Little white lies can be early signs of politeness

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Countless children have lied to Kang Lee over the past two decades, many of them toddlers as young as two. You can't blame them, really. He asks for it.

Lee, a distinguished psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is masterful at tempting children to make morally dubious decisions. It's an art he practises at his cheerful third-floor lab: He conducts experiments on how people lie in order to study the cognitive, social and cultural factors that help us learn how and when to be deceptive.

Take Lee's work on white lies, for instance. In one study, he and fellow researchers enthusiastically presented specially wrapped "gifts" to children to gauge their ability to choke back their disappointment and feign gratitude. The children eagerly opened their packages – only to discover plain bars of soap.

In another experiment, Lee promised to give adolescent subjects a cash reward if they correctly answered all the questions of an intentionally impossible quiz. He warned them not to peek at the answers printed on the back of the test paper, and then exited the room, leaving the participants alone with their consciences and hidden cameras.

"Kind of wicked, yes," Lee gleefully admits about his techniques for eliciting dishonesty. But his crafty methods have yielded fascinating findings since he began studying lying in 1993, such as when children learn to tell falsehoods (around age two to 21/2), and what early liars have in common (Lee says childhood lying has nothing to do with parenting and is even a positive sign of development). He's also studying whether promoting white lies for the sake of politeness encourages children to lie in other situations (Lee doesn't know the answer yet).

If you haven't heard of Lee, you may have heard about his work. The 53-year-old, whose research focuses on two areas – lying and processing faces – has a knack for conducting studies that make headlines and fuel water-cooler conversations. His research has been lampooned on The Colbert Report. It's been featured in newspapers, parenting magazines, and the documentary Babies: Born to be Good? on CBC's The Nature of Things. Most recently, his study, titled "Seeing Jesus in toast," which explains how people see human faces in everyday objects, earned him an Ig Nobel Prize from the Cambridge, Mass.-based Annals of Improbable Research. That goofy honour, presented last month by real Nobel laureates at Harvard University, recognizes research around the world that provokes giggles as well as deep thinking.

Indeed, much of Lee's research is both quirky and profound. As he explains, he prefers only to conduct studies he finds interesting – no boring stuff. It's hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm; he discusses his findings as though delivering punchlines.

Through his lying research, Lee has found children are extremely gullible, a trait that is important for their learning. They only begin to register suspicion at around four or five years of age.

Lying, on the other hand, begins around age two. In his experiments, 30 per cent of two-year-olds lie, 50 per cent lie by age three, 90 per cent by age four, and 100 per cent by the time kids are between seven and eight. What early liars have in common has nothing to do with IQ or parenting styles, Lee explains. Instead, they have a greater ability to understand what others are thinking, and better executive functioning, meaning they're better able to control their behaviour.

"Which is really cool, right?" Lee says. "You would be thinking a little liar would be a bad kid. But no, no, the other way around."

By the age of four, most children have developed these abilities, which explains the high lying rate. But curiously, by the time children reach the age of 12, the lying rate begins to decline. By age 16, only about 50 to 60 per cent lie, for reasons Lee says are yet unknown, but may be linked to some kind of moral development at that stage. "When you think teenagers are liars, they are not," he says. "Teenagers have a very bad image, you know?"

With an understanding of the building blocks of deception, Lee has branched into testing ways to promote honesty among children. He says telling them cautionary tales such as Pinocchio and The Boy Who Cried Wolf does nothing, but telling positive moral stories like George Washington and the Cherry Tree, or simply asking them to promise to tell the truth, make them more inclined to be truthful. He also examines lying among kids with conduct problems. Children typically learn to tell white lies and only occasionally tell lies to conceal their transgressions, but for those with conduct problems, it's the other way around – they're very blunt and don't tell white lies, but consistently tell lies to hide transgressions.

All this has serious implications. Lee's lying research is beginning to shed light on the behaviour of children with autism spectrum disorder, who tend to be more trusting. It also contributed to the adoption of Bill C-2 in 2005, which provides guidelines for using child witnesses in court.

"I never would have dreamed our studies would have this direct impact in our legal system," Lee says. "So sometimes when you start something, you don't really know what are the practical implications."

His work on how people process and recognize faces is also intriguing. His "Jesus in toast" study, for instance, examines which part of the brain tells the visual cortex to see things that are not really there. Understanding this communication is helpful when it comes to studying racism.

In a new study, Lee and his fellow researchers showed images of computer-altered, racially ambiguous faces to participants from a remote area of China, with little exposure to foreigners, and asked them to identify the race of the faces depicted. The participants were more likely to say the images were of black individuals when the expressions were angry, and Chinese individuals when the faces were smiling. "So just totally biased," Lee summarizes. "If … when you meet a black person, the first instinct you have is the person is angry, then your interaction with this person is going to be very different. If your first instinct about a Chinese person is that person is positive, then your subsequent interaction is going to be positive."

This kind of implicit bias – the unstated and perhaps even unconscious discrimination that affects how and whether you interact, befriend or hire people of different races – starts at an astonishingly early age. Babies develop a preference for looking at faces of individuals of their own race by as early as three months of age, Lee says. By the age of nine months, they already have difficulty telling apart faces of people of other races, but they are very good at discriminating between faces of their own race.

But when the Chinese study participants were briefly taught the names of five or six black individuals, Lee and his colleagues found their assumptions about which racially ambiguous faces were black or Chinese immediately disappeared.

"It's just like amazing, right?" he says, adding he is now exploring simplistic ways to similarly train children to counter racist tendencies. "We hope by doing that, we will be able to reduce implicit racial biases."

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Some findings from Lee's research

For his research, professor Kang Lee frequently lies to his subjects and encourages them to lie. It can take a year or more to develop techniques used in his study that provoke dishonesty. But Lee says he sometimes gets inspiration from real-life experiences with his 10-year-old son. His son's first known lie came at age three, when given a test at his lab. "I was very proud," Lee says.

Here's a sampling of experiments Lee has conducted:

To prompt white lies:

Children were given cameras and asked to take the experimenter's photos, but not before the experimenter applied a conspicuous smudge of lipstick on the tip of his nose. Prior to posing for the shot, the experimenter asked, "Do I look okay for the picture?" The majority, even children as young as three, answered in the affirmative.

To examine gullibility:

Preschoolers were told point-blank that an individual experimenter was deceptive. The deceptive experimenter then told the children a toy was hidden in a basket. When later asked where the toy was, three-year-olds overwhelmingly said it was in the basket, even though they knew the source of their information was unreliable. Five-year-olds exhibited greater suspicion.

To prompt cheating:

Teens were given a 10-question quiz and were told they would receive $10 for a perfect score, and no money if any answers were incorrect. While the majority of the questions were straightforward, such as "How many provinces are there in Canada?" two were trick questions: "Who discovered Tunisia?" (The answer: No one), and "Who discovered the comb?" (The answer: Unknown). The subjects were told the answers to the quiz were printed on the back, but were asked not to peek while the experimenter left the room. To Lee's surprise, up to 50 per cent later confessed to peeking.

Wency Leung