Recycling Sound Bites from the Four Basic Food Groups Era

My hometown newspaper rocks. I read it every day without fail and always appreciate that value it brings to my life. This does not mean I always agree with the writers. 

One writer, the parenting guy, I disagree with most of the time. Usually I either ignore my reaction or sometimes I don't even read him because it is too easy to predict what he is going to say. While I believe it is likely that his is a good man, a person I would probably like having a beer with, in his column he only has one message.

My initial reaction to his most recent column "Lying Kids are Sociopaths in the Making," was to think, lying comes in many forms, including having such a relentless ax to grind that one concocts opportunities to repeat one’s favorite sound bite in circumstances where the initiating event or comment actually have no relationship to what you wanted to say.

That type of lying is also deeply disrespectful and dishonest, since one simply lurks in the shadows ready to pounce like a medieval troll on truly unsuspecting passersby, who are engaged in a conversation unrelated to your soundbite.

Another form of lying, related to this, is to transform stories told by others who do not confirm the brilliance of your sound bite into straw men so you can eviscerate them with your trusty sound bite anvil. Even though no one was talking to you, and certainly no one was talking about your archaic sound bite.

After beginning to read the offending statement that triggered yet another launching of that same pitifully self-loathing sound bite ABJ readers have suffered through for too long, it occurred to me that something else was going on.

Reading the offending article requires one to be curious, to be interested in learning more about the world we live in, to be humble about the complexity of real world challenges we all face. This ABJ writer, unlike nearly all others who write for this amazing newspaper, lacks these characteristics.

It might still be true that his knee-jerk reaction remains a sociopathic form of lying, but it is also true that he central message to readers is to abandon inquiry and reject curiosity, distrust data and dismiss education, so you can simply cling to the same tired sound bites I have been feeding you since the dark ages.

Okay, now that all that is off my chest, let’s turn to the offending New York Times article, pasted below in its entirety.

Should parents be troubled when their kids start to deceive them?

Odds are, most of us would say yes. We believe honesty is a moral imperative, and we try to instill this belief in our children. Classic morality tales like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and “Pinocchio” speak to the dangers of dishonesty, and children who lie a lot, or who start lying at a young age, are often seen as developmentally abnormal, primed for trouble later in life.

But research suggests the opposite is true. Lying is not only normal; it’s also a sign of intelligence.

[I suspect our ABJ guardian of morality stopped reading at this point, unable to contain his fury over the suggestion that a moral imperative is not always more important than anything else…including understanding the behavior of the children we hope might become morally uprights adults.

Read the text would be a good place to start. Because simply reasserting (again) a superficial understanding of morality-without-gray-areas does not help and is likely to prevent us from seeing the developmental stages in play here, and as such likely to encourage us to misinterpret what is going on to the detriment of our children.

Our ABJ guardian reads the effort to wrestle with the data here as rejecting morality, which it is not, other than in the sense that the NYT author is not choosing to focus on morality or to adopt our ABJ’s thin understanding of morality as my way of the highway.

Yes, we observe that lying is normal. Let that sink in. That is what the data makes clear. Over 80% certainly suggests it is the norm. And the data further shows that the more intelligent children lie more often at this stage in their development.

At this point, my curiosity is piqued because this sounds counter intuitive. At the same time, I immediately wonder if the usual punitive approach to normal childhood lying might not overlook a more complex picture…as punitive approaches nearly always do…causing more harm than good. But not our ABJ guardian. I readily admit this is my preferred sound bite here, but I am not using it to stop reading.

Our ABJ colleague reframes this in a way that looks nothing like what we actually read below. What he sees here (which is not actually here) is a recipe for creating sociopaths.

He chooses to then frame it as a parenting choice to ‘put a higher premium’ on either intelligence or morality. Again, not what the NYT says at all. That is what one would call an either/or sucker’s choice, a question designed to look like an honest question but since it has only one ‘right’ answer it is anything but honest…and entirely unrelated to the NYT article. Let’s turn to that now and come back to our ABJ guardian later.]

Kids discover lying as early as age 2, studies have found. In one experiment, children were asked not to peek at a toy hidden behind them while the researcher withdrew from the room under false pretenses. Minutes later, the researcher returned and asked the child if he or she peeked.

This experiment, designed by the developmental psychologist Michael Lewis in the mid-1980s and performed in one form or another on hundreds of kids, has yielded two consistent findings. The first is that a vast majority of children will peek at the toy within seconds of being left alone. The other is that a significant number of them lie about it. At least a third of 2-year-olds, half of 3-year-olds and 80 percent or more of children 4 and older will deny their transgression, regardless of their gender, race or family’s religion.

[Regardless of whether or not a child is raised in a God-fearing, morality-driven household held in high esteem by our ABJ guardian…80% of the children chose to lie. That is what we mean when we say it is normal, it is the norm, it is what happens most, or nearly all, of the time. Denying this fact gets us no where.]

Children are also remarkably good at lying. In a series of additional studies based on the same experimental model, a range of adults — including social workers, primary-school teachers, police officers and judges — were shown footage of kids who were either lying or telling the truth about having committed a transgression, with the aim of seeing who could spot the liars. Astonishingly, none of the adults (not even the kids’ parents) could consistently detect the lies.

Why do some children start lying at an earlier age than others? What separates them from their more honest peers? The short answer is that they are smarter.

Professor Lewis has found that toddlers who lie about peeking at the toy have higher verbal I.Q.s than those who don’t, by as much as 10 points. (Children who don’t peek at the toy in the first place are actually the smartest of all, but they are a rarity.)

[This is where our ABJ guardian might have found grounds for his sound bite, which is why I suspect he did not read past the first two paragraphs. While our ABJ writer believes the question to ask is does being a good liar make one smarter or being smarter make one a good liar…that is not at all what we observe here. We observe that when we compare liars to non-liars we find that liars are smarter.

We have no data on the direction of causation. But we do have data that ought to suggest some humility and caution—we cannot assume that a child who lies is making a stupid mistake or that our response to childhood lying can assume we can successfully intervene by exclusively focusing on the morality of truth-telling, ignoring the cognitive attributes associate with learning to communicate this way.

Notice that little here is set up to refute our ABJ guardian’s sound bite, but rather designed to use the findings to help us ask new and more illuminating questions, so we might improve our understanding of the world and our parenting…rather than to justify returning to the same tired sucker’s choice questions that have gotten us nowhere.]

Other research has shown that the children who lie have better “executive functioning skills” (an array of faculties that enable us to control our impulses and remain focused on a task) as well as a heightened ability to see the world through other people’s eyes, a crucial indicator of cognitive development known as “theory of mind.” (Tellingly, children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is characterized by weaker executive functioning, and those with spectrum disorders such as autism, which are characterized by deficits in theory of mind, have trouble with lying.) Young liars are even more socially adept and well adjusted, according to recent studies of preschoolers.

[So, if this is accurate, it suggests we want to approach childhood lying carefully, perhaps tapping into our child’s heightened observational skills and capacity to put herself in another’s shoes as an indicator of how to nudge them from using these skills to lie rather than to communicate more clearly. Our ABJ guardian actually closes his piece with a suggested action that might follow from such an inquiry.

But he is so blinded by his sound bites that he does not see that he is celebrating an approach to parenting premised on parental lying as an effective tool to stop childhood lying. So, while his suggestion does focus on the cognitive (despite his insistence we should focus on the moral) dimension, because he comes to this without engaging with the data and his own curiosity, he fails to consider the negative consequences of teaching the morality of truth-telling through systematic lying.]

The psychologist Kang Lee, who has been researching deception in children for more than two decades, likes to tell parents that if they discover their child lying at age 2 or 3, they should celebrate. But if your child is lagging behind, don’t worry: You can speed up the process. Training children in executive functioning and theory of mind using a variety of interactive games and role-playing exercises can turn truth-tellers into liars within weeks, Professor Lee has found. And teaching kids to lie improves their scores on tests of executive functioning and theory of mind. Lying, in other words, is good for your brain.

[This is where our curiosity-impaired ABJ guardian’s head explodes. He says “teaching a child to lie in the hopes he or she will become smarter is not recommended.” He might be right here. But teaching our children to be clever, to understand how communication is layered, nuanced, and self-interested--the many ways the meaning of words are often not what they initially appear to be--is certainly an important life skill for anyone who does not want to grow up to become a welcome mat. So, rather than dismiss it out of hand, I am again intrigued. Curious. And skeptical.]

For parents, the findings present something of a paradox. We want our children to be clever enough to lie but morally disinclined to do so. And there are times when a child’s safety depends on getting at the truth, as in criminal cases involving maltreatment or abuse. How can we get our children to be honest?

[This is the type of framing that drives our ABJ guardian bonkers. This framing recognizes the complexity of the challenges here, rather than seeking refuge is simplistic sound bites that only capture the most superficial dimensions of the real world challenges embedded here…for our children and for ourselves.

It is complicated. There is gray area. Framing it as a paradox is appropriate and smart, because parenting requires us to think (rather than read from his list of commandments that are never wrong) and wrestle with ambiguity and listen to our children in order to find ways forward that actually work.

Then the next paragraph hits our ABJ guardian right between the eyes because he has long been an advocate of spanking and other excessively punitive approaches repeatedly shown to be either ineffective or counter-productive.]

In general, carrots work better than sticks. Harsh punishments like spanking do little to deter lying, research indicates, and if anything may be counterproductive. In one study, Professor Lee and the developmental psychologist Victoria Talwar compared the truth-telling behaviors of West African preschoolers from two schools, one that employed highly punitive measures such as corporal punishment to discipline students and another that favored more tempered methods like verbal reprimands and trips to the principal’s office. Students at the harsher school were not only more likely to lie but also far better at it.

[Since this West African study is not used to celebrate making students smarter through harsher punishments, this tempers the earlier claim about teaching executive functioning skills. The author of the NYT article (not the author of the study) appears to have been extending this idea to teaching lying as a journalistic technique likely not reflecting the scholarly work of the researcher here. Or this contradicts the earlier claim. This is a question I still want to know more about.

As I read the text below the difference seems to be approaches that are restorative and relational work better (than ‘scared straight’ approaches) because they recognize that lying is just one illustration, one area, where we are trying to teach our children communication and relationship skills, empathy, the ability to read non-verbal communication and situational cues that will help them stay safe and succeed in life.

When our children are paralyzed by fear they may be more obedient, but they are almost certainly not learning the communication skills they need to navigate future conflicts successfully—the cognitive deficit we are embedding within them is sure to make it even more difficult for them to develop and honor their own moral compass as they grow older--to find a way to be both thoughtful and discerning, moral and not a welcome mat.

I don’t at all know what to do with the final insight here that we can reduce lying by paying children to tell the truth. That seems to contradict other research on the counter-productive nature of using extrinsic motivations to try to boost intrinsic motivational skills.]

Witnessing others being praised for honesty, meanwhile, and nonpunitive appeals for the truth — for example, “If you tell the truth, I will be really pleased with you” — promotes honest behavior, Professors Lee and Talwar have found.

So does a simple promise. Multiple studies have shown that children as old as 16 are less likely to lie about their misdeeds, and the misdeeds of others, after pledging to tell the truth, a result that has been replicated widely. The psychologist Angela Evans has also found that children are less likely to peek at the toy while the researcher is out of the room if they promise not to. Curiously, this works even with children who don’t know the meaning of the word “promise.” Merely securing a verbal agreement — “I will tell the truth” — does the trick. By the end of infancy, it would seem, children already grasp the significance of making a verbal commitment to another person.

As for those childhood morality tales, you might want to skip the more ominous ones. Professor Lee and others have found that reading stories to children about the perils of deceit, such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and “Pinocchio,” fails to discourage them from lying. Reading them the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, on the other hand, in which truthfulness is met with approval, does reduce lying, albeit to a modest degree. The key to fostering honest behavior, Professor Lee and his colleagues argue, is positive messaging — emphasizing the benefits of honesty rather than the drawbacks of deception.

You can also simply pay kids to be honest. In research involving 5- and 6-year-olds, Professor Lee and his colleagues attached a financial incentive to telling the truth about a misdeed. Lying earned children $2, while confessing won them anywhere from nothing to $8. The research question was: How much does the truth cost? When honesty paid nothing, four out of five children lied. Curiously, that number barely budged when the payout was raised to $2.

But when honesty was compensated at 1.5 times the value of lying — $3 rather than $2 — the scales tipped in favor of the truth. Honesty can be bought, in other words, but at a premium. The absolute dollar amount is irrelevant, Professor Lee has found. What matters is the relative value — the honesty-to-dishonesty exchange rate, so to speak.

“Their decision to lie is very tactical,” Professor Lee said. “Children are thinking in terms of the ratio.” Smart kids, indeed.

[We now know that a core ‘scientific’ principle adorning the walls of our childhood classrooms—the four basic food groups—was neither scientific nor principled. It was an intentional and self-interested lie.

Who knows the harm that was caused and likely continues to be caused, since people like our ABJ guardian still refer back nostalgically to the simplicity of these 'good old days’ sound bites like the four basic food groups, like kids who do anything wrong that is not immediately and definitively punished are sociopaths on the prison track.

My parents and grandparents were right about many things, parenting and otherwise. They were also misguided in some ways as well. By do-gooders like our ABJ guardian of morality. When the next well-intentioned charlatan tries to sell you a simplistic and obvious answer to a complex and important question—think twice. Particularly when the ‘simple’ solution is appealing because it promises to make the complexity headache keeping you awake at night go away.

But unlike the guardians of morality, do not premise your rethinking on dismissing the ideas of those who disagree with you by fiat. Consult with others, including with experts in the field but also with others wrestling with the same challenges. Listen and experiment. Prototype and avoid becoming rigid, because we all need to learn from our mistakes to improve our parenting in real time. Complexity never goes away. Curiosity remains our best weapon against it.]