An article called “WHY WE LIE: THE SCIENCE BEHIND OUR DECEPTIVE WAYS,” in the June 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine, explores research about lying. Three of the researchers discussed there — Bruno Verschuere, Kang Lee, and Dan Ariely — are Ig Nobel Prize winners.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, the journalist who wrote the article, writes about them:
… “The truth comes naturally,” says psychologist Bruno Verschuere, “but lying takes effort and a sharp, flexible mind.” Lying is a part of the developmental process, like walking and talking. Children learn to lie between ages two and five, and lie the most when they are testing their independence….
Kang Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, sees the emergence of the behavior in toddlers as a reassuring sign that their cognitive growth is on track. To study lying in children, Lee and his colleagues use a simple experiment. They ask kids to guess the identity of toys hidden from their view, based on an audio clue. For the first few toys, the clue is obvious—a bark for a dog, a meow for a cat—and the children answer easily. Then the sound played has nothing to do with the toy. “So you play Beethoven, but the toy’s a car,” Lee explains. The experimenter leaves the room on the pretext of taking a phone call—a lie for the sake of science—and asks the child not to peek at the toy. Returning, the experimenter asks the child for the answer, following up with the question: “Did you peek or not?”…
Ariely became fascinated with dishonesty about 15 years ago. Looking through a magazine on a long-distance flight, he came across a mental aptitude test. He answered the first question and flipped to the key in the back to see if he got it right. He found himself taking a quick glance at the answer to the next question. Continuing in this vein through the entire test, Ariely, not surprisingly, scored very well. “When I finished, I thought—I cheated myself,” he says. “Presumably, I wanted to know how smart I am, but I also wanted to prove I’m this smart to myself.” The experience led Ariely to develop a lifelong interest in the study of lying and other forms of dishonesty…. The question Ariely finds interesting is not why so many lie, but rather why they don’t lie a lot more…. unless one is a sociopath, most of us place limits on how much we are willing to lie. How far most of us are willing to go—Ariely and others have shown—is determined by social norms arrived at through unspoken consensus, like the tacit acceptability of taking a few pencils home from the office supply cabinet…