Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human why you
Speaker 1: do the things you do? So let me ask you
Speaker 1: a question. Have you been on any of these online
Speaker 1: dating sites? Yes? And have you been on one of
Speaker 1: those that you have to enter your age and wait? Yes?
Speaker 1: And how how honest I would say? I would say,
Speaker 1: you're right? Mostly I probably I probably shaved off three
Speaker 1: pounds on that day. Yeah, And you probably said, you know,
Speaker 1: I used to be three pounds less, like just a
Speaker 1: few months ago. It just so happened that now when
Speaker 1: I'm filling it up is after the holidays. So you're
Speaker 1: in my head, Dan, You're in my head. That's Dan Arielli,
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University
Speaker 1: in North Carolina, calling me out in a lie. High
Speaker 1: stakes lies have all sorts of consequences. Perjurors are imprisoned,
Speaker 1: slanderers are sued. In the eighteen hundreds, liars and gossips
Speaker 1: in Scotland could be punished by being forced to wear
Speaker 1: a scolds bridle, a middle cage worn over the head
Speaker 1: with a painful bit to stop the tone from moving.
Speaker 1: But little lies they sometimes feel almost obligatory, like if
Speaker 1: your coworker Andy asks do you like my haircut? And
Speaker 1: you say yes, It adds a new shortness to the
Speaker 1: ends of it. Un Lying to children can be a
Speaker 1: joyful community activity. Good news, little Maxie. There's someone who
Speaker 1: would like to buy your old teeth. She's nocturnal, she
Speaker 1: could fly, but she deals exclusively with unconscious clientele, So
Speaker 1: you will just have to trust that you are receiving
Speaker 1: market rate, b Lie detector tests, child psychology, moral vigilance,
Speaker 1: bad haircuts. We're here to explore why lying is a
Speaker 1: developmental milestone for toddlers, but maybe a slippery slope for you.
Speaker 1: Honestly is a really good thing, and most people acknowledge
Speaker 1: it and they want to be honest. But in the
Speaker 1: day to day basis, we have lots of other motivation
Speaker 1: that play out as well. So motivation to be honest
Speaker 1: is one of them. Motivation to gain money is an
Speaker 1: under one. Motivation to have our political party be successful,
Speaker 1: motivation to decrease global warming, motivation to whatever whatever I mean.
Speaker 1: There's lots of them. Dan is the author of a
Speaker 1: book called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. How we lie
Speaker 1: to everyone, especially ourselves. Most of us want to be honest,
Speaker 1: but we also want to find love, we want financial security,
Speaker 1: we want the best for our kids, and not all
Speaker 1: of these desires are compatible all of the time. The
Speaker 1: team here at deeply human. So let's they did some
Speaker 1: lives from friends and colleagues and strangers on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And here's one that I found very clever. So my
Speaker 1: senior year of college, I had a truly all consuming
Speaker 1: crush on the teaching assistant for the photography seminar that
Speaker 1: I was taking, and near the end of the year
Speaker 1: I was applying for jobs. I got a bunch of
Speaker 1: professors to write me letters of recommendation, and once I
Speaker 1: had them all, I was like, you know, this is
Speaker 1: a really easy way to get people to give me
Speaker 1: a bunch of compliments. So I told the t A
Speaker 1: that I needed an additional letter of recommendation from him,
Speaker 1: even though I did not. Our liar Allison found a
Speaker 1: way to extract two full written pages of compliments from
Speaker 1: her crush. If you could somehow force a letter of
Speaker 1: wreck out of someone in your life now, in the
Speaker 1: same circumstances, who would it be? Oh my god, um
Speaker 1: Curtis sit and felt maybe me too. She's the best
Speaker 1: God is my favorite mort how did you get so smart?
Speaker 1: And just one life? I have absolutely idea, but every
Speaker 1: time I read one of her books, I'm just like,
Speaker 1: every sentence is perfect. How listener if you're unfamiliar. Curtis
Speaker 1: Sittenfeld is the name of a best selling fiction writer.
Speaker 1: Highly recommend her short stories. All right back to Dan
Speaker 1: Arielli are lying expert on how we conceptualize dishonesty. So
Speaker 1: in general, when we think about this honesty, we think
Speaker 1: about people as being either good open. We tend to
Speaker 1: consider honesty as a character trait, a fixed feature, like
Speaker 1: I am good at languages and bad at directions. I
Speaker 1: prefer cheap milk chocolate to the fancy dark stuff, and
Speaker 1: I am honest. But this kind of thinking can cause
Speaker 1: problems because if we consider our honesty as intrinsic and constant,
Speaker 1: then it's like a tattoo. It's permanently part of who
Speaker 1: we are. And with that attitude, we might get lax
Speaker 1: in policing our actual behavior. And we're really good at
Speaker 1: preserving the idea of our ourselves as honest people even
Speaker 1: while we're telling a lie. Imagine that you're late for
Speaker 1: meeting some friends, right, you could say, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I left too late, or I didn't check my watch
Speaker 1: or something like that, or you could say the subway
Speaker 1: was too busy. You have a motivation to lie, and
Speaker 1: what our amazing brain can do is to allow us
Speaker 1: to rationalize things that are not exactly perfect. So you
Speaker 1: can go to your friends and say, oh, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: the traffic was terrible. Now the traffic is thats not
Speaker 1: really the traffic that is terrible, but the traffic was
Speaker 1: not great. So you basically add this up and in
Speaker 1: your mind the moment you finished telling this lie, you're
Speaker 1: not a liar. You just slightly exaggerated. As we tell
Speaker 1: more and more lies of a certain type, we get
Speaker 1: more and more used to it, and by the end
Speaker 1: our brain stopped reacting. Dan and several colleagues put research
Speaker 1: subjects into an fMRI machine to watch their brain activity
Speaker 1: when they behaved it dishonestly, and they found that usually
Speaker 1: when someone first lied for personal gain, they felt bad
Speaker 1: about it, and there was this big bloom of activity
Speaker 1: in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with
Speaker 1: fear and emotion. But as people continued to lie, that
Speaker 1: brain activity declined, and this may be evidence that lying
Speaker 1: is a slippery slope. We're telling little lies can desensitize
Speaker 1: us and make it easier to tell bigger ones in
Speaker 1: the future. But the news from Dan's research isn't all bad.
Speaker 1: He also found ways to promote honest behavior by priming
Speaker 1: people with cues that put morality a top of mind.
Speaker 1: We asked people to do things like try to recall
Speaker 1: the Ten Commandments or right down an owner code, and
Speaker 1: we saw that those things increased honesty. This might have
Speaker 1: implications for how our important documents are designed. A small
Speaker 1: change in the layout of our forms might get us
Speaker 1: to fill them out more honestly. Will you tell me
Speaker 1: about where the signature line should be on a form?
Speaker 1: So the signature line should be in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the form? Why okay? So think about what what do
Speaker 1: we usually do when we write a form? We write
Speaker 1: and you fill it up, and then at the end
Speaker 1: I said, please sign You know the line has been
Speaker 1: done already, it's over. You did it. You rationalize that
Speaker 1: you forgot about it. Instead, what priming tells us is
Speaker 1: that we should start by getting people to be at
Speaker 1: the higher level of thinking about their morality. Right, So
Speaker 1: what we want is to get people to be aware
Speaker 1: of their own honesty, so we want people to do
Speaker 1: it first. At this point, if you're feeling pangs of
Speaker 1: guilt about having been dishonest in the past, well it's
Speaker 1: another thing. You might be able to blame my mom
Speaker 1: or dad. We teach our kids to be dishonest in
Speaker 1: the social politeness world. It's the first time that you
Speaker 1: tell a kid don't always tell the truth. For example,
Speaker 1: you don't want to offend somebody else's feeling, you don't
Speaker 1: like this kid, don't tell it to them. Other things
Speaker 1: are more important. So I'm wondering whether this is kind
Speaker 1: of the beginning of the way that we teach kids
Speaker 1: this very very delicate calculus about how much to care
Speaker 1: about the truth, how much to care about themselves, and
Speaker 1: how much to care about other people, and how to
Speaker 1: make this very delicate trade of you don't want your
Speaker 1: kid at the mall announcing who's old and who's smelling
Speaker 1: in a fit of unchecked honesty. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: a lot of parents actually talk to us about how
Speaker 1: they are so worried that kids are lying at such
Speaker 1: a young age, and they're worried they're going to turn
Speaker 1: into some kind of psychopaths. When they grow up. My
Speaker 1: name is Candy. I'm a professor at the University of Toronto.
Speaker 1: I've been studying how children learned to tell lies for
Speaker 1: the last twenty five years, calling himself was not a
Speaker 1: master of deception as a boy, or was a terrible
Speaker 1: liar as a child. So my sister always could figure
Speaker 1: out one I lied and she always say, you know,
Speaker 1: when you lie, your eyes turned the red. So I
Speaker 1: don't that's true or not, but thoughts. That's how she
Speaker 1: cut meat. And a lab outfitted with hidden cameras coming
Speaker 1: and his team tried to discover why some kids start
Speaker 1: lying earlier than others. We wanted to find out, you know,
Speaker 1: who are these two yold's who already lie at this
Speaker 1: tender age, you know, but the majority of them actually
Speaker 1: were very honest. So then we measure their i Q.
Speaker 1: There's no difference between those kids who lied and those
Speaker 1: kids who did not lie. And then we look at
Speaker 1: the onion moral and standing line. You know, there's no difference.
Speaker 1: So and then well maybe just gender, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: boys are more likely to lie then girls, or vice versa.
Speaker 1: And turned out that there's no difference between boys and girls.
Speaker 1: So then we looked closely at two very important count
Speaker 1: if skills. Tiny kids don't fully grasp that other people
Speaker 1: are having their own, unique, subjective experiences. They just presume
Speaker 1: that you know their grandma, that you're also caught up
Speaker 1: on the most recent episodes of pat Patrol, that you, too,
Speaker 1: my enjoy a bite of room temperature period pumpkin. But
Speaker 1: to lie, they've got to develop what's called theory of mind.
Speaker 1: They have to realize that each of us has different
Speaker 1: motives and thoughts and perceptions. They have to understand that
Speaker 1: the thoughts in their heads aren't the thoughts in moms
Speaker 1: or yours or mine. They've also got to develop executive
Speaker 1: function that allows them to strategize and inhibit any impulse
Speaker 1: to just blurt out the truth. Both theory of mind
Speaker 1: and executive function take time to develop. We know that
Speaker 1: kids begin to tell lies around two and a half
Speaker 1: years of age, but at that time only about two
Speaker 1: and a half year olds would lie. But when the
Speaker 1: child reaches three years of age, about kids will lie.
Speaker 1: By the time the kids reach four years of age,
Speaker 1: about the eight percent of kids will lie, and by
Speaker 1: seven years of age, almost kids would like Basically, the
Speaker 1: story is almost all kids at some point in their
Speaker 1: life and then seemed to be this kind of very
Speaker 1: universal developmental trajectory. And turn out, these young two year
Speaker 1: olds who lied how much better exactly functioning abilities than
Speaker 1: those kids who are honest. So it's almost like there's
Speaker 1: a precociousness that's indicated by lying early. It's not like
Speaker 1: these two year olds are all smoking cigarettes behind the
Speaker 1: schoolyard a little other jackets, Like they're developing theory of
Speaker 1: mind early. Yeah, exactly, So am I correct in thinking
Speaker 1: your father? So when I hang around my friends who
Speaker 1: have young kids, it's easy for them to to brag
Speaker 1: a little bit about like my kids recognizing shapes and
Speaker 1: letters and she's only nine months old, and my kid
Speaker 1: is walking and my kid is reading, and we're beating
Speaker 1: all the milestones. Were you like hoping that your kid
Speaker 1: was gonna lie really early? So, because I have a
Speaker 1: lab for testing kids, line when Nathan turns, that's his name.
Speaker 1: So when he turned three exactly on his third year birthday,
Speaker 1: I brought him to my lap and I had my
Speaker 1: students testing him, and I watched with anxiety. You know,
Speaker 1: I thought, is he going to be honest? So he
Speaker 1: is going to tell a lie, and he lied, so
Speaker 1: I was very happy. So so he figured out, you know,
Speaker 1: the theory of mind and figure out the exactive functioning
Speaker 1: at three years of age exactly. I have for a
Speaker 1: video recording of that. So you throw a hell of
Speaker 1: a birthday party. Indeed, when my son was little, I
Speaker 1: told him that when the ice cream van drove down
Speaker 1: our street playing its music, that meant it had run
Speaker 1: out of ice cream. Meal times are a classic setting
Speaker 1: for parental lies. No, that is clearly not an airplane.
Speaker 1: That is a rubberized spoon. Dad, if that is your
Speaker 1: real name, I like to my daughter all day long. Okay,
Speaker 1: how old is your daughter? Two? And like, what are
Speaker 1: the kind of wies that you're telling your daughter? Oh?
Speaker 1: This tastes great. Yeah, you could definitely have some vetchables. Oh.
Speaker 1: The woman gleefully deceiving her daughter is Sophie Vanderzi of
Speaker 1: the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands. She runs
Speaker 1: experiments to study how we lie to one another. I
Speaker 1: remember my mom lying to me when I was given
Speaker 1: a jump rope as a present as a little girl.
Speaker 1: She was worried that her muscular, not very coordinator daughter
Speaker 1: was going to spin herself upside down and knock her
Speaker 1: teeth out with it. And so she lied to me
Speaker 1: and told me that the way to use the toy
Speaker 1: it was to lay it gently on the ground and
Speaker 1: then jump all around it. And so when my dad
Speaker 1: came home, he found me playing with my jump rope
Speaker 1: as one would stamp out of fire. But I could
Speaker 1: never tell when my mom was lying. And if she
Speaker 1: still lies, then I still can't. Well, we're basically terrible
Speaker 1: allied dettection, and we're quite good at lying, and that's
Speaker 1: quite problematic. Experiments suggest that humans suck at spotting lies,
Speaker 1: like genuinely suck. When research participants were asked to identify
Speaker 1: the liars among a group of people half of whom
Speaker 1: we're telling the truth and half of whom we're lying,
Speaker 1: they were right only fifty percent of the time, which
Speaker 1: is an abysmal success rate. It's just barely better than chance.
Speaker 1: And as for all that stuff on forensic TV shows,
Speaker 1: forget about it. One of the first comments you usually
Speaker 1: cantus that liars look away. Something you often hear is
Speaker 1: that they look to the top left corner. They behave
Speaker 1: a bit sort of shiftly, But those are not actually
Speaker 1: cutes to the seats, as we know from research and
Speaker 1: from metal analysis, but that does mean that because people
Speaker 1: think it's acute. One of the cues that we did
Speaker 1: find is that looking someone like really in the eye,
Speaker 1: like sort of uncomfortable eye contact, can be acute to
Speaker 1: the seats. So that makes it really complicated. And one
Speaker 1: of the other problems is that lying is that through
Speaker 1: something you get better at with practice, So the more
Speaker 1: you lie, the emotional responses to the line become less
Speaker 1: and less severe. YEA, when I was five or six,
Speaker 1: and my uncle took me aside and he had a
Speaker 1: chalkboard and he did all these drawings of all the
Speaker 1: trees that we could see around where he lived, and
Speaker 1: he said, have you ever seen the trees at night?
Speaker 1: And I said, well, well no, because I'm asleep. And
Speaker 1: he said, well you know what happens to trees at night?
Speaker 1: And I said no, and he said, well, they turned
Speaker 1: upside down and they're actually rockets and they fly into
Speaker 1: space and then they come back before the morning and
Speaker 1: get him planted, and that's what trees do. Polygraph machines,
Speaker 1: the favorite lie detection devices of TV dramas, are legitimately
Speaker 1: better than humans. It's spotting to see, but they're not
Speaker 1: perfectly reliable either. A polygraph doesn't directly test the truthfulness
Speaker 1: of a statement. It measures our physical arousal through blood
Speaker 1: pressure and breathing patterns and perspiration. The idea is that
Speaker 1: lying usually stresses us out, and we can measure stress.
Speaker 1: But sometimes, of course, we can be stressed out for
Speaker 1: other reasons as well, so it's not a perfect indicator,
Speaker 1: and polygraph examination involves some interpretation. Two different examiners given
Speaker 1: the exact same polygraph output might come back with conflicting results.
Speaker 1: As a kid, I designed my own lie detector test
Speaker 1: to be used exclusively on my little brother Max. I
Speaker 1: drew a series of buttons and dials onto an index card,
Speaker 1: added a bright red circle where the suspected liar was
Speaker 1: to place his thumb, and my tiny brown eyed brother
Speaker 1: dutifully submitted pressing his thumb on the circle, at which
Speaker 1: point I whisked the index card into my room, shut
Speaker 1: the door, and turned on my lie detector machine, which
Speaker 1: ran with a horrible roar. In truth, I was really
Speaker 1: running the vacuum cleaner listener. I cannot tell you how
Speaker 1: guilty I am in recalling this story Maxie, I am
Speaker 1: so sorry. Next time we hang out, I am buying
Speaker 1: every round. As Professor Conley pointed out, children's first lives
Speaker 1: should be celebrated as a milestone, not interrogated with the hoover.
Speaker 1: But by the time you grow up, you might lie
Speaker 1: more than you realize. In an experimental setting where people
Speaker 1: have to talk for ten minutes to someone they didn't
Speaker 1: know in a waiting room that was secretly recorded, that
Speaker 1: people already lied twice on average in this ten minutes
Speaker 1: conversation with a stranger. So we all lie much more
Speaker 1: than we think we do. So there was an experimental
Speaker 1: design that put people in a room with a stranger
Speaker 1: for ten minutes, and even in the course of that
Speaker 1: ten minute conversation, they collocked two lies on average. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting is they didn't have to impress. They were
Speaker 1: just in the waiting room waiting to take part in
Speaker 1: an experiment, not realizing that was already the experiments that
Speaker 1: they were secretly being filmed. So to your point, you're saying,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to be gained, right, like, this isn't your boss,
Speaker 1: this isn't your mom, this isn't your lover, there's no
Speaker 1: real social stakes here, and we still do benefits, and
Speaker 1: we still lie. Remember Allison, the liar that we met
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of this episode, the one who
Speaker 1: got the letter of rec from a crush. We dragged
Speaker 1: her back into the studio to present a little gift
Speaker 1: for serving as the liar laureate of this episode of
Speaker 1: Deeply Human. Okay, well, thanks so much Allison for coming
Speaker 1: in again. No problem, Why am I back? Actually? I
Speaker 1: had just wanted to play you some audio. Oh all right,
Speaker 1: To whomsoever it may concern, I hereby commend Alison Cherry
Speaker 1: on the slide design and flawless execution of her elegant
Speaker 1: con May her work serve as an inspiration for future
Speaker 1: generations of scheming love sick co eds. Sincerely, Curtis Sittenfeld,
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? What? How did you make that happen?
Speaker 1: I wish you could see my face right now. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for that, Curtis Sittenfeld. In addition to
Speaker 1: being a best selling fiction writer, you are a total boss.
Speaker 1: And next time we meet, I am buying every round. Allison,
Speaker 1: for her part, has zero regrets about lying to obtain
Speaker 1: her letter from her crush worthy t A, and she
Speaker 1: rereads it every few years. Come, our expert on children's lives,
Speaker 1: thinks that lying can actually be an important part of
Speaker 1: a happy life. The fact that the lies exists in
Speaker 1: our society is because sometimes they serve as lubricant of
Speaker 1: social interaction and it makes our lives better. But you
Speaker 1: put yourself in this situation. Just think about this. If
Speaker 1: you are honest all the time, all minute, think about
Speaker 1: what kind of person you're going to be. Just try
Speaker 1: it the full warm day. I can't guarantee you you're
Speaker 1: going to be friendless, spouseless, and then it may be jobless.
Speaker 1: You know, you just nobody would like you if you're
Speaker 1: always very, very honest. You know you mentioned that you
Speaker 1: were a lousy liar when you were a kid. Are
Speaker 1: you any better now? No? I'm not. You know what's
Speaker 1: funny is I don't know if I should believe you
Speaker 1: or not. There's no way, there's no way. Embarrassingly, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure that I lied during the course of this podcast.
Speaker 1: Remember when Dan Ariali, the Duke Professor, asked me about
Speaker 1: dating sites and I admitted to shaving off a few pounds.
Speaker 1: After we spoke, I thought to myself, Wait, which dating
Speaker 1: site asks for an exact weight. I mean, I know
Speaker 1: I fibbed on that stuff before, but I think it
Speaker 1: was like on my driver's license. I just I didn't
Speaker 1: want to interrupt the flow of the conversation, and I
Speaker 1: didn't stop to really make sure I had my facts rate.
Speaker 1: And just like that, I'm sucked up in this metavortex
Speaker 1: lying to a lying expert about lying. It's not all intentional,
Speaker 1: it's not all perfectly calculated. The temptations to be dishonest, right,
Speaker 1: they just shop all the time, and net means we
Speaker 1: need to be very careful. That asks for vigilance, tremendous vigilance. Dan,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry about the fib If we ever meet in person,
Speaker 1: I'm buying every round. Man, this is becoming like the
Speaker 1: most expensive podcast ever. Learning about Dan's research on how
Speaker 1: little transgressions can pave the way for bigger ones, it's
Speaker 1: changed the way I behave just a little bit. I'm
Speaker 1: more likely to pause during an anecdote to get the
Speaker 1: names right, even if it dampens the comic timing. And
Speaker 1: when declining an invitation to hang out, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: lean less on the old excuse of having work to do,
Speaker 1: which is always sort of true, but rarely the whole story.
Speaker 1: And if you'd like to lie less, it might be
Speaker 1: that honest answers about the daily, unimportant stuff can serve
Speaker 1: as cross train for the muscles that we need to
Speaker 1: answer the hard questions truthfully. If lying is a slippery slope,
Speaker 1: we can at least work cleats. So to co worker Andy,
Speaker 1: I don't love the haircut, but you are awesome and
Speaker 1: I like you no matter what is on or near
Speaker 1: your head. To the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles on
Speaker 1: last way in, I was one d and forty six
Speaker 1: and a half pounds to my mom, so you totally
Speaker 1: made the right call about the jump rope. I would
Speaker 1: have knocked my theory of mind right out the back
Speaker 1: of my little head. On the next Deeply Human, we'll
Speaker 1: ask why do humans have sex at times that our
Speaker 1: fellow mammals don't. So for most female ammost it's two
Speaker 1: or three days out of a cycle that they have sex,
Speaker 1: and otherwise they're not willing to have sex with males
Speaker 1: that initiate it. And there really are that attractive to
Speaker 1: males either. Males seem to know. Deeply Human is a
Speaker 1: BBC World Service and American public Media co production with iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: and it's hosted by me Dessa