Learning to be Truthful

I am currently working on a book called, Realville, How to Get Real in an Unreal World.  There is so much misinformation, disinformation, and weaponizing of information in our society that I feel compelled to try to motivate us all to be more honorable and forthright.

One section of the book deals with the question of how people learn values about truthfulness and learn to recognize and moderate their natural tendencies to lie, cheat, deceive, delude, pretend, and withhold. I identify four main sources for such learning:

·         Child rearing

·         Education

·         Habit

·         Behavior of others.

Child Rearing

Michael Lewis, a prominent psychologist at Rutgers, has conducted many studies on how children learn from well-meaning parents how to lie and deceive. Certain ways of expressing emotion are taught to be acceptable, while others are not. For example, in one experiment, investigators taught children to express sadness when their mother left them with a baby sitter. However, the reality was that they were not sad and recovered quickly when the mother left. Other examples are how children learn to express responses to minor injuries. Some kids are taught that it is alright to over-react, while others are taught not to act like sissies.

It is hard to know how a child really feels, because parents are continually teaching them how they are supposed to feel and how to express feelings and reactions to life events. When children become adults, a lifetime of conditioning about expressing emotions creates problems for mental health workers to treat patients, because true feelings may be so buried and masked.

Three primary factors affect how children learn to think and behave in untruthful ways in which they do it to:

1. Avoid negative consequences or punishment.

2. Protect their ego from assaults on their sense of self-worth or confidence.

3. Benefit themselves or take advantage of others.

No wonder untruthful behavior is so common. In some respects, Lewis thinks this is a good thing, reflecting mental development to become more emotionally and socially competent as an adult. However, character development is corrupted.

Lewis and his colleagues conducted some classical experiments in young children that revealed how their tendency for untruthful behavior changed with age. The researchers secretly videotaped children in an honesty test in which they were told not to peek at a toy that was placed behind them. The child was told that the adult had to leave the room for a few minutes, but when she comes back they could play with the toy.

While the investigator was out of the room, 100% of children as young as two peeked at the toy. When asked if they peeked, 38% of two-year-olds lied about it. However, among six-year-olds, one-hundred percent of peekers lied about it. Boys generally had less self-control in resisting peeking, but no sex differences occurred in the extent of lying. The fact that all six-year-olds lied indicates a serious need to instruct children at this age on the virtue of telling the truth.

Clear correlations occurred with other aspects of cognitive function. For example, how quickly a child yielded to the temptation of peeking varied with IQ. Those who peeked sooner had lower IQ scores. They also had less emotional intelligence, that is, were less able to name the emotions revealed by pictures of human faces and less able to predict the kind of emotion they would generate to certain experiences. I have to wonder: If parents and 1^st-grade teachers made more of an effort to teach honest, would 6-year olds increase their IQ and emotional intelligence?

Children also learn self-deception at rates that vary with age. A child learns to avoid or minimize honest judgments that unnecessarily diminish their self-esteem. Blame shifting or excuses come naturally to children. At the same time, a child can learn when honest self-appraisal serves the useful purpose of avoiding future mistakes or taking some necessary action.

Even so, Lewis and others perversely contend that lying and deception are normal and good, because they relieve the physiological and psychological consequences of stress. Lying seems to be associated with pro-social behavior and with creativity.

Pretend play provides a paradigm for studying self-deception. Very young children imitate the actions of others around them. As they get a little older, they pretend that one toy is doing something with another toy, as for example, toy soldiers engaging in battle.

Pretend play begins at around age one.  Lewis gives the example of a one-year-old who imitates seeing his mother talking on the phone. By age two or three the child might pretend that her doll is talking on the phone. By three years of age, a child is able to consider success or failure of the play and to assign blame or credit for it. At this point, self-conscious emotions have emerged that lead to shame for failure and pride in success.

More condemnable is to be untruthful to benefit oneself and taking advantage of others in the process, as when a child lies about a misdeed and blames it on an innocent, such as a sibling. Unfortunately, there seems to be little research on childhood development of this level of dishonesty. How does it change with age? What factors promote it? Or mitigate it? The social consequences are profound. For example, child siblings who lie about each other may become alienated from each other the rest of their lives.

Biology wires children to behave falsely. Where do they learn moral values and respect for truth? Traditionally, this was in houses of worship. However, as many parents are leaving formal religion, this teaching is increasingly absent. We know that teaching of children has lasting effects, good or bad. Both Jesuits and Communist Lenin have claimed, "Give me a child until age seven, and I have that child for life."

Education

Education can be a factor in promoting untruths because it trains the brain in thinking skills.  Educated people may be more tolerant of deceptive behavior, more effective at it, more adept at rationalizing why they do it, and they will likely be clever enough to get away with it. Getting away with it provides positive reinforcement that engenders more dishonesty.

Knowledge and life experience do change what a person thinks of as true. This can be illustrated with Winston Churchill's famous quote, "If a young man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. ...If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain."

Of course, highly intelligent youngsters can figure a lot of this out on their own. However, they need to question, and many humans are prone to take things at face value. They are easily manipulated by false teaching.

A questioning mindset formed the basis of the life of Socrates, whose mission was to show people the importance of introspection, asking questions, and reasoning to answer those questions. In my decades of teaching at the college level, I have learned that most students are intellectually compliant and do not question. Maybe this reflects prior teaching in k-12.  Even at the college level, an emphasis on career training limits use of the Socratic method of teaching. The desire to “educate the masses” provides students with the corrosive experience of 12 or more years of taking multiple-choice quizzes where each question is framed in only one way and supposedly only has one correct answer.

Habit

Any attitude or behavior, if sufficiently rehearsed, becomes a habit. Once formed, habits automate attitude and behavior, producing mental “knee-jerk” responses to the events of life. To paraphrase the Jerry Lee Lewis song title, in our society, there is a “Whole lot of knee-jerking going on.” The key to honorable behavior is to think carefully about the attitudes and behaviors one is repeating. If they contribute to personal integrity, habit is a good thing. However, if you repeat and repeat untruthful attitudes and behaviors, you are creating a habit to behave untruthfully. You are making yourself a dishonorable person.

A clear example of teaching oneself to be dishonorable comes from a British university study showing that people become desensitized to lying. The experiment involved creating scenarios whereby people could lie repeatedly, and they would get paid more based on the magnitude of the lies. In the experiment with 80 people, pairs of people in separate rooms viewed a photograph of a jar filled with pennies. The photo was clear only for one person in the pair, whose task was to advise the other person how many pennies were in the jar. The person making the estimate was told that the reward would vary on each trial, without knowing critical details about the built-in incentive structure. They received no feedback. The game was rigged so that the more the advice was deliberately exaggerated, the more financial reward was given.
Experimenters set the conditions so that lying could benefit both partners, benefit the advising partner at the expense of the other partner, or benefit the advising partner only without affecting the other person.

The greatest lying occurred when it benefitted only the lying person. Dishonesty persisted at lower levels if the partner also benefitted. There was zero lying under conditions were lying was punished by lower reward while the partner benefitted. People's lies grew bolder the more they lied. They were getting into the habit of lying. Brain scans revealed that activity in a key emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, became less active and desensitized as the dishonesty grew. The amygdala processes fear, which suggests that the people became less fearful of the consequence of lying. In essence, the brain was being trained to lie.

We should conclude that a little bit of dishonesty is a slippery slope that can lead one to grow more dishonest. This provides a rationale for early corrective action of untruthful behavior in children, with the aim of nipping such behavior in the bud before it becomes a habit.

If left unchecked, a person who benefits from repeated untruthfulness will likely do more of it to the point of it becoming automated. This is a classic example of the basic principle of operant conditioning: people are more likely to repeat behaviors that are repeatedly rewarded. The authors of the British study asserted that lying increased in terms of self-interest, because the greatest lying occurred when only the adviser and not the partner benefitted. However, because the experiment did not allow subjects to know when their advice was being rewarded, the likely remaining explanation for the lying is that they just adapted to lying, and it didn't bother them so much to exaggerate their estimates. The absence of feedback was a crucial part of the design. The authors point out that in the real world, feedback greatly affects the extent of dishonesty in terms of whether the deceiving person thinks there will be benefit or punishment.

Emotions are at the core of the problem of drifting into a habit of untruthfulness. Normally, we tend to feel guilty when doing something we know is wrong, that is, when we have gone beyond our untruthfulness set-point. However, as we get in a habit of being untruthful, the associated shame or guilt dissipates. We get used to it, and our conscience doesn't bother us so much—a lower set-point emerges. So, we are less constrained in our future behavior. Each little untruthful act can escalate and negatively change the person we are.

One bad habit that is easy to fall into is denial. What is the typical first reaction to getting caught at bad thoughts or bad behavior? Remember when you were a kid in school when the teacher wanted to find out who did a certain bad deed. How did the class respond when she said, for example, “Who wrote this graffiti on the board?” A knee-jerk, “Not me,” goes out the cry, including from the kid who was the perpetrator. In other words, a common first response to being confronted is to deny the facts. Many children never outgrow this denial tendency.

Such denial and rationalization can become a habit. For example, a student may deny that laziness or personal problems are responsible for poor grades, rationalizing instead with a belief that the teachers are ineffective or the courses are irrelevant and boring. Eventually, people with problem attitudes and behaviors may have no choice but to admit the facts when denial becomes too awkward and implausible. Once denial is no longer tenable, an automatic response is to develop a habit of deception, deceiving others and even oneself. The alcoholic may try to hide bottles of liquor or to sneak drinks when family or friends are not watching. To illustrate just how powerful this habit of deception can be, I remember that when I quit smoking I had occasional dreams over several years where I had hidden a pack of cigarettes and cheated on my pledge to quit smoking.

The most common response to having one’s misdeeds or poor behavior discovered is to make excuses. I used to do a lot of that, now hopefully much less. I could write a whole book on that, and I did (Blame Game. How to Win It).

Because deception is usually discovered, the only real hope is to do something constructive to resolve the problem that tempts one to deny and deceive.

Behavior of Others

People certainly learn values about truthfulness from others. If the people you work and associate with place a high value on truthfulness, then you are more prone to be truthful to fit in and to avoid ostracism.

Various forms of untruthfulness can spread like an infectious disease. For example, some experiments by behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, were conducted so that unpunished cheating could occur. In one such study, experimenters planted an actor student in the room who publicly claimed he solved an implausible number of the test problems. The level of cheating by other students in the room increased, suggesting that cheating can be infectious. In test teamwork experiments, students increased cheating if they thought it would benefit their teammates as well as themselves.

Under real-world conditions, the most common way to spread untruthfulness is to repeat it, again and again. A lie, for example, repeated often enough becomes believable. This is why advertisers keep repeating the same commercial. Whatever the exaggerated claims of benefit of the product, the repetition seeps into an audience’s subconscious to become engraved as believed. This is why news media push an agenda by harping on a story theme until they shape public opinion about an issue or politician. This is why politicians use repetition to discredit and demonize their opponents. “Opposition research” is now standard practice in political parties, and the politicians often repeat exaggerated or otherwise distorted negative information.

As misinformation is repeated again and again, more and more people come to believe it.  This leads to “argument by authority” to rationalize dishonesty. Then too, the more prevalent lying, denial, pretense, etc. become in a social group, the more we either become accepting or tolerant of it. People tend to tolerate what is common, because that is “just the way things are.”  Even if you want to mount a challenge, it would just be too much trouble and not likely to be successful. Complying with the group norm is akin to the thinking error of arguing from authority, only in this case, the deception has undeserved status.

Sources:

Ariely, Dan (2012). The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty. New York: Harper Collins.

Lewis, Michael. (2015). The origins of lying and deception in everyday life. American Scientist. 103: 128-135.