{"id":27079,"date":"2018-01-06T01:05:34","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T05:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=27079"},"modified":"2018-01-09T10:31:29","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T14:31:29","slug":"truth-set-free-just-make-less-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2018\/01\/truth-set-free-just-make-less-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the Truth Set You Free Or Just Make You Less Smart?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Alex Stone startled in a recent New York Times<\/em> op-ed, \u201cIs Your Child Lying to You? That\u2019s Good.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0Stone, author of Fooling Houdini<\/a>, tempts readers to abandon that plodding parental desire to raise honest children with this irresistible bait: liars are smarter. \u201cWe believe honesty is a moral imperative, and we try to instill this belief in our children,\u201d Stone opens. He identifies this as a mistake, undervaluing both the act of fibbing and its power as predictor of cleverness: \u201cLying is not only normal; it\u2019s also a sign of intelligence.\u201d \u00a0Overturning hidebound preference honesty is \u201cresearch.\u201d\u00a0 Through experiments telling young children not to peek at a hidden toy, then asking them to self-report, observers discovered that at least 80% of four-year-olds could lie convincingly. Adults, even parents, sometimes had trouble distinguishing liars from truth-tellers. This research\u00a0suggests not only that lying is common among young children but that it can be read as a good sign. Kids who disobeyed and lied about it were measured as smarter than the ones who did not lie. Smart in ways that play like music to the ears of parents now: their verbal IQ scores were higher, their executive functioning skills were superior, and they even seemed more open to others\u2019 points of view. Parents whose preschoolers disappoint with ox-like honesty can jumpstart these late-bloomers by instruction through (what else?) games that \u201ccan turn truth-tellers into liars within weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parents unwilling to give up dreams of honesty for their children can cultivate that too. Getting kids to make some sort of promise, like signing an honor code, seems to trip self-policing mechanisms even if kids do not understand them. Kids can be paid off for telling the truth, the lowest effective \u201chonesty-to-dishonesty exchange rate\u201d hovering around 150%. \u00a0Carrots work better than sticks, Stone concludes. \u00a0Kids who know to tell the truth at $3 instead of lying at $2 are to be praised as rational calculators.\u00a0 They have figured out the best policy. After all, as Stone assesses parental desire, what we want is for \u201cour children to be clever enough to lie but morally disinclined to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone may be right in that assessment: what is wanted in honesty is not inability to lie but the choice not to. But Stone\u2019s larger argument is wrong. Actually parents should<\/em> be unhappy if their children are lying. Parents are reasonable in wanting little Dick and Jane to be honest, not because incentives make honesty more rewarding but because truth-telling is good in itself and shapes the kind of person that boy or girl is and will be.<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s contrarian title is effective at getting readers\u2019 attention. But the insidious part is his baiting of the hook, because many readers of this newspaper want what\u2019s on that hook so badly. We want our kids to be smart. We may weight different strains of that quality differently, one family valuing creativity over calculation, another grooming engineers over wordsmiths, but intelligence is prized.<\/p>\n

Many of Stone\u2019s conclusions are neatly wrong, the tidy opposite of what should be. To get underneath what disturbs about his transvaluation, it might be useful to\u00a0confess\u00a0several peeves often provoked by current advice about childrearing:<\/p>\n