Chapters 4 and 5 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 4: Dr. Victoria Talwar has concluded that people cannot generally tell when children are lying. Acknowledging that even parents cannot tell whether children are lying, Talwar says that parents have a hard time believing that their children will lie, since this undermines their ideas of themselves as good parents.

Bronson describes a study in which children are given a chance to peek during a game, and then to see whether they lie, and how far they go with their lie. Bronson says that children learn to lie early: only 30% of third-graders will lie, but over 80% of four-year-olds will lie about whether they peeked during the game.

Bronson says that children learn that some lies are alright, but he says that the correctness of information is important to children, and any factual inaccuracy seems like a lie to a child...