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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2016
Everyone lies, but politicians do it more often
Early learners
Research
indicates we
learn to lie at
about 3 years old
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON — This is
the season of lies.
We watch with fascination
as candidates for the world’s
most powerful job trade false-
hoods and allegations of
dishonesty.
Republican
presidential
candidate Donald Trump rou-
tinely calls rival Ted Cruz
“Lyin’ Ted.” Cruz retorts:
“Falsely accusing someone of
lying is itself a lie and some-
thing Donald does daily.”
News organizations such
as The Associated Press and
PolitiFact dedicate enormous
resources to separating candi-
dates’ truthful wheat from their
dishonest chaff.
But if we’ve come to
e[pect of¿ce-seeNers who
seem truth-averse, many of
us have given little thought
to our own ¿bs, and how they
Paul Zheng/University of Toronto
A child peeks at a hidden card when an adult leaves the room
and later lies about not peeking, during a study about how
young children start to lie at Kang Lee at the University of To-
ronto in Toronto. Scientists say we all lie, and this year, politi-
cians are bending the truth big time, with real consequences.
By studying how and why we deceive, the experts say they
can help us better understand the 2016 election season.
compare with politicians’
deceits.
For more than two decades,
researchers of different stripes
have examined humanity’s
less-than-truthful underbelly,
and this is what they have
found: We all stretch the truth.
We learned to deceive as tod-
dlers. We rationalize our fabri-
cations that bene¿t us. We tell
little white lies daily that maNe
others feel good.
“I feel more worried about
lying in public life (specif-
ically by politicians, and in
particular, Trump) than I
ever have before,” psychol-
ogy researcher Bella DePaulo
at the University of Califor-
nia, Santa Barbara, said in an
email. When lies succeed, they
maNe it “more tempting to lie.
Lies can sticN. They can have
a lingering effect, even if they
are debunNed.”
Children learn to lie at an
average of about 3 years old,
often when they realize that
other people don’t Nnow what
they are thinNing, said .ang
Lee, a professor at the Univer-
sity of Toronto.
He has done extensive
research on children and lying.
Lee set up an experiment in a
video monitored room to see if
he could catch children lying
about peeNing at a toy when an
adult left the room.
At age 2, only 30 percent
lie, Lee said. At age 3, half do.
By 5 or 6, 90 percent of the
Nids lie and Lee said he wor-
ries about the 10 percent who
don’t. This is universal, Lee
said.
In 1996, DePaulo, author
of “The Hows and Whys of
Lies,” put recorders on stu-
dents for a weeN and found
they lied, on average, in every
third conversation of 10 min-
utes or more. For adults, it was
once every ¿ve conversations.
“I would say we’re lying
constantly. Constantly,” said
Maurice Schweitzer, who
studies deception and deci-
sion-maNing at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School of Business, Trump’s
alma mater.
White lies
Experts split on whether
to count white lies, the social
lubrication that maNes civi-
lization operate. When your
spouse tells you that you don’t
looN fat in that out¿t when you
do, does it really do any harm?
Some lies, said Schweitzer,
“fall under politeness norms
and are not very harmful. There
are other lies that are self-in-
terested and those are the ones
that are really harmful. Those
are the ones that harm relation-
ships, harm trust.”
But DePaolo sees no dis-
tinction: “It doesn’t matter if
the attempt was motivated by
good intentions and it doesn’t
matter if the lie is about some-
thing little.”
Regardless, society rewards
people for white lies, said Rob-
ert Feldman at the University
of Massachusetts. “We don’t
liNe people who tell us the
truth all the time.”
He added, “The lies that we
accept from politicians right
now are lies that are seen as
acceptable because it’s what
we want to hear,” liNe a spouse
saying that an out¿t Àatters
you.
Or perhaps we feel that
lying is necessary.
“The reason that people
want their politicians to lie
them is that people care about
politics,” said Dan Ariely, a
professor of psychology and
behavioral economics at DuNe
University. “You understand
that Washington is a dirty
place and that lying is actually
very helpful to get your poli-
cies implemented.”
When people deceive
beyond white lies, they spend
a lot of effort justifying and
rationalizing what they are
doing.
Likely to deceive
“Dishonesty is conta-
gious,” said University of Not-
tingham’s Simon Gaechter.
His March 2016 study
examined honesty in a dice
game in 23 different countries
(but not the United States) and
then compared them to a cor-
ruption index for those coun-
tries. The more corrupt a soci-
ety was, the more liNely the
people there were willing to
deceive in the simple dice
game.
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Who to call.
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800-882-3377
THE DAILY
ASTORIAN
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