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I mean.) Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.
    Other than mind-reading, there are two other key mental abilities involved in mature lying. One of them is what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function’, a cluster of higher-order mental skills related to thinking ahead, strategising and reasoning (although the word ‘executive’ has a distinct meaning in psychology, these are precisely the abilities that enable children to grow up and enjoy successful careers, running large organisations or figuring out complicated engineering problems). A four-year-old engaged in a lie has to run different mental processes in parallel: he or she must establish their goal, work out how it might be achieved with the aid of a false statement, and then execute their strategy without giving the game away via facial or verbal leakage – that’s to say, looking shifty, or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. They have to combine intellectual agility with physical and emotional self-control.
    A child who lies well is also demonstrating a creative intellect – the ability to imagine those alternative versions of reality in the first place. Even very simple lies can require a leap of imagination. Tom has to be able to see it was plausible that Ella might have crawled across the room and knocked over the lamp even if, in truth, she has been sitting quietly on the sofa all along. In the Peeking Game, the more intellectually sophisticated children will stitch together an answer of some sort when challenged by the researcher. Victoria Talwar recalls how a Canadian boy tried to rationalise his ‘guess that the toy behind him was a stuffed football, based on the sound of a greeting card tune. He explained that the music ‘sounded squeaky, like the soccer balls at the school gym’. It was an impressive display of lateral thinking.
    Lying is hard . Children who lie well must be able to recognise the truth, conceive of an alternative false but coherent story, and juggle those two versions in their mind while selling the alternative reality to someone else – all the time bearing in mind what that person is likely to be thinking and feeling . It is wondrous that a child of four should be able to do this. If you catch your three-year-old in a well-told lie, allow yourself to be impressed.
Learning Not to Lie
    Of course, you can admire the skill in a three-year-old’s lie without wanting to congratulate them on it. The number of lies told by children tends to spike upwards in children aged four as they exercise their amazing new-found powers. Then, during the first school years, as the child receives an increased amount of what Talwar calls ‘social feedback’, the lying usually declines. In the classroom and the playground, children learn that the benefits of lying come with some pretty hefty costs. They find out that if they lie too much, teachers and friends lose faith in their credibility, and they become unpopular.
    This is an important point, and one that applies to adults as much as children. Truth-telling works , most of the time. For intensely social creatures like ourselves it’s an efficient default mode, if only because, as Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English thinker and prose stylist, offered a take on truth and lies that both contrasts with and complements that of Machiavelli’s:
    So large is the Empire of Truth, that it hath place within the walls of Hell, and the Devils themselves are daily forced to practise it; . . . in Moral verities, although they deceive us, they lie not unto each other; as well understanding that all community is