Studies Say We Learn to Fib While Young

July 20, 2005 — -- Would you eat a chicken's foot, toes and all?

Chances are you would, under the right circumstances.

That's because you were taught how to lie at a very early age, and you've been honing that skill ever since. We lie about all sorts of things, usually so we won't hurt someone else's feelings, and many of us have developed strong inhibitions to keep us from being socially unacceptable.

Otherwise, we're likely to tell the truth and blurt out that the chicken's foot that was just served to us by a nice Chinese lady is "bloody revolting," says psychologist Bill von Hippel of the University of New South Wales in Australia. And we'll do it even if she has just informed us that it's her favorite dish, and a delicacy in her native land.

That social blunder makes us an oaf, unable to tell a little white lie that would have spared her feelings.

And it's all because we didn't learn the lessons that mom taught us at a very early age. If you're going to get along in this old world, you've got to know how to lie.

But not to worry. Both studies indicate that we learned that well, and many of us would down that chicken's foot like it was a Big Mac, if the social situation called for it.

In the interest of full disclosure, however, let me state for the record that I would flunk that test in a heartbeat.

Both studies were published in recent issues of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.

The first study is one of several recent reports showing that we were taught how to lie while we were very young, usually by those closest to us, like mom and dad, and granny. Don't hurt Aunt Gertrude's feelings by telling her you wanted a red car, not a book. Grin and bear it.

But the researchers wanted to take that a step further and see if children who are conditioned to put more effort into controlling their emotions are actually better at it than those who aren't. Psychologists have a term for it that is so hard to say it's, well, disgusting. It's called "effortful control."