Born Liars (4 page)

To ensure a robust set of data, Talwar returned to both schools the following day and carried out more interviews. When she analysed the results, the first thing that struck her was the length of time the pupils from School B waited before they turned around to peek. Most children who play the peeking game wait less than ten seconds before taking their chance, and the children of School A conformed to this pattern. But School B's kids waited much longer – for up to a minute – before sneaking a peek. Perhaps School B's teachers would have felt proud at such evidence of inner discipline, but they would have been less pleased with Talwar's most striking finding: regardless of age,
all
their pupils lied, instinctively and immediately. The alacrity with which they did so seemed to have nothing to do with their cultural background; the results from School A were very similar to those from schools in North America or Europe.

Not only were the School B pupils all lying, they were brilliant at it. Wherever the peeking game is played, younger children tend to confess to their lie immediately, or make such a flimsy defence that it barely counts. (‘When I say, “Well, how did you know it was a football?” a three-year-old will often say, “Because I
saw
it,”' Talwar told me.) Lying involves a considerable amount of physical and emotional discipline, as well as mental dexterity. The child has to control his expression and body language so as not to give himself away with a stray smile, a tell-tale flash of the eyes or a wince of anxiety – all while keeping his story straight. As you'd expect, such skills tend to improve with age: three-year-olds get their story mixed up or laugh at their own fibs, whereas four- and five-year-olds are better at making their stories believable, and telling them with a poker face.

This pattern was reflected in the results from School A. The School B pupils, however, were all masterful liars. Whether aged three or six, they denied having peeked with impenetrable conviction, and confidently maintained their story when challenged. The slightly older children were even careful not to guess correctly first time around, in order to give the false impression that they were groping towards an answer by a process of intuition and deduction. ‘I thought it sounded a bit like a cellphone. But I know you're not allowed to have a cellphone in school. So then I thought it must be something else . . . an animal maybe . . .' These were skilful performances, requiring psychological nous, creative thinking and dramatic flair.

In the early 1990s Talwar studied at St Andrew's University, where her tutor was Andrew Whiten. What she learnt from the work of Whiten and Byrne was that lying is an inescapable part of being a social animal, and that children are likely to find the lying strategy that best helps them adapt to their social environment. Whiten and Byrne observed that it is young or low-ranked chimps that are most likely to engage in tactical deception, and the philosopher Sisella Bok has speculated that children develop the habit of lying as a last line of defence against the overwhelming physical and social power of adults. ‘The weak cannot be sincere,' said François de La Rochefoucauld. By ratcheting up the punishments for lying, teachers and parents can force children further on to the defensive – with unintended consequences.

For the children in School A it made sense to tell the truth most of the time and lie occasionally. They knew they might get into trouble if caught out, but not too much. The children in School B, however, had adapted their behaviour to life in what Talwar described as a ‘punitive environment', in which self-defence was the highest priority. They knew that telling the truth would often get them into trouble; they also knew that getting caught out in any type of lie, however small, would lead to a painful punishment. So they had learned, even at the age of three, to gamble on deception, employing a logic that went something like, ‘If there's any possibility at all of getting into trouble, then tell a lie – just be sure to do it well.' As Talwar put it to me, ‘If you're going to get into trouble for small things, you may as well go for broke.'

School B's approach, based on a regime designed by Catholic missionaries, was intended as a harsh but effective way of instilling good moral habits into children. Talwar's research revealed that its regime hadn't succeeded in knocking all the lies out of School B's children. Quite the opposite: it turned out to be the perfect method for producing habitual, highly skilled little liars.

Children get mixed messages from their parents about lying. On the one hand, they're taught that lying is bad; on the other they're admonished when they tell grandma, truthfully, that they have never worn the scarf she bought them for Christmas. Kids note that when they lie in certain circumstances, their parents applaud them for it, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Being observant creatures, they also notice their parents telling lies to others, whether it be the telemarketer on the phone or the friend who asks an awkward question. As they grow up, they learn to manage the ideas that lying is both wrong, and necessary. In one of Talwar's experiments, a child receives a present that looks like it's going to be a toy but turns out, on unwrapping, to be a bar of soap. The overwhelming majority of seven-year-olds openly express their displeasure. By the time they're eleven, about half of children will lie convincingly and say they like it.
²
As they grow up, it's not so much that children learn
not
to lie, as
when
to lie.

Nancy Darling has studied the social lives of adolescents for nearly twenty years in countries including Chile, the Philippines, Italy and the United States. In every society, nearly all teens will admit, in interviews, to lying at home. Their lies are usually limited to a few issues: romantic relationships, the use of alcohol or other substances, the violation of rules about where and with whom they're allowed to hang out. At the same time, most teenagers profess to valuing honesty, and many boast of having strong, open relationships with their parents. It's only when researchers ask about it in detail that the extent of their dishonesty is revealed, even to themselves. ‘They're surprised by it,' Darling tells me. ‘They don't like to think of themselves as liars.'

As with the rest of us, teenagers' attitudes to lying are complicated. On the one hand, they lie for reasons of straightforward self-interest – to avoid punishment, and to maintain a carefully managed image for the audience of their parents. On the other, they are lying to protect their parents, reasoning that the truth would upset them unnecessarily. Parents often collude in such deceptions, tacitly agreeing not to probe into areas of their child's life that they may not wish to know too much about. Darling remarks about her own teenage son, ‘He doesn't lie to me about his sex life, because I don't ask him.'

At school, as at home, there are certain circumstances in which lying regularly pays off. For instance, the stigma attached to being a ‘snitch' or a ‘grass' is near-universal, and it can put kids in uncomfortable situations as they try to balance conflicting obligations to teachers, parents, and peers. A classic experiment from 1969, staged in an American high-school, illustrates the subtlety of the social calculations involved. During a history lesson, the teacher was called out of the classroom, apparently to take an important phone call. One of the students got up from his seat, strode up to the teacher's desk and swiped a pile of money that the teacher had left there. ‘How about that?' he exclaimed triumphantly to the class, returning to his seat. The other students didn't know it, but the thieving student was playing out a role agreed earlier with the researchers.

The scenario was played out twice in different classes, with two different students playing the role of transgressor. In one, the student chosen was the boy whose name came up most often when classmates were asked to list five people whom they considered worthy to represent the class at a banquet for school representatives. He was the ‘high status' student. In the other scenario, a ‘low status' student, considered less trustworthy by his peers, played the role. After both incidents, the students from each classroom were interviewed by one of the psychologists, either singly or in pairs. They were asked three questions: ‘Do you know whether someone took some change from the teacher's desk today? Do you know who took it? If so, who took it?' All the students interviewed alone told the truth, regardless of whether the classmate in question was high or low in status. But when students were interviewed in pairs, things were different. Now, when the culprit was high in status,
nobody
told the truth. Everyone denied that they even knew about any money being stolen. When it came to the low status culprit, however, everyone told the truth, and named him. The students had an instinct for honesty, but they were prepared to forego it in order to avoid being seen to betray the most popular kid in class.

The reason lying doesn't become a problem for most children isn't simply that they get taught that lying is wrong, and so stop. It's that they learn the unwritten social rules of when to tell the truth and when to lie. Parents can help them learn these rules, but only if they allow their children to feel trusted. Most children's lies are told in order to avoid embarrassment or to stay out of trouble, rather than to manipulate others, and punishing these dodges too vigorously can trap kids into a cycle of dishonesty. ‘If you walk into a room to find your five-year-old with milk spattered everywhere and ask ‘Did you do that?' you're inviting them to lie,' says Darling. ‘If you say
, ‘
Ah, you spilt the milk. Let's clean it up,' she's less likely to lie. If she still does, it's best to laugh it off – whilst making it clear you know she's lying. There's no point telling her she's a bad person because she lied.' If a child feels her character is constantly under assault she will quickly build a protective carapace of deceit around herself. Children who live with the threat of heavy punishment for lying may simply become better liars.

It's sometimes said that the best approach for parents to adopt when it comes to their children's lying is to simply let it go and wait for them to grow out of it. But to Darling, this is a betrayal of the child: ‘If they get away with a lie, they'll lie some more, and pretty soon they won't know when to stop.' The best parents, she says, are warm but strict. She recalls that when she was young her father told her that he could tell when she was lying just by smelling her elbows. ‘It was
years
before I realised this wasn't actually true,' she laughs. Now, she admires his shrewdness; he'd created an ostensibly objective test (itself a benign lie) to detect her lies, one that allowed them both to acknowledge the transgression without throwing her moral character into question or threatening punishment.

Victoria Talwar runs a version of the Peeking Game in which the researcher reads the child a short story before the game begins. One story is
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
, in a version that sees the boy get eaten along with the sheep because of his repeated lies. Another is
George Washington and the Cherry Tree
, in which the young George confesses to hacking down the tree with his shiny new axe. The story ends with his father's words: ‘George, I'm glad that you cut down the tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.' Talwar was interested to see if the stories had any effect on the willingness of children to lie during the subsequent game and, if so, which story was more effective. You might imagine that
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
would work better. After all, it ends with a vision of terrifying punishment. But in fact, children who were read this story were
more
likely to lie than normal. By contrast, the story of George Washington's truthfulness inspired children to follow suit – even when Washington was replaced by a nondescript name in order to eliminate the potential for the first president's fame to influence the child. According to Talwar, the power of the story is that it teaches children to take pleasure in honesty, rather than instilling in them the fear of being found out.

The research of Darling, Talwar and others suggests that the most reliable way to raise a trustworthy child is to trust
them
; to work on their best instincts rather than attempting to eradicate their worst – in short, to create an environment that makes honesty feel like the best policy.

Though he was writing in an age of strict and often punitive moral instruction, Charles Darwin had arrived at the same conclusion long before:

‘As this child was educated solely by working on his good feelings, he soon became as truthful, open, and tender, as anyone could desire.'

Liars, artists, madmen

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

William Faulkner

In 2004 the satellite broadcaster Sky launched a legal action against one of its suppliers, Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The case rested on Sky's charge that EDS had deceived them over the length and cost of an IT project. Sky was demanding hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. Industry observers were sceptical about Sky's chances of success; a case on this scale had never been won before, and it would be very hard to prove that fraudulent misrepresentation, rather than simple misunderstanding, was at the root of the dispute.

On day thirty-seven of the trial, Joe Galloway, the EDS executive whose integrity was most at issue, faced Sky's barrister Mark Howard across the courtroom. Taking a break from the complex substance of the allegations, Howard questioned Galloway about the Masters in Business Administration he had been awarded by Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands, mentioned by Galloway in his witness statement. Galloway needed little prompting to expand on his year of study on the beautiful island of St John. He said that he had attended Concordia College while on the island in the service of a previous, Texas-based employer who had tasked him with overseeing a project for a number of Coca-Cola distributors based on St John. This required him to fly to and from the island by plane, on ‘a small commuter flight . . . a four or six-seater airplane' . He described the three main college buildings, which he had got to know well – a rigorous progamme of evening classes required him to spend three hours a night on campus, several evenings a week. He promised to provide textbooks from the course to the court, and eventually did submit one.

During this part of his testimony, Galloway spoke confidently and fluently, as he had throughout the trial, and even seemed to be enjoying himself. The uninformed observer, and even most informed observers, would never have guessed he was making it all up.

* * *

A psychiatric case study published in 1985 by the neurologist Antonio Damasio tells the story of a middle-aged woman who had suffered brain damage following a series of strokes. She retained most cognitive abilities, including coherent speech.
What
she said was rather unpredictable, however. Checking on her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. She spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband, and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there she replied, ‘Falklandese. What else?'

In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating'. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem which affects a small proportion of brain damaged people. In the literature it is defined as ‘the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive'. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission – there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill – confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.

Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of their circumstances – of why they're in hospital, or talking to a doctor. Some invent occupations for themselves, or pretend that they are doing their work as they talk. One patient, when asked about his surgical scar, explained that during World War II he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family described how at various times they had died in his arms, or been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren't out to deceive – they engage in what the neuropsychologist Morris Moscovitch calls ‘honest lying'. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a ‘compulsion to narrate': a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.

Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain's frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Hearing a question, or just a word, triggers a whole set of associations for the patient. Of course, this happens to all of us – hear the word scar and you too might think about war wounds, old movies, or tales of near-death experiences. But you don't let all of these random thoughts reach consciousness – and if you do, you don't articulate them. You self-censor for the sake of truth (I wasn't in World War II), sense (you can't be killed and come back to life) and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators do none of these things. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story out of the confusion.

The wider significance of confabulation is what it tells us about the normal human mind: specifically, it exposes the mind's gushing stream of invention. We are natural-born fabulists, constantly spinning stories out of our experience and imagination, testing the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. It's just that, most of the time, we exercise our cerebral censors, exerting control over which stories we tell, to whom – and which we want the hearer to believe. The
degree
of control exercised, however, can depend on personality, and on the moment.

* * *

Mark Howard may have been surprised at the length and detail of Galloway's extemporisation but he was more than happy to let him continue, because he knew he was lying. In the course of conducting an exhaustive background check on Galloway, Sky's legal team had discovered that there was not and never had been a Concordia College on St John; there was not, nor ever had been, a Coca-Cola office or facility on the island. Nor was there an airport; it was not possible to fly onto the island. The barcode and stamp on the book Galloway produced marked it as the property of a library in Missouri, near Galloway's home. A few days after Galloway's testimony, Howard presented to the court an MBA certificate that his pet schnauzer Lulu had been awarded by Concordia College and University, an unaccredited institution based in Delaware that awards degrees based on ‘Life Experience'. The barrister pointed out that Lulu had managed to achieve a higher mark than Joe Galloway. He also displayed a letter of recommendation written on behalf of Lulu by Concordia College's president and vice-chancellor.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Joe Galloway's lying was its unnecessary elaborateness. Once Howard began to ask Galloway about his MBA, Galloway's best tactic would have been to confess to its origin, since a moment's reflection would have told him that in a case with such high stakes it was likely that every aspect of his witness statement would be pored over for veracity; a second option would have been to stonewall most of the barrister's questions by claiming not to remember much about it. Instead, he recalled his year on St John at length and in finely drawn detail. Galloway was exhibiting something that lying experts term ‘duping delight' – although perhaps his delight lay less in the duping than in the exercise of his own fertile imagination.

Explaining his decision in favour of Sky, the judge said that the apparent ease and confidence with which Galloway had lied about the MBA had destroyed his entire credibility as a witness, and indicated a propensity to deceit in his business dealings. Lying about an educational qualification was one thing, said the judge, but Galloway had demonstrated something else: ‘an astounding ability to be dishonest'. EDS was ordered to pay Sky over two hundred million pounds.

* * *

In the film
The Usual Suspects
, detectives engage in a desperate search for the mysterious Keyser Söze, a ruthless, violent and brilliant criminal who has acquired a mythical reputation in the underworld. Though his brutal deeds are legion, barely anything is known about Söze's identity, his past, or even what he looks like – those that meet him have a habit of dying horrible deaths. In their investigations the detectives rely on the testimony of Roger ‘Verbal' Kint (played by Kevin Spacey), a lowly con-artist with a pronounced limp, who has been granted immunity from prosecution in return for telling what he knows of Söze's story.

Verbal describes how he and a small group of career criminals were blackmailed by Söze, through Söze's lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), into destroying a large drug shipment belonging to Söze's rivals, during which operation all but Verbal and one other man were killed. He also tells the investigators what he knows of Söze's life; of his beginnings as a low-level drug dealer in his native Turkey, and of how, after the Hungarian mafia kill one of his children, he wreaks terrible revenge on them and becomes a faceless, fearsome one-man force of destruction. Verbal's tale directs the police to a man called Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne); apparently the real Söze.

In the movie's famous final sequence, however, it is revealed to Verbal's interrogator – and to us – that Keyser Söze is none other than Verbal Kint. Verbal's story was an elaborate lie, an improvised concoction of strung-together details snatched from his immediate surroundings, including the crowded bulletin board in the office where the interrogation took place. As the investigator stares at the board, he recognises random words and phrases from the story he has just been told, and feels the cold rush of revelation. He drops the coffee cup he has been sipping from during the interrogation. In slow motion, we see it fall to the floor and smash. The manufacturer's logo, printed on the bottom of the cup, reads
KOBAYASHI
.

Like the appropriately nicknamed Verbal, confabulating patients make up their stories using whatever comes to hand. As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, their stories are conjured up instantaneously – an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they're off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the launch-pad for a solo. A confabulating patient might explain to her visiting friend that she's in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been ‘suicided' by her family. These patients are like novelists as described by Henry James: people on whom ‘nothing is wasted' though, unlike novelists, or liars, they are entirely at the mercy of their material.

Both Verbal Kint and the Falklands woman are exercising one of the core processes of the creative imagination. In
A
Treatise on Human Nature
the philosopher David Hume writes:

To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects . . . But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted . . . In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will.

William James (Henry's brother) called the ability to make novel connections between ideas ‘divergent thinking', a mode of thought in which ‘the unexpected seems the only law'. When I asked the writer Will Self about his creative process he echoed this theme, describing the creative mindset to me as a continuous willingness to pick up on aspects of the world, aspects of thought, and put them together with other things to produce juxtapositions. We get a glimpse of a creatively focused confabulatory process in
No Direction Home,
Martin Scorsese's documentary about the early career of Bob Dylan. It's 1966, and Dylan is standing on a street corner in Kensington, London, wearing a blue suede jacket, Ray-Bans, and pinstripe trousers. He is on his first trip to Britain and in a playful, high-spirited mood. Dylan has come across a series of three painted signs on a pet shop, which evidently doubles as a tobacconist. He reads them aloud:

WE WILL COLLECT, CLIP, BATH & RETURN YOUR DOG

CIGARETTES AND TOBACCO

ANIMALS AND BIRDS BOUGHT OR SOLD ON COMMISSION

Dylan then uses these words as the raw material for a series of verbal riffs that are part nursery rhyme, part Beat poetry. Dancing around, waving his cigarette in the air and giggling at his own inventiveness, he spits out new versions faster than most of us can think:

I want a dog that's gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette, and give tobacco to my animals and give my bird a commission.

I'm looking for a place to bathe my bird, buy my dog, collect my clip, sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.

I'm looking for a place that's gonna animal my soul, clip my return, bathe my foot, and collect my dog.

Part of what makes this vignette so compelling is that it lays bare one of the key operations of improvisational creativity: taking elements of the familiar or mundane and remixing them until something new is born. It would be stretching it to call the resulting doggerel art, but this is where much art begins: in the power of confabulatory combination. Dylan's creativity often spilt over into lying, especially when it came to his own biography. When first making a name for himself in New York he told interviewers that he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, had lived in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Kansas, and had been taught guitar by the blues singers Arvella Gray and Mance Lipscombe. In fact, Dylan had lived only in Minnesota and New York by that point, and had never met Gray or Lipscombe. This is exactly the sort of story a confabulating patient would tell, mixing truth with fantasy and wish-fulfilment. The difference is that Dylan presumably knew he was fibbing.