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privately nicknamed ‘the enforcer’ – to go from class to class asking the teachers if any of their pupils had misbehaved. Twice a day, those named by the class teacher were taken out into the school courtyard and beaten with a wooden bat in front of the other children. Punishable offences included a failure to do homework, forgetting to bring a pencil to class or – worst of all – lying.
    Here were two schools, only a few miles apart, with pupils from similar social backgrounds, but with vastly different approaches to discipline. In other words, near-perfect conditions in which to explore the effect of different moral codes on deceitful behaviour. Both schools were happy to have Talwar carry out her experiment; each was supremely confident in the moral fibre of the students they turned out. The teachers in School B were unembarrassed about their methods and disparaging of School A’s approach, which they regarded as hopelessly lax. They sincerely believed that theirs was the most reliable method for raising honest children.
    Along with her frequent collaborator, Kang Lee, Talwar set about interviewing pupils between the ages of three and six years old from both schools. She introduced the guessing game to each child, brought out the easy-to-guess toys, and then the stuffed toy with its tinny accompaniment. Back in her hotel room, as she played back the interviews on her camcorder, she noticed something remarkable: School B’s children seemed to be lying with far greater consistency and conviction than any children with whom she had ever worked.
    To ensure a robust set of data, Talwar returned to both schools the following day and carried out more interviews. When she analysed the results, the first thing that struck her was the length of time the pupils from School B waited before they turned around to peek. Most children who play the peeking game wait less than ten seconds before taking their chance, and the children of School A conformed to this pattern. But School B’s kids waited much longer – for up to a minute – before sneaking a peek. Perhaps School B’s teachers would have felt proud at such evidence of inner discipline, but they would have been less pleased with Talwar’s most striking finding: regardless of age, all their pupils lied, instinctively and immediately. The alacrity with which they did so seemed to have nothing to do with their cultural background; the results from School A were very similar to those from schools in North America or Europe.
    Not only were the School B pupils all lying, they were brilliant at it. Wherever the peeking game is played, younger children tend to confess to their lie immediately, or make such a flimsy defence that it barely counts. (‘When I say, “Well, how did you know it was a football?” a three-year-old will often say, “Because I saw it,”’ Talwar told me.) Lying involves a considerable amount of physical and emotional discipline, as well as mental dexterity. The child has to control his expression and body language so as not to give himself away with a stray smile, a tell-tale flash of the eyes or a wince of anxiety – all while keeping his story straight. As you’d expect, such skills tend to improve with age: three-year-olds get their story mixed up or laugh at their own fibs, whereas four- and five-year-olds are better at making their stories believable, and telling them with a poker face.
    This pattern was reflected in the results from School A. The School B pupils, however, were all masterful liars. Whether aged three or six, they denied having peeked with impenetrable conviction, and confidently maintained their story when challenged. The slightly older children were even careful not to guess correctly first time around, in order to give the false impression that they were groping towards an answer by a process of intuition and deduction. ‘I thought it sounded a bit like a