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Episode 39: Matthew Gingo: Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them
26 Plays2 years ago
Developmental psychologist Matthew Gingo joins to discuss his research on morality and deception. Why and under what circumstances do parents and their children lie to one another?
We discuss his paper entitled "What they don't know won't hurt them: Parents' judgments about lying to their adolescents", published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (2019)
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Transcript
Introduction of Matt Jingo
00:00:07
Speaker
All right, welcome to Cognation. This is Rolf Nelson. And this is Joe Hardy. And today's guest is Professor Matt Jingo, who is a colleague of mine at Wheaton College and who studies developmental psychology and in particular, moral development. So welcome to the show, Matt. Great to have you with us.
Matt Jingo's Educational Background
00:00:30
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:00:32
Speaker
Let's see, maybe a little bit about your background too. So you've got your graduate degree with Elliot Turiel at UC Berkeley. And then, let's see, where was your undergraduate degree from? I was a University of New Hampshire Wildcat. A Wildcat. Cool, I grew up in Maine, but that's my neighborhood. Oh, right on, yeah.
00:01:02
Speaker
Well, like many, I grew up in Vermont and like many kids in Vermont, I got about as far away as imagination would take me, which was all the way to Durham, New Hampshire. Perfect. But then I very quickly realized that California was the promised land and the last Shangri-La and I packed up my bags and I moved straight to Berkeley.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, and then I should admit that I didn't go straight to grad school. I proceeded to like live on my sailboat for three or four years before I went back to grad school. So I got a flavor of real California, if you will. That's smart. Where was your boat?
00:01:42
Speaker
at the Berkeley Marina, of all places. So I lived on my sailboat. I rode my bicycle up and down University Avenue. As a couple of Berkeley grads, you know that a bicycle and a sailboat can get you places out in the bay. And so that's what I...
00:02:01
Speaker
That was my lifestyle for quite a while. And then I found my way back into developmental psychology. And I guess I should say, by way of caveat, as an undergraduate, I took exactly one psychology course, introductory psychology. And I think I may have gotten a C plus. So it was a long journey back.
00:02:24
Speaker
to psychology and the grad program at Berkeley, but I did make it, yeah.
Children's Moral Development and Lying
00:02:30
Speaker
And so that's your area of expertise, developmental psychology. Do you want to talk a little bit about sort of your general area that you focus on and the kinds of questions you're interested in?
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, you know, my, very specifically my interest is in the development of deception and children's judgments about lying to whom and under what circumstances, right? So when is lying legitimate?
00:03:00
Speaker
And I use that not simply because I'm interested in lying, but because I'm interested in children's social cognition and the way that they form judgments around the world, like as they develop, like when things come into conflict, what is the priority? And so when you study lying and you study moral development, you're kind of constantly looking at conflicts, or at least I am. So morality would tell you, you know,
00:03:30
Speaker
not to lie, but there are plenty of circumstances that as kids develop in whatever social circumstances they're developing in, they learn that there are certain exceptions to that rule. And in some cases, you know, lying is the right thing to do. So I guess to say specifically, I study lying, but more generally, I study moral development and the way that different types of social cognition become coordinated as children develop.
00:03:58
Speaker
and looking at how that changes over the course of childhood and adolescence, particularly when you think about lying and sort of some of the onboarding of different things like theory of mind, it becomes kind of this complicated mix. So when I say I study lying, I really study social cognition and morality generally, and then how moral conflicts are resolved in the context of other competing concerns.
00:04:23
Speaker
So one of the things that you've studied is the relationship of parents and adolescents and how deception works between parents and adolescents,
Parent's Perspective on Lying
00:04:36
Speaker
right? So kids lying to their parents. And in the paper that we're actually focusing on today, which is called, What They Don't Know Won't Hurt Them, parents judgments about lying to their adolescents.
00:04:49
Speaker
You actually researched how parents judged lying to adolescents and focused more on parents' behavior. But I know that you've looked at both things. Right. So actually, the story behind this paper is sort of a simple one. And it was a reviewer's comment on a paper saying, you know,
00:05:15
Speaker
Is there any wonder that kids are lying to their parents in this particular way? I lie to my kids all the time. Parents lie to their kids. Don't kids get it from parents was sort of the gist of the comment. And I think that largely there's some taken for granted assumptions in there that
00:05:34
Speaker
Deception is somehow a parenting practice that parents lie to their kids regularly and use lying as a tool to achieve certain socialization goals. So we wanted to do a little bit more of a systematic study and that's where this paper
00:05:51
Speaker
that was sort of the idea behind it. And we also wanted to make sure that it was like not just kind of parents lie to their little kids about the tooth fairy, for example, because those sorts of white lies, particularly when there's such an asymmetry in understanding the little kids versus the parents, we thought, nah, that paper has been done or a version of it has. And so we wanted the lies in this paper to be
00:06:20
Speaker
a little bit more, I don't know, appropriate for an adolescent audience. What might an adolescent really be motivated to lie to their parent about? And so that was things like smoking pot and drinking alcohol, having sex, shoplifting, cutting class, skipping school. And so that's what we were interested in studying. And the way that we organized it in this particular paper was it was the adolescent inquires
00:06:49
Speaker
to their parent, hey, did you ever smoke pot when you were my age? And the parent has to decide, all right or not all right, to lie. And in the scenarios that we gave, these are all hypothetical scenarios, the parent in the story lies.
00:07:10
Speaker
And then we asked parents and adolescents, was it all right or not right for the parent to lie to keep this private or whatever. And yeah, it was kind of a neat way to look at the judgments that parents bring to bear on when it's all right and not all right to lie to their adolescents.
Understanding Social Reasoning
00:07:28
Speaker
in this approach too, it seems like there were a few different kinds of situations or domains that you sort of evaluated. And there's quite a big difference in terms of how both children and adults perceive whether or not it's okay to lie depending on the specific domain in which it's happening. Do you want to say a few words about that maybe?
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know, so I guess it's worth dialing this back just a little bit to say the theoretical framework that I work from, Rolf mentioned his name earlier, Elliot Turiel. He's sort of, I guess he would be the pioneer of this. So the notion here is that social reasoning, particularly around moral,
00:08:19
Speaker
areas of reasoning. But social reasoning is domain-based. Rather than children moving in this progression where they move stage by stage, which was suggested by Piaget and Kohlberg, the notion here is that children have different domains of social reasoning. And so their moral reasoning doesn't become increasingly differentiated from, say, personal preference or from self-serving topics. It doesn't become more increasingly moved toward morality.
00:08:49
Speaker
but that the child's personal domain exists alongside a conventional domain, a system of norms related to the social conventions and that there'd be a moral domain. And so in this paper, what we did was we tried to present lies that parents would tell for different reasons, right? So if you can imagine lies that you may have told to your kid, I assume you guys have kids, I guess I don't know if that's true.
00:09:18
Speaker
We both do. Yeah, we both have kids. So we're all parents. So you might imagine yourself telling a lie to a young kid because you want to get out of the grocery store. The kid's like, oh, I want to buy this. I want to buy that. I didn't bring enough money for that. Right. And so we're not going to buy the slime today. We'll get it next time. Right. And that's just this lie of expedience.
00:09:38
Speaker
You might also tell a lie because you want some behavioral compliance, right? If you don't get in this car right now, I'm going to leave, right? You're not going to leave your kid in the parking lot at the store. There are different reasons or different justifications for the two lies you did. Most of them are sort of for expedience.
00:09:58
Speaker
In this paper, what we wanted to do was say that there are some lies that parents might judge legitimate for reasons of privacy.
Types and Motivations of Lies
00:10:04
Speaker
So parents lie to their kids about their sex lives or their premarital sex, their sex life as a high school student. And they might lie for a reason like, well, if my kid knows that I had sex, then they'll think that they have license to have sex or something like that. Right. I don't know if you want your kids to be better than you, but you
00:10:28
Speaker
something about, yeah, you don't want to promote the sorts of immoral things you get. Do as I say, not as I do. Do as I say, not as I do. Right. Exactly. Sure. Sure. You could say you could, you could absolutely have that. But then here's where the domain piece gets interesting is that the domains are based upon particular behaviors. So we might not say that sex is immoral.
00:10:51
Speaker
But we, because certain people would say, what's immoral about that? But we might say something like cheating is immoral or stealing, shoplifting is immoral. And so the parent might not want to, the parent might feel different about lying to you about a personal thing versus lying to you about a prudential thing like taking unnecessary risks like, I don't know, smoking pot or drinking alcohol when they were that age.
00:11:17
Speaker
What we're trying to do is have lies come from different places, right? Lies about moral things are different than lies about personal things, right? So it doesn't quite break down into white lie and malicious lie, I guess. Maybe that's, is that somewhat the framework that adolescents or kids might be working with?
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, kids and parents, lots of us have what I might call paternalistic, you know, we tell paternalistic lies, we tell a lie that we think is better for the developmental outcomes of our kid, right? We tell a lie to boost their self confidence, we tell a lie, a white lie is a lie that does more harm, I'm sorry, does more good than harm, right?
00:12:05
Speaker
It's not self-serving in nature. It's meant to serve the other. It's meant to be, it's meant to be good, right? So I ask you, how do you like my sweater? And you say, oh, it's a nice sweater, even though you're ambivalent or you don't care. Grandmother puts a gross fruitcake on the Thanksgiving table, and she says, how do you like it? And you know that the answer is, I love it. And if you don't say I love it, you get taught I love it, right? Your mom kicks you under the table. You love it, right? And so you learn that there are certain social situations where
00:12:34
Speaker
deception is sanctioned. Sometimes it's not to hurt other people's feelings, that kind of white lie. And that's the sort of white lie kind of understanding that many of us have, an unwanted gift or something like that.
00:12:50
Speaker
And then there are other lies that we might tell because social conventions sanction those in very particular ways. If I asked you point blank, how much money do you make? We know that there's a social convention that prevents us from talking about how much money we make in this society. And so you might feel justified in telling me a lie about that, not increasing your value, not decreasing it, but simply saying, oh, you know, I don't know off the top of my head. I would have to check. How many of us don't know how much money they make?
00:13:18
Speaker
Right? Oh, I would have to check, right? You've kind of dodged that question, prevarication, innuendo, some form of mendacity. You've avoided answering that question. There are also lies that you might tell because there are lies told out of justice. So think about Kant's kind of classic philosophical example. There's a knock at the door. The murderer is there. He says, have you seen Joe? And I say, Joe, haven't seen Joe, right? I lie while Joe hides in the middle.
00:13:46
Speaker
That particular kind of lie, that sort of altruistic lie is not a white lie per se, right? That, but it achieves something where the lie, the immoral act of lying is actually also accomplishing a good. So in the white lie sense, the immoral act of lying, I really like your sweater. It prevents you from hurting some of these feelings in the, I haven't seen Joe. I don't know where he is. Well, he hides under my desk cowering, right? Joe thinks I'm a moral hero for saving his life, even though what I did to save his life was an immoral act I lied.
00:14:16
Speaker
And then in the personal, you might feel justified lying because you asked me a question that you don't deserve the answer to. So I have justification for lying there.
Parental Lies to Adolescents
00:14:29
Speaker
In this particular study, what we saw a lot of the lies that parents were willing to tell were related to prudential. This is another domain, but this is a slightly less social domain because unlike a moral act where you do harm to others,
00:14:45
Speaker
A prudential act is, or an impredential act, is you do harm to yourself. So here the parent is telling a lie because they think, and this is quite paternalistic in some ways, they think that what they're doing is protecting their kids. So in the case of the parent that has shoplifted in the past,
00:15:03
Speaker
they might lie to their 14-year-old and say, no, I never shoplifted. They're lying to their kid. But their justification for lying to their kid, and you see this in the paper, was that if I tell my 14-year-old that I shoplifted, then my 14-year-old will feel like they can go shoplift, that I'm a hypocrite if I tell them that they can't. In this particular instance, we have parents taking on this prudential justification for lying.
00:15:33
Speaker
They don't want it, they might be thinking that they're protecting their kid from the mental burden of having sex or something along those lines. You have sex and there's a lot of baggage that goes with it. So they say, I tell my kid that I didn't have sex so that my kid won't think that having sex is okay, they won't go do it. It's sort of a developmental outcome that I'm buffering against.
00:15:53
Speaker
Does that make sense as to how the domains work? Yeah, I think that seems, I mean, it feels pretty intuitive, I guess, the ways that we might think about lies that seem acceptable. So here, let me give you an example from the other side. This is adolescents lying to their parents. So a different study. We asked, we give this story, and I'll do it real quick. Rolf wants to date Cathy.
00:16:21
Speaker
Kathy drives a motorcycle, she never has on a helmet, she is known around town to drink some alcohol, and Rolfe wants to go on a date with her, and Rolfe's dad says, no, you can't date Kathy. Kathy's dangerous, I don't want you to get hurt. Rolfe goes on a date with Kathy anyway, and when he gets home, tells his dad that he had gone out with somebody else. Was it all right or not all right to lie to his dad?
00:16:46
Speaker
Most of the participants in that situation go, no, it's not all right to lie. Because what Rolfstad was trying to do was Rolfstad had his back. Rolfstad was looking out for him. Rolfstad was trying to protect him. Rolfstad was doing all these good things. If I switch the words in that scenario just a tiny bit, I can get a really different result. Rolf wants to date Kathy. Rolf wants to go out with Kathy. Kathy's black. Rolfstad says, no, you can't date black girls. We don't date that kind of people in our house.
00:17:13
Speaker
Rolf goes on a date with Kathy anyway. When he gets back, he tells his daddy went out with somebody else. And then we ask this, is it all right that Rolf lied to his dad? Yeah, it feels like a very different, very different situation. Every single one of the participants in that study said it's all right to lie because the dad is being bigoted. The dad is doing injustice and the lie
00:17:36
Speaker
remedies that. The lie rectifies injustice, right? And so in this particular case, you've got lying, this immoral dishonesty coming up against racism, and one of them has to win. And most adolescents subordinate honesty to social justice. They say honesty is less important here than
00:17:59
Speaker
racial justice. So you can go ahead and lie to your dad in that situation. When your dad's trying to protect you, you can't. And so depending on the domain of lie, depending on the intention of the lie, depending on what the act is about, we see parents, adolescents, and even young children. I've done studies with kids down to the age of like six years old
00:18:19
Speaker
where they'll differentiate between the all right or the legitimacy of a lie, the all right and not all rightness of a lie, depending on what that lie sets out to do or what that lie accomplishes.
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess one of the things that comes up as being an interesting question or query is, where do you see differences where like 14 year olds and 18 year olds versus the parents of 14 year olds or 18 year olds differ in terms of where they think it's acceptable to lie?
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the crux, right? So as a developmental psychologist, it's not just a snapshot view. It's like, how do these things change? And I think that when you see the inter-functional nature of socialization goals with adolescents and with parents, you see that parents are really
00:19:13
Speaker
sort of granting autonomy in a number of ways over the course of that 14 to 18 year old period that we studied in this paper too.
00:19:24
Speaker
are viewing protecting their 14-year-old in very different terms than they are viewing protecting their 18-year-old. At least that's my interpretation. They protected their 14-year-olds by telling a lot more lies to their 14-year-olds about a whole host of different topics. Across more domains, parents lie to their 14-year-olds, feel justified in lying to their 14-year-olds, and do it out of a sense of prudence that they are protecting their kid from the harsh reality
00:19:53
Speaker
or something along those lines. Parents of 18-year-olds are viewing protecting their kids in really different ways, it seems. So for one, they lie to their kids a lot less as they reach 18. And I don't think that that's simply because the parents have more experience with lying to their kids and they feel more guilt about it or something along those lines. I think it's because of the socialization goals of the parents shifting. One is that the 18-year-old is probably getting ready to leave the nest,
00:20:22
Speaker
And so the parent's job is saying, well, I've got to get you prepared to leave, right? The other thing is by the time you were 18, you've demonstrated more maturity, you've achieved more autonomy, you have a different kind of relationship, inter-functional relationship with your parents, like how you push and pull on each other in different ways. And so what we saw with parents lying to 18-year-olds as opposed to the 14-year-olds was that parents of 18-year-olds
00:20:49
Speaker
were much less likely to lie about things, but they would say, I'm going to tell the truth about this to protect my kid. So when the 18-year-old says, well, did you ever shop with when you were my age, the parent says,
00:21:05
Speaker
This is an opportunity, this is a teachable moment, this is a way for me to relay some particular teaching to you, some socialization goal to you. So the parents want to be honest about that because they view one that they're putting themselves as having had experience. Shoplifting means that I have some expertise that I can bring to bear on that. If I, as the parent of an 18 year old, go, no, I never shoplifted and you should never shoplift.
00:21:28
Speaker
Well, my parent has no experience, what do they know? But if you as the parent of an 18 year old go, yes, I did shoplift and here's what I learned and here's what you should take forward. That's how parents of 18 year olds sort of view it, that they're getting their kid ready.
00:21:42
Speaker
for the kid to make these decisions on their own. They won't have the guidance of the parent anymore. I think that that's one of the things that you're seeing. So the parents of the 14-year-olds and the parents of the 18-year-olds are both viewing this as for the good of the kid, right? They're both having this kind of paternalistic view, but one of them is much more egalitarian in relationship with their 18-year-old, right? Like, be honest, have the conversation, we're more on equal footing.
00:22:06
Speaker
And the parent of the 14-year-old is really saying, I need to constrain this kid. I need to give them less information about me so that they don't have, so they don't feel like they have more license to go out and act recklessly as I acted recklessly or something along those lines. All right. So do you think you see this progression starting at an early age that there's sort of more paternalistic kind of lying
00:22:33
Speaker
and then gradually you get this transition as a kid is gonna be out in the world on their own, there's no more sense in protecting them with this sort of lying, then there becomes more honesty and sort of more equity, I guess, in exchanges. So, okay.
Cross-Cultural Views on Lying
00:22:53
Speaker
I guess the question I have is, this sounds like it could be a very,
00:22:59
Speaker
a pretty culturally specific thing. So do you see, and maybe this research is still in play, so I don't know what you see in other cultures, but are there other sorts of patterns that you may have noticed?
00:23:14
Speaker
in lying in general, I guess, and that relationship of trust between parents and kids and what's acceptable for lying. Wow. So there's so much there, Raul, to unpack. I think I'll tell two quick narrative pieces to this related to the cultural aspect. One is that there are all these great narrative structure, narrative pieces. They're not empirical research the way that you or I might do cognitive empirical research.
00:23:45
Speaker
They are great stories of women being kept in a harem in Egypt, for example. Renisi has a book on this.
00:23:55
Speaker
weren't allowed to listen to the radio and yet somehow when all the men were away at work the women found a key and they would listen to the radio and they would all play and they would laugh and dance and all this stuff and when the men would come home there would be no oh no one listened to the radio right and then one day like the kids give it up right the kids are like oh we listen to this radio program all the time and then you know the moms have to educate their daughters like
00:24:20
Speaker
There are times when you can be honest and times when you can't. So I remember reading that book and being like, oh yeah, like this honesty and deception thing is not culturally specific. It's power specific. When there's a power asymmetry,
00:24:37
Speaker
People don't like the people in power to lie to you, right? We don't like it when our government officials lie to us. The people in power lie to us. But what winds up happening is people will regularly lie to even the tables, just like the adolescents lie to the parent when the parent's being racist to make the tables equal. People in subordinate positions will view lying
00:25:01
Speaker
being justified when lying brings things into equitability, when lying brings things into equality. It seems fair. It seems like it's justified because it's fair. Right. Your rule is unfair. And so my lie brings us into fairness. You said I couldn't date her because she's Black. I lied to bring that into racial justice. So I think we do see that in lots of different cultural settings. And I'll give you another example. I remember this. When we first invaded Afghanistan,
00:25:31
Speaker
The Taliban was running Afghanistan. This is whatever. This is a long time ago, 2002. Remember really vividly was the television footage of people playing guitars in the streets and parrots and people were watching the invasion on TVs and all of those sorts of things. And what I can guarantee you is that the US Air Force wasn't airlifting in guitars and parrots and televisions.
00:26:01
Speaker
They weren't doing that on that first weekend. Those people under, you know, they would have been beheaded by the Taliban.
00:26:11
Speaker
They had guitars buried underneath their garage. They had gotten rid of their TV. Their TV was buried in a cave in their basement. They didn't have parrots. They were very quiet about it. So on the surface, cultures can look like they are not telling lies because lies can get you in big trouble. But just remember the nature of studying deception is really funny because somebody that tells a good lie, it's really tough to study it.
00:26:34
Speaker
Right? And so in particular instances, in various cultures, it may look like people in subordinate positions are doing what they're told. But don't think that there isn't some active resistance. And deception is a great way to resist the powers and to bring things into equality. So I think you'd probably have a tough time finding a culture where there wasn't some line going on. I don't know. I mean, I suppose power dynamics can be different between kids and their parents in different cultures too.
00:27:04
Speaker
and also conflicts about power can be different in different cultures that
00:27:08
Speaker
there may be more or less acceptable to have conflicts about these kinds of dynamics. It's suspecting that in the US that it is acceptable to some extent to rebel and it's normal to, it's almost expected that you would be lying and part of growing up and part of separating from your parents, right? Absolutely. I think that there's some really interesting work that Kang Lee and colleagues have done
00:27:37
Speaker
Chufu and Boer, there are a handful of folks out of San Diego and Toronto that studied deception in children in China. And there's some interesting patterns over there. One of the patterns of deception there being that white lives are really expected and are told with greater regularity. There's a greater expectation of politeness, essentially, an etiquette related to
00:28:05
Speaker
Saying yes, yes, yes, you look good or whatever it might be. There's also culturally an expectation there that there'll be greater
00:28:15
Speaker
parental fealty. So there's maybe some less line as rebellion there, but there's more relying in sort of flattery, and there's more lying in sort of in ways where you're not taking credit. So lying about modesty, like Rolf, it looks like you did really good, you know, you did great work on this paper. Oh, that wasn't all me.
00:28:39
Speaker
credit my group, right, even if it was all you. So, you still see patterns of line, but they do align, as you say, with cultural norms and cultural expectations, right, so maybe a little bit less about resistance and more related to compliance or
00:29:00
Speaker
things of that nature. So I do think that you would see different patterns, but I would also say that what seems to be relatively universal is that kids lie to protect their autonomy in certain areas related to personal choice. So although different things will fall into the personal domain in different cultures, people will lie to protect
00:29:25
Speaker
whatever those elements of the personal domain are, if that makes sense. So if you're trying to control some aspect of my life that I view is hands off, you don't have a leg to stand on, you can't tell me what to do there, then I will lie to protect that. And we see that in a number of different studies in a number of different cultural populations. It seems like based on your research and the way you're talking about it, that you're kind of a fan of lying.
00:29:55
Speaker
It's true. Let me say some of the early work online was also, you all know more about theory of mind than I ever will, but early work online was this great indicator of cognitive sophistication. If I can get into your mind, have you ever played hide and go seek with a three-year-old? It's not a fun game. Their head is under the coffee table, their legs are in the middle of the living room, and they're giggling and saying, don't look over here, don't look over here, right? They have a tough time deceiving you.
00:30:23
Speaker
But when you play hide and go seek with a 10-year-old, as you come up to the wood pile where they're hiding, they'll throw a pine cone over to the bushes because you'll hear it and they'll look over there. They've gotten into your head. And so I am a fan of lying, at least at a couple of levels. One is, I think it indexes cognitive sophistication, being able to take other people's perspectives, and then manipulate the lie, tell the lie just enough to be believable
00:30:50
Speaker
and still accomplish the masking goal that you're after. So that's cognitive sophistication. The other aspect of lying that I really think is great is when people who are in subordinate positions, social positions, can lie to get back into equality. It can be an equalizer. Yeah. And so when that happens, I am a fan of lying when I see that happening now.
00:31:11
Speaker
in the rare occasions when I'm a person in power, I don't like to be lied to, right? I don't like to be manipulated. If you ask yourself, why is lying immoral? Or why is lying wrong? You can get to some crooks aspects of, okay, so when might it be all right? If that makes sense. So what are your thoughts on that? How would you describe when lying is immoral?
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I guess to me, there's like a couple of different routes here too, that I think it'd be worth exploring both.
Moral Implications of Lying
00:31:41
Speaker
I think maybe we can start with that question, the moral, but then there's also the efficaciousness, like, you know, especially with parenting, like, I think that maybe we can, we can come back to that, but like, it's interesting to think about when it's like actually useful because we do it because as parents, because we think it's useful, but, but maybe let's start with the moral question first. Sure. So.
00:32:05
Speaker
I think, so if we apply morality and norms about honesty, we know that there are norms about honesty that are conventional, right? There are laws about when you can and can't lie or when you have to tell the truth. Things like fraud and all these sorts of things. There are certain expectations.
00:32:26
Speaker
There are also communicative expectations. If, whenever I talk to you I can't base our conversation in fact, like the whole point of conversing falls apart, right.
00:32:40
Speaker
a loss of trust between people. You can't believe what someone's going to say. Absolutely. And even before you get to the notion of relational trust, just the fact that if you're not supposed to tell the truth, you could say anything you want. And I would just have to sort through the believable and not believable.
00:33:04
Speaker
There's a lot going on there, but I think if we get to trust, trust I think is the main moral aspect related to lying. If I can't trust you, that has a caustic or an erosive effect on our relationship and relationships fall apart without trust. I think that there's another piece though, and it's related to the manipulative side. So to the extent that knowledge is power, if I can manipulate your knowledge
00:33:33
Speaker
I hold the power, right? And if I lie to you, I essentially incapacitate your ability to act of your own free will, to act how you would have had you known the truth. So if you had known the truth, you would have acted in a particular way, but by lying, I can get you to act in a way that is not to your own advantage, that in fact is to your disadvantage. I can get you essentially to act against your own free will. And since we value free will,
00:34:03
Speaker
We value honesty because if I can simply lie and get you to act against your own interests, that kind of manipulation is something where I've done harm to you. I've done harm to your free will, your ability to act in your own interest. I've- And then it becomes a real question of what it means to act in someone's interest too, especially I'm sure as you watch the developmental trajectory as
00:34:31
Speaker
kids are changing and what's in their interest may be different from one year to the next. Absolutely. And I think that what you see in this paper we've been talking about, the parents keep claiming that they're lying in the interest of their kids. But that's a really, are you? Yeah, now we're getting to it. Now we're getting down to it. Is that efficacious? First of all, is it a good strategy?
00:34:59
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, what you see in this paper, though, I mean, the 14 year olds don't think parents should be able to lie to them. The 14 year olds think parents lying to them is worse than any other kind of lie because parents are obligated to tell the truth because parents hold special obligations to their children. Right. We all do that. There are certain things I owe my kids that I don't owe anybody else. And kids are very much aware of this. And 14 year olds think the truth is one of the things that you owe me.
00:35:25
Speaker
14-year-olds also don't think the truth is something that I owe you all the time. So it's this interesting balance, right? But yeah, so whenever we do something that's paternalistic, where we say, I'm doing this for you, we really have to do a little bit of a reality check there. Am I lying? Is this for you? Or is this the parent lying for themselves? What we see sometimes is that the parents are lying for themselves to go back to that domain-based thing.
00:35:53
Speaker
lying about my sex life is a personal choice. I don't have to talk to anybody about sex. I don't have to talk to anybody about my salary, things of that nature. Think about taboo topics. If somebody asked you about your masturbation experiences or something like that,
00:36:08
Speaker
you would never, that's not a topic of conversation. I would never, people would feel totally justified in lying. In that case, I'm not lying for you. It's not paternalistic. I'm lying to you because you don't deserve this. So there are different forms of lying. It's not all paternalistic, but there are plenty of times where parents couch their deceptive behavior to their children in this is good for them, right? And sometimes we have to believe that it might be, right? Related to
00:36:37
Speaker
I don't know. The dog dies and you say, oh, the dog went off to the farm or something like that, you know. For sure. Or whatever light, whatever small light takes to get them to stop running out into traffic or something, right? Absolutely. Or to brush their teeth. If you don't brush your teeth, monsters are going to come, right? Whatever it might be.
00:36:56
Speaker
Again, there are probably routes to getting kids to comply with what you want without lying to them, but lying is expedient there, right? Get in this car or I'm going to drive away, right? Is a really quick way to get them in the car and you have behavioral compliance and you can get on with your day, right? There's a lot going on there. I think that if you are reflective or if your listeners are thinking back on a time when they told a lie where they totally felt like,
00:37:27
Speaker
they were lying to help somebody out. Those sorts of white lies, we tell them all the time and we feel comfortable with them because there is a convention that sanctions them. It's okay to lie in certain situations. When telling the truth would hurt somebody's feelings, it's okay to lie a little bit, right?
00:37:48
Speaker
where it becomes troublesome is when we use a lie for expedience all the time, or when we use a lie to create a submissive situation. That's when we go, oh, that lie is over the line. I think that that's, for me, I think that that's like the plain old way of doing it. Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense what you're saying there in terms of power too. It's like, if,
00:38:14
Speaker
I am lying to you about something that you need that information to make a good decision.
00:38:22
Speaker
and maybe that's a decision about me, then that's like the worst kind of lies, right? Where it's like in relationships this happens, this is where the canonical situation where if you were lying to your partner about whatever, something that was important, cheating on them or whatever it was, those are like the worst kind of lies because you're removing the ability for that person to then evaluate you in a way that is important to them, that they have to make important decisions about.
00:38:53
Speaker
Elliott Turiel and Serena Perkins did a really interesting study. I don't know that it was ever published. It was like I inherited Serena's desk when I went to grad school. And so there it all was like this whole manuscript. But what they were finding in those relationships, Joe, just like you were talking about, when the
00:39:14
Speaker
Husband who had the job and made the bulk of the money when he would lie to his wife who didn't have as high paying a job about how he was spending the money or about a secret bank account, for example.
00:39:31
Speaker
People thought that was really a messed up lie, that he shouldn't lie to her, that there's a power imbalance, he's got a secret bank account, people didn't like that. But when it was, when the shoes were reversed, when this woman who didn't have much money, when she lied about her secret bank account, for example, to her husband that made the bulk of the money, people thought that that was justified. People were much more accepting of
00:39:57
Speaker
These are adults and college students were much more accepting of lies in that way because of the dynamics the power relationship in that spousal relationship. So, even when it's like.
00:40:11
Speaker
Even within the relationship, power matters and power dynamics matter. It's an interesting idea. The people who we are closest to, are we telling them more lies than people who don't mean anything to us? Or are we lying about topics that we really should be honest about?
00:40:31
Speaker
our ability to manipulate them really comes with a cost to that individual, right? You're getting at kind of the moral core of why honesty is required or is normative in that way.
00:40:44
Speaker
So let's step back a second and I wonder if you have an example of the, and, you know, feel free not to answer in the same way that you don't have to answer about your sex life or masturbating or anything like that.
Impact of Lies on Trust
00:40:56
Speaker
Maybe you have an example of the last time you manipulated a person with a lie. You heard of elf on the shelf. Yeah, sure.
00:41:07
Speaker
This is a great deal of work for parents because this elf keeps showing up all over your house having done all different sorts of things. So one day the elf is on the counter and there's flour spread out and cookie ingredients and then stay the elf is in the Christmas tree day the elf is hanging from the chandelier and Oh, where do you think
00:41:27
Speaker
her elf Ignacio. Where do you think Ignacio is going to be? And she's running around the house. And I think of that as like, we were having fun. She was loving it. She's in this relationship and I'm feeling good about it. And at the same time, it's like every morning I'm putting on this lie every morning, where, oh, where, where could he be? Let's go look around. And so I think that like, there's an example of me trying to do like,
00:41:54
Speaker
be a good dad, and how do you do a good dad thing here? Oh, help your kids, let her live in this moment, let her feel the season, let her get amped up about Christmas time and the means for accomplishing that. Lie after lie. Lie after lie, yeah, it's monstrous. This elf on the shelf is just monstrous.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know what to say about that. What can one say about the elephant in the show? So here's a question. So we tell fewer lies as as kids grow up or as as parents, we tell fewer lies to them as they grow up. So what that means is that you're eventually sort of admitting to the you know, the litany of lies that you've told them over the years and you have to confront, you know,
00:42:37
Speaker
you may have to confront the elf on the shelf one day and Tooth Fairy and all of these other ones at some point, right? So how does that reconciliation, how does that, you know, this may be just your intuition about it, because I don't know what research is here, but how does your, how does that reconciliation go? And does it lose, do you lose trust with kids after sort of letting them know that you lied to them in the past? But it was for a good reason. I,
00:43:03
Speaker
I know only a little bit about the research in this area, and I don't think that there's much. But what I can tell you is parents tell a lot of lies to maintain the lies. The web of lies. Yeah, that idea.
00:43:24
Speaker
Parents do have, and this is just folk, right? This is naive, potentially, but parents feel like, well, if they catch me in that lie, then they won't trust me. So I got to make sure that that lie sticks around, that that holds up. Parents are also really, for whatever reason, because remember, you know, when we talk about different cultural setups, whatever parents and children, generally parents have more control over more, more power of their kids. So it's, you got to wonder why with the parent,
00:43:54
Speaker
lie to their kid, other than in a manipulative way. We can understand why kids with less power would lie to their parents, but parents
00:44:02
Speaker
do feel like they don't want to let their kids down and they have a status to maintain. Kind of a feeling of responsibility. Yeah. So it's this funny thing. You want your kid to trust them to trust you. So you keep lying to them. Right. It's this interesting kind of catch. And so I know parents are fearful of that because I hear that a lot in the different interviews that we've done. I don't know if there's research on
00:44:29
Speaker
how much of an impact it has. But when you ask adolescents, and I have not done this work, but many folks have, when you ask adolescents to retell times when their parents lied to them, they're almost always about the most mundane
00:44:46
Speaker
little lame thing, right? Like my parents told me that the goldfish had died, but they had really, or that the goldfish had gone somewhere, but they had really flushed it down the toilet or something like that. My parents told me that my balloon had blown away in the wind, but really my mom got tired of it and popped it, right? It's like the simplest little things. But so when they're that simple, I don't know how much trust is lost. It's just like, oh, I can't believe you lied to me.
00:45:14
Speaker
But I don't know if it's like the kids now don't trust their parents about anything they say. I'm sure there are gradations here. Yeah. You know, when I think about some of the lying that
00:45:27
Speaker
is most interesting to me, not to get into the crazy relationship lies because there could be some that are just so elaborate. So you have your connoisseur of, you have some of your favorite lies. Yeah, I've got some preferences. But what I think would be interesting to know for the little kid is when is the little kid taking on the lie knowingly?
00:45:52
Speaker
So when does the little kid actually know that they're being lied to by the parent, but like they're participant to the ruse? I was thinking about that with elf on the shelf. I'm like, does my kid really still think that the elf goes to its places on its own? I'm not going to say that it does. I'm not going to test this hypothesis. Does she really still believe that? But there's going to be a point at which we're just both playing the game, right? Neither of us are really believing it. I'm lying and she's going along with the lie because she's doing it for, does that make sense? When the kid picks that up.
00:46:21
Speaker
Well, and, you know, for the, the, there's, there's often an incentive not just not to discontinue it right with the tooth fairy. I mean, you want to keep the money flowing. Right, you're going to run out of teeth at some point, though. Yeah.
00:46:39
Speaker
maybe a good place to sort of start to wrap it up a little bit. Maybe this has, I think, been a very good discussion of very interesting topic about deceit and lies. So maybe I'll ask you this question. What are some of the things that you're really excited about in your research going forward? Like what are some of the questions that you're really excited to explore and get into more?
Future Research Directions
00:47:08
Speaker
Well, right now, I guess the one that I'm really interested in, again, is looking at how deception is used as a moral good, as an example, right? So just like hiding Joe under the desk and keeping him away from that ax murderer, I'm interested in looking at how children, young children, like when these things come online, when children are
00:47:38
Speaker
using lies to accomplish social justice related goals. So we've done some work on this with like kids lying
00:47:51
Speaker
altruistically on behalf of say a disabled age mate, right? Or you let your little brother win at a game because you could easily beat them but you let them win and then you let them think that they won on their own or something along those lines. We've looked at some of those sorts of things and we see that children early on are altruistically applying
00:48:15
Speaker
deception. They're lying in kind of that white lie way for altruistic goals. I'm interested in seeing how children use lies to achieve more social justice related goals. So when do kids deploy lies to a teacher, to an authority figure to protect somebody else who might be getting
00:48:37
Speaker
prejudicial treatment, something along those lines. When do young kids use lies to prevent unjust harm of somebody, right? So we know that little kids will happily do that version of the Kant murderer at the door where the bully is looking for Joe, and I know that Joe's at the swing set, and when the bully comes to me, I say, oh, Joe's over at the jungle gym to protect Joe from the bully.
00:49:04
Speaker
Well, what else will they lie about? When else will they do it? So do kids recognize and then coordinate? Do they prioritize some other social justice thing and then say, oh, you know what? It's okay to lie in this situation for racial justice or for gender justice, for example. So that's what I'm looking, that's what I'm interested in looking at next. Like when will they lie to achieve other forms of fairness? Not just for themselves, but third party fairness.
00:49:33
Speaker
That's very interesting. And yeah, maybe we can have you back on after you've solved some of that. And we can talk about that some more. Thank you very much for being on the show. Appreciate it. Thanks for talking to us today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's nice to chat with folks. And it's also nice to have a little Berkeley flashback.