culture in particular seems to embrace Rousseau’s ideas about the innate goodness of children. Further, unlike in, for instance, Scotland, where children are punished as adults starting at the age of eight, our justice system grants younger members of society special leeway, as if crime is not indicative of the true nature of their characters. This attitude is reflected in the views of many parents I speak with, who believe that their children possess an innate, and powerful, moral compass. My children don’t lie, I’ve been assured by many a kindergarten mother. When we look into the face of a child, it’s hard to believe he or she could be capable of the cunning, much the less the malice, we generally associate with deceit.

Make Sure You're Sure

However, developmental psychologists who have been studying questions of deceptive behavior in children for decades would argue differently. Indeed, what they have found stands in contrast to the simple goodness we typically attribute to young children. One of the primary tools psychologists utilize in studying childhood deception involves what’s called the temptation resistance paradigm, or, in simpler terms, peeking experiments. It is in such an experiment that Jonah finds himself in the scenario described at the beginning of this section. And the results of her study, broadly speaking, are typical for peeking experiments. Depending on the variation of the peeking experiment, sometimes as many as 95 percent of the guilty peekers lied. The peeking experiment demonstrates that young children are not as honest as we might like to think. As with teenagers cheating on tests, the typical behavior in scenarios like the peeking experiment is for children to lie. The fact of childhood deception is not limited to the lab, either. Observed in preschool or elementary school, interacting with peers or with their parents, most children lie. Lying is not limited to any particular demographic, either. Girls lie as well as boys.

Under The Gun

Deception in children is common enough, in fact, that psychologists have been able to identify clear patterns in how children lie as they age. Verbal lies start in most children around the age of three, though in some children they can occur as early as two. Lying typically accompanies children’s understanding of the fact that their parents have rules and that there are punishments associated with breaking them. The earliest are almost reflexive attempts to avoid these punishments. In other words, the first lies children tell are often of the I didn’t do it variety. Importantly, these lies are as unsophisticated as the phrasing suggests. Children’s lies become more nuanced around the age of four or five. As children begin preschool and have greater peer interaction, the need for lies that ingratiate or boost a fragile ego increases. Again, in these early forms such lying is crude, but it often serves the same psychological needs as adult lying. Whereas an adult may brag about exaggerated success at work, a child may brag about a trip he took to hunt down the Loch Ness monster. By this age children have the social wherewithal to use deceit to shade their own opinions. Clearly we can see that as children grow up, the lies they tell become increasingly complex. In less than three years, they move from basically transparent attempts to escape blame to subtle maskings of their true opinions that reference the sensitivities and egos of others. And there is also another important way in which childhood deception alters with age. I told the participants that their goal was to convince an interviewer that they liked the repulsive drink as much as the good one, as they might if they were acting in a commercial. I videotaped their reactions and descriptions of the two drinks, and then showed these videos to a group of adult observers. The observers could usually tell when the first graders had tried the unpleasant drink. Despite some attempts at masking their displeasure, their puckered lips and frowns gave them away. So the legend goes.