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 1st-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.
