Brooders.net

Found this over at Schneier’s blog titled “Kids and Lying“.

Worth the read.

The original article is called “Learning to lie“.

A couple of interesting excerpts:

It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,”
….
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require.

I’d never seen this perspective before. Manipulating perception of reality is an act of intelligence and persuasion. That does make sense.

he most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it.
….
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile.

This one is pretty common, from an early age lie to protect the feelings of adults. Schooled from a very early age to be polite through telling white lies. Also, the concept of lying to adults instead of tattling/telling on your mates seems to be a factor.

So, paradoxically, it seems lying is an integral part of a society which values honest.