Little White Lies Do Fly?

-Alexandra Metzler 

Most parents spend years teaching their children that lying is bad, yet everyone learns to lie.

To understand why this happens, experts have spent decades studying the science of lying.

Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, says that despite what our parents told us, lying isn't always a bad thing and that there are important reasons almost everyone learns to lie.

"Lying is a basic process that gets us into imagination and into play and into creativity," he explained.

Lewis has been studying how and why children lie.He said he's identified four major types of lies: lying to protect the feelings of others, lying to protect yourself, lying to yourself and lying to hurt others. Of the four, he said only lies designed to actually hurt others seems to be a "bad" kind of lie.

From his research results, he said children will start to lie around two years old, when they pick up cues from their parents.

"Lying you can see in children as young as 2 and a half and 3 years of age," Lewis said. "You have to remember that adults lie all the time."

 He said children quickly pick up on lying when parents tell them to come forward if they did something wrong. Children find out they're in trouble even if they don't lie about it.

-Alexandra Metzler 

"Children quickly learn that to avoid telling the truth," Lewis said. "The children who are more emotionally stable, these are the ones who are likely to lie than to tell the truth."

Lewis said parents will often instruct children to lie to protect the feelings of, say, a gift-giver, who gives something the child doesn't want."[By] 2 years of age, children are capable of engaging in pretend play, which means they know what is real and they can pretend that it’s different than reality," Lewis explained. "You lie to yourself and at the same time you know you’re lying to yourself."

Even lies to protect oneself seem to be a normal part of development,” Lewis said. “In one experiment he performs, the researcher leaves a child along with a box and tells them not to look inside if they want a toy. They then leave the room and watch through cameras to see if the child looks at the toy.”

When they later ask the child if he or she has looked inside the box, usually around two-thirds of children under age 5 will lie, Lewis noted. By the time they are around 7,that number goes up to 90 percent.

Expecting children to be truthful all the time is unrealistic, Lewis said, noting that lying is part of how we interact with those around us.

"All these lies are going on in the adult world and the child has perceptions of what’s going on in the adult world," Lewis said. They "are learning these kinds of rules."