Why do we lie? - CrowdScience podcast, BBC World Service

First question: Could you introduce yourself please? My name is Ariana Kincaid. And whereabouts in the world are you? I am in West Virginia Charleston West Virginia in the United States. And is your name really Ariana? It really is. You're listening to CrowdScience on the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Steel and I don't normally question  everything people say. Could you explain to listeners why I'm doubting what your real  name is? Because I have been in and judged liars contests. Ariana is th

e world's second biggest liar and we're joined by this untrustworthy character thanks to a question from one of you  listeners. Hi, I'm Anthony. I'm in the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. And what's your question for  CrowdScience? My question for CrowdScience is: Why do we lie and how conscious are we of  the lies that we tell? We all do it at some point during the day or during our lives in general  so is this influenced by culture or say the context that we tell certain lies? Anthony's moved

 all over the world for work and each time he's had to learn a new rule book for lying. At first it was difficult to suss out who was lying and when but then it gradually it goes back to culture you can  understand here in Cambodia people are very nice you know they're just extremely smiley and  they'll say the lovely things about you but it takes a bit longer to suss out a bit more  what's underneath the surface. Anthony has an adorable two-year-old daughter who's just learning to tell fibs. Sh

e went over to a friend's house a couple of days ago and she made up this wonderful lie. She said she was bored of being there for whatever reason you  know and she started saying "Oh I want to go home and sleep". So her mother took her home to sleep  and of course she wasn't sleepy at all she just wanted to come home so it was yeah very sweet  I was dead impressed yes. Top tip on how to get out of social situations from Anthony's daughter there - pretend you're sleepy and hopefully your Mum wil

l take you home. I think my friends would  describe me as a bit honest, if they were being polite. Very blunt, if they're being honest. I  don't like lies, including white ones. I will tell them to get by in awkward social situations  but I try and avoid it. I personally think life would be much better if we all always tell the  truth and know exactly where we stand with each other. On this show we're going to untangle  the web that is the psychology of lying. So when does this deception begin?

Anthony's  fibbing two-year-old suggests lying starts at a very young age. Professor Kang Lee from the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, at the University of Toronto is an expert on kids lying strategies. According to scientific evidence,  children begin to lie around two and a half years of age. So isn't that basically when children  are learning to speak? Yes indeed they just barely are able to put words together to make a sentence, they start to lie. What is it about a t

wo and a half year old that means they can lie? Like what is it that we need to be able to lie? So what is needed is the child has to understand that different people have different knowledge about the world. Another thing that's extremely important  is the ability to inhibit. So that's the ability to inhibit the truth and then switch over to come up  with the alternative truth. These two abilities are the essential skills we have to develop as  humans. When we function you in our society so lyi

ng is sort of like a good sign. Your child has  arrived at this kind of important milestone of development. So we should sort of be celebrating  a child's first lie rather than sort of scorning them? Oh definitely so this is you know this is a  moment for you to be very proud of your child. Do you have kids? Yes I do. Do you remember  a first lie and what your reaction was like? So I brought him to my lab to see whether or not he  would lie about a transgression, which is he's peeking at the ans

wer to a game and he did. So I was very  happy. "Ah, my kid can lie". You must be one of the only parents who are like "Yes my kid lied, he's doing  fantastically well, he's developing fantastically". So as we develop, how do our lies change? So is  a two-year-old lying in a different way from a seven-year-old or is it basically a skill that  sort of stays with us for life? At about two years of age it's only a third of kids two and a half years old would lie. At four more than 80% of kids would

lie. By about seven, almost all kids will  lie to cover their transgressions. This is kind of universal across the world. Do adults lie as much as seven year olds or do we get a bit more caught up in the ethics of lying? Once you reach the peak around seven to eight years of age, we start slowly decline our tendency to lie. By about 12 years of  age the lying rate is about 60% instead of let's say 100% around seven years of age and the decline continues to about 16 years of age so basically if

you look at the teenager years  as actually a more honest period of development That's so the opposite of what I would expect. What changes between teenager and adult? Why do we start to lie more again? We come up with all sorts of ways to rationalise the lies we tell, we call it moral licensing. Lying is a healthy part of development. We pick it up at around two and practice it freely until we reach our teenage years, when lying starts to get tangled up in morality and to justify it to ourselve

s we start  to give lies names like white lies. In fact Kang has a whole rainbow of colours for understanding  different lies. White Lies are lies we tell to be polite, to spare others feelings. Grey Lies are a  lie we tell to cover up our own mistakes. Blue Lies, a lie we tell in the interest of a collective or  group. Purple Lies are lies we tell to be modest, to remain lowkey. Red Lies are lies told out of spite  and revenge. We can give them different colours but at the end of the day a lie

is a lie. It's a way  of deceiving someone. Hi, I'm Ian Leslie. I'm an author. I've written books about human behaviour, about all sorts of things. But my first book was about lying. It's called Born liars: Why we can't live without deceit. So why can't we live without deceit? Great question, I'm so glad you  asked. Well the argument I make amassing lots of different evidence from lots of different  fields is that lying is much more central to our existence, to our societies, to who we are as hu

man  beings then we like to think. Almost everybody lies a lot right and studies have shown you  know people kind of tell two or three white Lies a day right but it's just something which is  kind of woven into daily existence and yet we talk about it as if it's this aberration or  this perversion or this terrible terrible kind of weird thing. I find that really interesting. How many lies do you think you tell a day? Two? Three? Maybe even five? A study shows that when meeting a new person we mi

ght tell up to three lies in just 10 minutes. And Ian thinks this has  been happening for a very long time. There's a really interesting theory from evolutionary psychology called a Machiavellian theory of intelligence Early, early humans and our  sort of predecessors on the evolutionary tree lived in larger social groups than other  primates. Now if you're in a large social group you have to know who your allies are and who  your enemies are and what's going on and you have to become socially i

ntelligent, there's this kind  of arms race going on where you have the detect deception and when you deceive you have to be good  at it otherwise they detect it. When they looked at ape behaviour they saw all these kind  of interesting examples of deception. A young ape would be caught doing something that they  shouldn't have been doing, going after the food they shouldn't have been, taking whatever and runs  up to the ridge of a hill and sort of makes a noise which usually indicates I can see

a kind  of enemy troop approaching and all the elders kind of run after the younger one when they  get there they realise there's no threat at all but by that time they've kind of forgotten why  they run up there and you know the ape has just made a successful kind of diversion.  You see these like little micro-examples of of deception and deceit and dishonesty quite  a lot once you start looking for them. Larger the frontal cortex the more lying was associated  and of course we have the larges

t frontal cortex of all and we do the most lying so it's  kind of really woven into our DNA, it's bound up with our social intelligence which is  also responsible for all the kind of you know amazing things that we do, but you can't kind  of separate one from the other. It's interesting that we all lie and yet there are moral codes written into sort of all the stories we come across as a child, which are basically saying  don't lie - you have The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There once was a shepherd boy

who was  bored as he sat on the hillside watching the village sheep. To amuse himself he took a  great breath and sang out "Wolf, wolf, the wolf is chasing the sheep". The villagers came  running up the hill to help the boy drive the wolf away but when they arrived  at the top of the hill they found no wolf. The boy laughed at the sight of their  angry faces. "Don't cry wolf when there's no wolf". Later the boy sang out again "Wolf, wolf,  the wolf is chasing the sheep". He watched the villager

s run up the hill to help him drive the  wolf away. When the villagers saw no wolf, they sternly said "Save your frightened song for when  there is really something wrong, don't cry wolf when there is no wolf". Later he saw something big  with terrible teeth and scary eyes prowling around the sheep field. It was a real wolf. Alarmed he  leapt to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could but the villagers thought he was trying  to fool them again and so they didn't come. In almost every moral c

ode there's some commandment against deceit so it's clearly been an incredibly important thing in any human society to punish or  shame people for for lying right and you can see why. If you can't rely on people to tell the truth  most of the time then you can't really cooperate, you can't organise, you can't get anything done.  So you need to kind of find a social mechanism for stopping that and for minimising it anyway - how to manual for living right your moral commandments or whatever it is

. You're listening to CrowdScience on the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Steel and we're answering a question  from listener Anthony who wants to know: Why do we lie and can we lie without even realising  it? In some ways this show is a lie or at least it's a story. We've stitched together interviews  to make a logical narrative. The conversations didn't actually happen in this order and we cut  out bits so the show isn't too long but we have a sort of unwritten understanding between you  liste

ners and us the CrowdScience team that that's OK. I'd like to introduce you to Ariana,  a storytelling expert and medal holder from the world's biggest liar competition who we heard from  at the start of the show. I came in second. That's pretty good, so second in the world's biggest lying competition. Yes it is the world's biggest lying competition. How do you feel about having the title of being the second best liar in the whole world?  Well honestly I feel like it's almost more believable bec

ause you know if I was  lying why wouldn't I make myself sound better. Commiserations. How on Earth did you get into  lying competitions? Well it's sort of in the culture around here, there's a large festival here  in Charleston, the Vandalia Gathering and they started back in the 70s with the liars contest.  This annual event in West Virginia USA is one of the busiest in the calendar. The storytelling  competition also known as the biggest liar event of the Vandalia Gathering has become a  Memo

rial Day weekend tradition for many in the mountain state. And it's just one of those  things I think everybody around here enters at least once and if they don't they've been to it  to watch the people lying. It's run by the state department for culture and history which takes  pride in carrying on this strong tradition of being home to the very best liars. My husband has been in it, my daughter's been in  it, they've both won so it was sort of entering it was sort of self-defence really. Why i

s it  important to you? What do you see as the value of lying? It's really just the oral tradition of  history and storytelling in a way that makes it palatable for others. So something that I've  learned in this show which is sort of I've found surprising is how important lying is socially  it's something I've always almost looked down on and been like whenever anyone tells  a lie regardless of whether or not it's a white lie or a self-serving lie I would sort of judge it  as a bad thing, but I

'm definitely changing my mind on that as I talk to more people about this. So I  would like to get better at lying because I would say I am a categorically terrible liar. If you got  any tips as the world's second best liar. You have to believe what you're saying whether it's true or  not you know it's not true but you have to sound like you believe what you're saying. I think there  are certain cues like you said you get nervous when you tell a lie and you wind up telling the  truth right afte

rwards anyway. The closer you stick to the truth, the less your body betrays you  I think in telling the story. Lying is complicated. It takes a lot of mental work to do it. You have  to come up with an entirely new story and that's all going on inside our brains in a way that's  invisible to people watching. Unless you're a neuroscientist with an MRI scanner. I'm Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL. So what is going on inside our brains when we lie? Right so when we lie we

need to do two things: We need to suppress the truth and then we need  to make up something new. Can you see those two things happening in the brain if you look inside  it? Yeah so you'd see the frontal lobes active both in suppression of the truth, both in you  know imagining and inventing something new which is a lie and then you could also see activity  related to emotion so for example the amydala which is important for emotional arousal may also be active. So how can you go about studying

what's going on in someone's brain when they  lie, do you put them in like an MRI scanner or how does it work? Yeah so we put them in an MRI  scanner and we create situations where naturally people will tend to lie. One experiment that we  did we put people in a situation where if they lied they would gain more money at the expense of  another person. And what percentage of people in that experiment do lie? So almost everyone lies the  question is by how much. When we lie there's more activity i

n our frontal lobes, which is the part of the brain responsible for problem solving, as we suppress the truth and invent an entirely new  story and our amydala which is our emotion centre fires up, probably because the fib makes us feel  bad. In one of Tali's studies she found that the more people lie the less active their amygdalas  are suggesting the less they care. Sounds like a slippery slope. And the more opportunities they  have to lie the more and more they lie so from one pence it goes t

o a pound then it goes to two pounds and three pounds and so on, so they become comfortable with their own lying so lying escalates it kind  of snowballs. Interestingly people were not aware that they were doing this at all. At the end we  told them "Hey look what happened, you know you lied by a little bit then you lied more and  more and more" and they were not aware, so this seems to be at least partially unconscious, if not  fully unconscious. Anthony that's the answer to the second part of

your question: Can we lie without  realising it? Well yes, we can if we lie enough we become numb to it. So this is something that's known as emotion habituation. By the time they get to this lie that's really large they've already  become desentised. To me this feels like that's not a useful behaviour, like becoming desensitised to lies around us makes us I guess a less good judge and I can imagine sort of socially it's  not great to lie more and more you're going to lose the trust of people ar

ound you. Are there any  advantages to this behaviour? We see this behaviour because it is due to a basic element of the brain. So this behaviour did not evolve for lying right it's basically because habituation  is something that is adaptive. The brain is a limited resource so it can't just react to  everything all the time. Things that don't change and do not harm us our brain filters out so that  it has resources to direct to things that are more important. Habituation means we can become  em

otionally desensitised to lying. This could happen as we tell more and more lies to  get ourselves out of a sticky situation or it could happen when we move to a new culture  and our behaviours have to adjust to fit in. Derek Scott also known as Let's Double Dutch on  Instagram and TikTok makes videos about awkward social situations where honesty in his hometown  of Amsterdam clashes with his experience growing up in the USA. Well I look at kind of Dutch  language and culture and identity bumpin

g up against different anglophone people. There's a  value in Dutch culture that's embedded in the language that the truth and direct expressions of  your thoughts and feelings are important above all else. I prefer the Dutch way of doing things but  I've dabbled relatively unsuccessfully in stand-up comedy and I was doing it in Amsterdam and it  was awful and I was like I want the ground to swallow me up. Well I'm sorry about that. You  know Dutch people are not liberal with their laughs at any

form of live performance. I think  that's a cultural value because again they're not going to go out of their way to make you feel  good. They I think believe that that's up to you and that's sort of expected but maybe we would  just all adjust if we just did it the Dutch way and everyone got used to having a little bit I  guess harsher feedback a bit more honesty. In your experience of living in different places  where has been your favourite place in terms of levels of honesty. I grew up in t

he suburbs of  Chicago my family's all still there. I go back sometimes and I'm in like a store checking out  and the cashier is like "How are you doing today?" You know in the Netherlands like if you ask  a Dutch person that while you're ringing up their milk like they'll fully dissociate they're  like I don't know what to do with this question this is absurd, this is high comedy to them, that  would be so outrageous and now when I'm in that position I similarly like kind of just have an  out o

f body experience. I think I don't know what to do right now. Interesting it's so relative isn't  it. Do you think your level of honesty and what is acceptable just adjusts when you move from place  to place? Oh completely, for people who have you know experienced being a foreigner  somewhere or had to adjust to language and culture I think those nuances and those kind  of in between spaces become something you know have to get used to and eventually build  into your own sensibility and way of c

ommunicating. Every culture has a different flavour of lying.  The Netherlands might be more honest than most countries, while in the UK we are constantly  telling white lies to protect each other's feelings. In Japan there's even language for it -  Honne means your true feelings, while Tatemae mean the the behaviour and opinions you display in public  and according to Kang, the psychologist we heard from earlier in the show, in China purple lies are  common, which is where people will tell lies

to be modest, maybe to say hide a good score on a test.  Here's Ian Leslie again. I think if you looked across different cultures say different national cultures you'd find different norms for the amount of direct truth telling let's put it that  way from whether you're talking about Britain versus Japan versus  the Netherlands, right, you probably find kind of three different standards there of how direct  should we be about about telling the truth. So the amount of truth telling you do is alw

ays  in relationship to the cultural norm whether or not that's in society at large or within your  your relationship or the group that you're in. Anthony, Derek, that sounds like your experience  of moving between different cultures and maybe some of you listeners can relate to that too. If  so I'd love to hear about your experiences of lying in your country and you can get in  touch with us to tell us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk. I want to say in this conclusion that this show has convinced me t

hat lying is a good thing because that would make a nice story. Ariana would be proud but that would be lying. But Anthony I hope we've answered your  question about why we do it. We lie because it benefits us personally. Maybe it stops us from  getting into trouble at school or means we pay slightly less taxes but the key thing is that we  don't lie too often so it still makes sense for society's default to be to trust what people  are saying otherwise life would be chaos and before we hear the

credits from Anthony I'd like  to play you the end of my interview with Derek. So that was a great interview. Thank you for coming  in. Oh now yes okay. Yeah I mean had lots to talk about cultural differences, honesty. I did not  enjoy it so much. You didn't... you didn't enjoy the interview? No. Surely there were some bits  you liked I mean we were just having a nice conversation? Yeah it's too much science. Too much  science? Yeah. You are aware this is CrowdScience? And why do you have all t

hese questions from  people all over the world? The questions from our listeners? Yeah. I mean that is the premise of  the show, we answer questions from listeners. You told me I had to stay in this tiny little room  and that I could not go to the bathroom until we were done recording. But this tiny room is a  studio, it's quite expensive to book, we only have half an hour, we had a lot to get through.  What is this place, everybody makes such a big deal out of this building? The BBC. Yeah I am 

underwhelmed. Underwhelmed by the BBC? Yeah. OK. You're very honest aren't you? Oh do you think so?  Yeah. I mean most people I interview tell me they had a great time afterwards in fact, I think  everyone I've ever interviewed has said they enjoyed themselves. Well I did not, maybe they  did but I did not. I just think maybe there's something in being polite, something in being kind,  saying you had a good time even if you didn't love all of it. Lying? It's not lying, I would not lie  like tha

t, it's not lying, it's not lying, that's just being polite. Do I bother you? No, no, it's  been great having you on. Yeah I think that's a lie. That's it for this edition of CrowdScience.  Today's question was from me Anthony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. If you have a question you want  answering you can email crowdscience@bbc.co.uk. This week's presenter was Caroline Steel  and the episode was produced by Robbie Wojciechowski.