The Truth About All That Lying

Truth seems harder to come by today, but there’s a time to shield yourself from lies and a time to embrace them. “Forget smoke and mirrors,” Wesley Morris, a Times critic, wrote. “These are pants- on-fire times.”

There is a form of protection against those who deceive, he said: receipts. While a receipt used to be easy-tolose proof of a transaction — and not just of the financial kind — technology has made them easier to retain and distribute by digitizing them as audio, photographs and video. “Receipts are a confirmation of the truth, a corroboration of hypocrisy,” he wrote. “And they’re fast.”

Mr. Morris said that the need for receipts could be the emblem of this era, but that also means we’ve purchased goods that are defective.

Judi Ketteler wrote in The Times that she’s keeping another form of a receipt: an honesty journal.

“With honesty much in the news lately — you might even say honesty is having a cultural moment — I wanted to reflect on my own,” she said.

In doing so, she’s found that telling the truth has made her feel better. The journal has also helped her when she’s faced a difficult choice in being honest with her child.

“If it’s between YouTube and me to explain prostitution,” she said, “I pick me.”

There are health benefits to telling the truth, too, according to research from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. When a test group consciously stopped lying for 10 weeks, the subjects reported feeling better about their social interactions and their relationships, and had fewer mental and physical problems than the control group.

“My 6-year- old daughter once told me that telling the truth made her feel ‘gold in her brain,’ ” Ms. Ketteler wrote.

Her daughter might not be typical. Research shows that children start lying around the age of 2, the author Alex Stone wrote in The Times. They’re exceptionally good at it, too.

In an experiment, a toy was hidden behind a child, who was told not to peek at it when a researcher left the room. Later, the researcher asked the child if she or he peeked. The vast majority of the children looked at the toy almost immediately after the researcher left the room, and quite a few lied about it: 80 percent of children 4 and older, half of 3-year- olds and a third of 2-yearolds. The findings were the same across race, religion and gender.

In a follow-up, adults were shown footage of children either telling the truth or lying about peeking. Not one of the adults could consistently identify the lies, including the par- ents of the children.

But parents might want to celebrate if their offspring are adept at deceit — and the younger the better. Studies show that children who lie have higher verbal functioning than those who don’t, are better able to see the world through the eyes of others, and are more well adjusted.

Kang Lee, a psychologist, suggests parents speed up the process. In a few weeks, a child can be turned into a skilled liar with games and role-playing.

“Children who lie a lot, or who start lying at a young age, are often seen as developmentally abnormal, primed for trouble later in life,” Mr. Stone said. “But research suggests the opposite is true. Lying is not only normal; it’s also a sign of intelligence.”

The parents with the most reason to celebrate, however, were those of the children who did what they were told and didn’t peek at the toy. They were the rarest — and smartest — of all.