(Author’s note: first thing I’ve written in…over a month. Turns out graduating college and looking for work takes up a lot of one’s free time.)
Admit it: you’ve told a lie or two. Whether it’s claiming that your printer broke to get a few days’ extension on an essay or telling the American public that you “did not have sexual relations with that woman”, we’ve all stretched the truth to save face at one point in our lives.
But surely this is a behavior we acquire as we age – we aren’t born lying.
So when do we actually develop the ability to withhold the truth? A recent study performed by Angela D. Evans and Kang Lee at the University of Toronto sought to find out.
The researchers brought sixty-five two- to three-year-old participants into a room, one at a time, and ran a few baseline tests.
First, the researchers needed to see how developed the kids’ minds were. In order to do this, the kids completed a variety of game-like tests to assess their verbal and mental processing skills.
Then, each child played a guessing game with an adult experimenter. In the game, a stuffed toy animal was placed on a table behind the child, and an animal sound (such as a lion’s roar or a dog’s bark) was played. The child then guessed which toy the sound belonged to. Pretty simple, right?
But here comes the twist: after the child correctly guessed the first two toys, the experimenter placed a new toy behind the child and then turned away, looking through a bin to find a storybook. She told the child not to peek at the toy behind them on the table while the animal sound played.
Unsurprisingly, about 80 percent of the kids peeked at the toy anyway, since the researcher could not see them. When asked if they broke the rules and snuck a look at the toy, 40 percent of those who peeked lied about it.
However, the researchers found that as age of the child increased, so did the likelihood that they would lie about what they did.
Most of the two-year-old “peekers” confessed to their crime immediately when the adult asked them whether or not they had peeked at the toy. As the kids’ age increased, though, so did the likelihood that they would lie. For each month of age, peekers were 1.14 times more likely to say they hadn’t peeked at the toy; that is, if a child was two years and five months old, they were more likely to lie than a child that was two years and four months old.
Lying, therefore, is a skill we acquire in very early childhood. Evans and Lee assert that although lying is generally seen as a negative attribute, the development of the ability to lie coincides with the development of higher executive functioning skills – things like memory, reasoning, and problem solving. These skills are important to normal brain development as a whole, so the onset of lying can be viewed as a milestone in cognitive development.
So lying is not all bad after all. If that’s true, maybe the other vices we develop in early childhood – stealing a candy bar, cheating on a spelling test – could also be viewed as just benchmarks in the growth of our young brains.
d i s c o m b o b u l a t o r i u m 