Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

who had a somewhat tangential relationship with truth, used to say that you should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He could have said the same about any theory on which a scientist has staked his identity. Abandoning a theory on which you have built your career and reputation with your peers will threaten your sense of being a person, and so you are likely to deny the evidence that shows your theory to be wrong.

      So rarely does a scientist gracefully relinquish a theory which built his reputation that much is made of those occasions when a scientist does just this. In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of a respected elderly zoologist who was tremendously pleased when, in a lecture, a much younger scientist showed the zoologist that his long-held theory was wrong. Dawkins wrote, ‘We clapped our hands red.’²

      If you are the student of a well-known or an up-and-coming scientist, one of the most dangerous things you can do is to obtain research results that throw doubt on this scientist’s theories. (Alternatively, one of the best things you can ever do is to produce results that disprove the theories of his competitor.) Vasudevi Reddy told the story of what happened when one of Piaget’s students, Olga Maratos, made a discovery that suggested that Piaget might be wrong. From his extensive research the great psychologist had concluded that it was not until they were about eight months old that infants could imitate another person because imitation requires some understanding of oneself and another person, and this a newborn baby did not have. Olga Maratos found that, if she poked her tongue at a baby no more than a month old, the baby, seemingly with much thought and effort, poked his tongue at her. Her fellow psychologists were sceptical, but, when she showed the great man a video of her research, he said, ‘Indeed they imitate!’ When she asked him what she should do, he said she would either have to develop his theory, or create a different theory from the data.

      When Olga had presented her work at a conference of the British Psychological Society, in her audience was a young psychologist who went on to show that what she had found was indeed the case. Babies are born knowing how to imitate.

      It was Andrew Meltzoff who, having persuaded a large number of pregnant women to allow him to be at their baby’s birth, established that, if you hold a baby who has just been born so that the two of you are looking at one another, and you poke your tongue out, slowly and carefully, the baby will copy you. Now, nearly a hundred studies of newborns have shown that babies within minutes of birth can imitate mouth opening, finger movement, eye blinking, and even one sound, ‘aaaa’. Reddy wrote, ‘The debate is just as passionate as it ever was, now having shifted to the question of whether we could actually call such acts “imitation”.’³ This reminds me of the phenomenon of ‘retrospective diagnosis’ which I observed in the psychiatric hospitals where I worked. The psychiatrists I worked with believed that depression was a lifelong chronic illness which could be managed by the psychiatrist with the use of antidepressant drugs. When any of my depressed patients came to the conclusion that it was their ideas that had led them to become depressed, and decided that they could change these ideas to ones that ensured a satisfactory life, the psychiatrist who had diagnosed this patient as being depressed would deny that the patient had ever been depressed. He had merely suffered from mild anxiety. Changing the facts so that your original theory still holds is a very popular form of falsehood called ‘hypothesis saving’. It is not just scientists who do this.

      The question of whether newborn babies can imitate is important because, as Reddy said, ‘You cannot imitate that which in some sense you don’t understand.’⁴ To imitate you have to have some sense of self and to see something similar in the person you imitate. When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788 there followed a meeting between two groups of people whose paths had diverged some sixty thousand years before. When the first groups of homo sapiens left Africa, the distant ancestors of the officers, soldiers and convicts had settled in Europe while the distant ancestors of the Aborigines had set off on a long journey that eventually brought them to Australia. The two groups developed vastly different languages and cultures. Thus, when some of their number met on the shores of Sydney Harbour they could communicate only by facial expressions and gesture. What disconcerted the whites was the way the Aborigines could imitate them. The Aborigines could echo back to the English words and phrases that the white men had used. The Aborigines had no knowledge of what were appropriate manners in eighteenth-century England, but they could understand, say, how one man might display his power by the way he moved and gesticulated, and another his vanity. However, despite this and much other evidence that the Aborigines were the same species as the whites, the whites had to maintain their pride by insisting that the Aborigines were not just ignor ant savages but less than human. This belief has not entirely vanished from the minds of many white Australians today. Whoever you are, if you are treated as inferior by those who have power over you, you suffer. Children suffer when the adults around them treat them as their inferiors, as many adults do. Yet it is now quite clear that newborns do not merely imitate, they are able to distinguish human beings from objects, and understand wordlessly that people have intentions but objects do not, and that other people can confirm your existence but objects do not.

      It seems that we are born with the ability to be a person but that this ability requires interaction with other people in order for it to manifest itself. In the company of attentive faces, the many and various facets of being a person begin to show themselves. In her book How Infants Know Minds Vasudevi Reddy gives an account of all of these, but here I want to look at the aspects of being a person that relate to truth and lies.

      Infants perceive and respond to another person’s emotional state. They show a clear preference for happy faces rather than angry ones. What they dislike most is a blank, unresponsive face. We might not enjoy someone being angry with us or rejecting us, but at least these people are taking notice of us. Nowadays, in conversation ‘blank’ is used as a verb, as in, ‘At the party Susie blanked Jim, and he got back at her by sending her up.’ I am not sure how much of that sentence is Australian slang and how much English, but it means, ‘Susie refused to acknowledge Jim’s presence, and he responded by making fun of her.’ Teachers must make sure that they pay attention to the well-behaved child, otherwise the child might become very badly behaved in order to get some attention. In some of the workshops I used to run, I would ask the participants to imagine they were the sole survivor of a shipwreck. They had just enough strength to paddle their life raft to one of two islands. On one island, the inhabitants would ignore them completely. On the other, the inhabitants would notice them but only to be extremely unpleasant to them. Which island would they choose? The majority of people chose the island where the inhabitants acknowledged their existence, albeit unpleasantly. If, over a period of time, nobody takes any notice of us we start to feel that we have disappeared.

      It seems that babies soon discover that, if they respond to an adult in the way the adult wants, the adult rewards them, not just with smiles, but also with saying something in a warm, encouraging tone. By the time they are eight or nine months old infants start to understand and respond to orders. At first, this can seem to be another enjoyable game, but then some of these orders become, in the infant’s way of seeing things, an unwarranted intrusion into what the infant wants to do. Infants learn very quickly how not to comply to unwelcome instructions. To these they respond sometimes with noisy defiance, and sometimes more subtly with a stiffening of the back and the sudden onset of deafness.

      In responding in these ways to unwelcome orders, infants show that they understand the dangers inherent in being very obedient. If we comply with an order because, if we had thought of it, we would have done what we are now being asked to do, or because we want to please the person giving the order and fulfilling that order is not difficult, we feel that we are in control of that situation. However, if we believe that we will feel guilty if we disobey an unwelcome order or that in the face of punishment we are being compelled to comply, or that complying means going against the grain of our very being, we are not in control of the situ ation. We want to resist, and, if we do not do so, we despise ourselves. If these last three situations often arise, we soon find that continual compliance threatens to wipe us out as a person. We do not need a language to understand the danger of being annihilated as a person,