Learning to Lie

Learning to Lie

Transcript for Learning to Lie (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

My father, he was very matter of fact.

He just said, you know, daddy's in trouble.

It's not his fault, which is not exactly true.

Last week, I looked my friend Grant straight in the eye, and told him I was going to drive to the grocery store that afternoon.

It was a lie, but I told it anyways, because I didn't want to lend Grant my car to go to the golf course.

I just lied casually, but I guess everyone does that.

Everybody lies.

Some lie more than others, but we all lie.

Probably more often than we'll admit.

Some say, yeah, let's get lunch sometime, just to be polite.

Others add a master's degree or two to their resumes.

We are constantly navigating the space between truth and fiction, between honesty and convenience, kindness and deceit.

And the truth is, we so often find ourselves lying or being lied to that it seems to be part of the human condition.

And at times, like when I told Grant he had to carry his clubs to the golf course, it feels like we're natural born liars.

But are we?

Or are we all born truthful and then learn to deceive, delude, double cross, sucker, snooker, bamboozle, beguile, cheat.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project, and I'm your host, Austin Meyer.

Today's episode is Learning to Lie, stories about our first encounters with the liar within.

Psychologists, of course, have always been interested in lying.

So we sent our producer, Joshua Hoyt, to talk to a few psychologists who have thought a lot about lying.

And what they have found is that lying isn't something very small children think about.

They don't think you could ever be trying to deceive them.

Not even when you lie to them over and over and over again.

At least young children, when we're talking about three and four-year-olds, they tend to believe people who lie to them repeatedly, at least in the lab.

This is Gail Heyman.

She is a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

She investigates how children experience lying, how they lie, and how they handle being lied to.

I think they have this sort of default trust assumption about what people tell them.

They're just inherently very trusting when people say things to them, and it's very adaptive for children to accept the fact that most of what they're told is true.

Trust and honesty seem to be the factory setting for children.

It's a matter of survival.

They depend on the people around them to keep them warm and fed, to keep them alive.

But as soon as they learn to walk and begin to make sense of the world, they evolve into liars.

The magic age we learn how to lie seems to be between three and four.

In one study, psychologists asked three-year-olds if they cheated in a game.

Most children under the age of three told the truth, but 80% of four-year-olds lied.

And that's a good thing.

Learning to lie is actually linked to a very important cognitive milestone.

Understanding that people have distinctly different perceptions of the world and that perceptions of the same thing may vary.

Psychologists call this acquiring a theory of mind.

Theory of mind means understanding that other people have minds of their own.

And once you understand that, you understand that others might not know what you know.

That maybe you can trick them.

Around age three to four and five is when children develop a pretty sophisticated theory of mind where they can understand something called a false belief.

This is Dr.

Karl Rosengren.

He is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Cognitive Psychology at Northwestern University.

He explained to Joshua that before they can fool anyone, children need to figure out that people can be fooled.

And there's a classic task that they use with this that involves a situation where you have a box of, let's say, pencils, and you show them to a child and you open up the box and show that they're not pencils in there, they're M&Ms or something like that.

And then you ask the child what will happen if another person comes into the room.

The toddler knows that the box contains M&Ms, and he assumes that everyone knows exactly what he knows.

So he assumes anyone coming into the room will know the pencil box is filled with M&Ms.

And it's not until children are about 3 1⁄2 to 4 1⁄2 that they are able to kind of answer that the individual will hold this kind of false belief that the box will hold pencils rather than M&Ms.

This may seem like no big deal to anyone over the age of four, but think about what a game changer this is for a child.

Now, imagine you're four or five and you really love M&Ms.

You want the ones in the pencil box, and you know no one else knows they're in there.

So when little Hunter asks you what's in the box, what do you do?

You lie.

Once we know that others can get it wrong, it doesn't take us long at all to figure out that lying can be effective.

It helps us keep M&Ms a secret and much, much more.

So why don't we lie all the time?

Part of growing up is learning how to lie.

But just as important is learning when to lie.

We learn how to lie through trial and error because we really need to figure out how to get what we want.

But our parents take on the hard task of teaching us when it's okay to lie, when it's expected, and when it's necessary.

And how do they teach us how to lie?

They teach by example.

Professor Gail Heyman again.

We've documented that in our research that parents explicitly teach their children lying is wrong and they give them all kinds of messages about how lying is one of the worst things you can ever do.

And yet they lie to their children.

And it's interesting sort of how you navigate the philosophy of it and sort of what you're teaching your child and how your child can make sense of what they're being told while watching you lie to them, lie to other people.

For example, a child may see a parent complain about, oh, you know, your aunt's coming to visit and I'm so upset that she's coming and I wish she wouldn't, you know, it's messing up my plans.

And then they'll see the aunt come to the door and they'll see the parents say, oh, I'm so glad you came.

It's perfect.

And then the child has to make sense of this and say, oh, okay, what does that mean about what you're supposed to say to people and when you're supposed to lie?

This is the situation we all faced at some point in our lives.

We all had to learn when to lie, when not to lie, and how to lie.

That's this week's episode of State of the Human.

Our first story investigates the most common lie of the Western world and what it reveals about how we discover the world of lies.

Our second story is about how hard it is for children to overcome the irrepressible urge to tell the truth, even though it may destroy everything dear.

And our third and final story is about lying as a form of love.

Stay with us.

For our first story, Victoria Hurst tackles the big one, Santa Claus.

He's the biggest, jolliest lie in the Western world.

For his sake, we've cleaned our rooms and smiled when our great aunts pinched our cheeks.

Because of him, we believed wholeheartedly in the fairness of the world and in bearded old men from the North Pole.

But what has he really taught us?

All the parenting books and blogs will tell you that the best way to raise a child, to be honest, is to be honest yourself.

Teach by example.

I think that generally parents try to do that, but there is one exception, one huge exception.

Every year at Christmas, those same parents who constantly lecture and teach their children about honesty, simultaneously lie to their children about Santa Claus.

The myth that a plump, white-haired man circles a globe in a sleigh pulled by magical flying reindeer and squeezes through narrow chimneys, or worse, impossibly thin pipes, to leave presents for sleeping children all over the world.

Once parents have lied to their children about Santa Claus, they come up with more elaborate lies to cover up their tracks.

Feeding Santa was like a big thing.

Every Christmas Eve, we would think, oh, what are we gonna feed Santa this year?

And then we would pull out like carrots and stuff for the reindeer, and then make cookies specifically for Santa.

Every Christmas morning when we would check the plate of cookies, they would be like very well eaten.

And there would like typically be a little mess around the plate too and be like, oh, like one of the reindeers got added.

This is my friend, Rebekah Morreale.

In a lot of ways, she's very tough.

She just joined the Air Force and she can do more pushups than any other girl I know.

But at the same time, she is exactly the kind of person you would expect to have believed in Santa Claus just a little too long.

I got the idea to investigate what's behind the Santa Claus myth while I was talking with her.

She told me that finding out the truth about Santa Claus just about broke her heart.

It was so different from my own experience that I started asking everyone around me about how they found out the truth about Santa Claus.

In doing so, I found out that the Santa Claus lie is really a very complicated affair.

My friend Anish Mitra knows how far parents can go to try to keep the myth alive.

His parents immigrated to the United States from India, and I was surprised to find out that growing up, Anish had believed in Santa.

He remembers that one year, when he was about four or five years old, his family spent Christmas in India.

They flew from their home in Washington State to Calcutta, where most of his extended family lived.

I was really terrified that Santa Claus wouldn't find me.

And I remember just like crying a lot, because I was like, man, I was so good.

Like I would have never done all those nice things for all of you that would have known about this terrible thing that Santa won't be able to find me.

At this point, Anish's parents could have told him the truth.

After all, none of their Indian relatives knew who Santa Claus was.

Instead, Anish's parents decided to go all in.

They enlisted the help of his grandparents and came up with an idea.

They would bring Santa to India.

So my grandfather was like super rich, and he like got all those like people and like carpenters, and they like put together this like beautiful tree.

It was like seven feet tall, it had like green foil on it.

Rather than tell Anish the truth, Anish's parents made him the biggest, most elaborate Christmas tree they could.

They let him continue to believe.

They lied to him because they knew that was what he wanted.

He was only five years old, and he made it very clear that he wanted Santa to be real, and all of his Indian relatives pitched in too.

And I remember all my family members being really confused by what was happening.

They're like, what?

We have to put the gifts on the tree, we hang it up, or we put them under the tree.

So I was like a little dictator, and I told them how it worked.

And luckily, Santa Claus found me, so I was really happy.

As children get older, they naturally begin to question some of the facts of the Santa story.

How is it possible that one man can visit every single home in the world in just one night?

Why can't people visit his workshop in the North Pole?

How does Santa fit so many presents into one bag?

Ian Girard, an outdoorsy guy from Humboldt County, remembers that when he was eight, he began to get skeptical about Santa's existence.

Unlike Anish, he didn't want to be lied to.

He wanted to find out the truth, so he asked his parents.

I'd raise some issues with my parents, some potential loopholes in the story.

So I woke up Christmas morning, and my parents had gone, well, I came to find out, full out improving the Santa story.

Ian's parents put together an elaborate plan to convince him of Santa's existence.

They lodged oranges in the chimney, stamped reindeer hoof cutouts in the snow, and they even dragged two-by-fours across the lawn to look like sleigh tracks, all to give the illusion that Santa really had been there the night before.

They were extremely careful to not leave any footprints anywhere around, and to this day, I have no idea how they did it.

The next morning, after assessing all the evidence left by his parents and reasoning away his doubts, Ian changed his mind and decided once again that Santa actually was real.

But then, something strange happened.

After that morning, my parents, about an hour after we finished opening presents, told me that Santa wasn't real.

Ian's parents told him the truth.

They admitted that they were the ones who had thrown the oranges in the chimney.

They were the ones who had made the reindeer tracks in the snow.

They confessed that after Ian and his sister had gone to bed, they stayed up and staged the entire thing.

So the same, the day after they went to all that trouble to prove that Santa was real, they told you that it was just a lie.

I think they thought this sort of traumatized me and I was severely torn up inside about it.

So they just put you out of your misery?

Yeah, they just end the puzzling in a calm, peaceful way.

To Santa, I would write an annual letter where I would ask him how he was doing and general questions trying to figure out more about him, like his favorite cookie or how much he weighed.

This is Ashley Artmann.

She is tall, elegant and brilliant.

She is the kind of person you would expect to be on the cover of Time Magazine one day.

But when she was a kid, she had a soft spot for mythical creatures and people, Santa Claus being her favorite.

Ashley grew up exchanging letters with Santa Claus.

And Santa was really great and he always wrote me back and he always answered all my questions, so it was really special.

Honestly, one of my favorite gifts from Santa every year would be his card.

Up until the fifth grade, Ashley believed that all the letters she had accumulated over the years really were from Santa Claus.

One day, all of that changed when she found a crumpled piece of lined paper in the trash can, a draft of a response letter from Santa.

And I immediately knew that my parents were Santa Claus and I had never heard anything otherwise that Santa was real or whatnot, so I just started bawling and my mom walked in the kitchen and she's like, oh my gosh, what's going on?

And I started yelling at her, like, you lied to me, like there's no Santa.

And I was like, what about the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy?

And I just had this mental breakdown.

TCH!

Once you've stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, where does it go from there?

Where does the disillusionment end?

My friends and I had grown up surrounded by adults who told us that Santa was real.

He knows when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Santa was like a really friendly father figure who happened to be all knowing.

Coincidentally, this sounds a little bit like a childish understanding of God.

So once you found out that Santa isn't real, do you also stop believing in God?

In anything your parents tell you?

Probably not, but you certainly begin to understand that the world isn't as black and white as it seems.

Santa sent me on my own quest for truth.

Growing up, I had no doubt that Santa existed.

To this day, I remember one of my friends at school, Stephen, telling me that he had woken up in the middle of the night, went to his living room, and actually caught a glimpse of Santa, leaving presents beneath the tree.

I followed Stephen's example.

Every year, for about three years, I attempted to stay up late enough to catch Santa.

Finally, I did it.

I stayed up past midnight, past 1 a.m.

I stayed up until I heard Santa creep into the living room.

I snuck from my bedroom to the hallway and from the hallway to the living room, carefully avoiding the places in the floor that I knew would creak if I stepped too hard.

I lingered just outside the living room and listened.

My heart was pounding and my palms began to sweat, but I was so excited that I barely noticed those things.

I closed my eyes and sat very still.

I wanted to hear every single sound.

Santa picked up a bowl of applesauce we had left him and began to eat.

Once he was about finished with it, he began scraping the sides of the porcelain dish the way my father does when he is just about through with something.

Suddenly, I knew that either my dad was eating Santa's food or that Santa just wasn't real.

In that moment, I could have barged out into the living room and confronted my father.

I could have asked him why he had told us to put out applesauce for Santa Claus if he was just going to end up eating it himself.

But after you have believed in something for so long and then suddenly find yourself on the verge of uncovering the truth, there's a part of you that wants to delay that moment and just hold on to the lie.

My parents pretended Santa existed and I believed them.

It was a game we had played together and I suddenly realized I didn't want it to end.

So I walked back down the hallway to my room and went to bed.

I didn't tell my brother or sister about what I had discovered.

I didn't tell my parents.

In retrospect, I learned a lot from playing the Santa game.

I learned that my dad likes applesauce more than cookies.

I learned how to gather evidence to solve a mystery.

I learned that not all lies are necessarily bad.

And I learned that I didn't need to share everything I thought with my parents.

And perhaps I became a part of the lie too, because I didn't share my findings with my brother or sister.

I still pretended to believe that Santa existed and that Santa was real, even though deep down I knew that I had solved the puzzle.

I was surprised to discover that one of my former college roommates, Rebekah Morreale, remember, she's my friend in the Air Force, had believed in Santa until she was 12 years old.

I know what you're thinking, 12 years old?

Really?

But even now she's our favorite person to play pranks on.

Even now she falls for everything.

And back then, she fell for Santa hard.

Rebekah grew up in a family that took the Santa Clause myth very seriously.

Every Christmas Eve, they would throw a flower on the living room floor to catch Santa's footprints.

Her parents would disguise their handwriting on short cards written by Santa and his elves.

And her father would tell her horror stories about how overly inquisitive children ended up not receiving any gifts for Christmas.

Because Rebekah's parents had done such a good job convincing their daughter, eventually Rebekah's mother had to break the news to her.

But it was kind of late in the game, so she thought she would take advantage of the other traditional moment of Revelation, the puberty talk.

Rebekah remembers that one day, after shopping for groceries, her mother made a detour.

I didn't really know what was going on, but my mom seemed a little suspicious.

But then we went to this Christian bookstore, which she didn't often do, and then she picked out this book.

I was like, oh, what are you getting?

And she didn't say much about it.

That weekend, while Rebekah was spending time with her mom, her mom brought out the mysterious book that she had purchased and began reading it.

We started reading it, and there was no introduction, and she just started reading it.

And it was basically about the whole reproductive system.

Rebekah had just started her period, and this was her mother's attempt at explaining to her that she was becoming a woman.

She dropped words like ovaries and fallopian tubes and told Rebekah that her body produced eggs that could one day be fertilized.

And then she just said, and by the way, Santa isn't real.

And she kind of had a downward tone in her voice, so I think she still kind of felt bad about it.

Rebekah was traumatized.

She felt as if a rug had been pulled from under her feet.

For me, it was like a really crushing moment, and I actually broke down crying.

At first I thought this was just strange timing.

What does Santa have to do with the reproductive system?

But then I realized Rebekah's parents were basically stripping away all the illusions of childhood in one fell swoop.

Rebekah had just started her period, meaning that biologically she was entering the realm of adulthood.

She was growing up.

But growing up is marked by more than a series of physical changes.

It is also a time when the world changes around you.

When you're a child, your parents try to simplify the world for you.

They tell you that if you're good, you'll get presents.

You'll be rewarded.

And for a while, that happens.

But as you get older, you begin to deal with more complicated situations.

When you enter middle school, you realize that no matter how nice you are to people, that doesn't necessarily stop them from spreading rumors about you.

Your friends begin to find boyfriends and girlfriends, and you have to make the decision whether or not you want to be in a relationship yourself.

In this world, Santa has outgrown his usefulness.

You've already learned the lessons that Santa teaches, and now you have to figure out things for yourself.

I'm now a junior in college.

It's been a long time since I was in middle school, and it's been an even longer time since the night that I discovered my father eating Santa Claus' applesauce.

I'm beginning to realize that there's something special about that time of life, when the distinction between reality and imagination blurs.

When you're young, it seems possible that Santa really could live in a place like the North Pole, surrounded by his elves and magical flying reindeer.

Think of how optimistic the Santa Claus myth sounds.

That if you're good, you'll receive presents not only in your childhood, but for your entire life.

And that if you're in India, Santa Claus will come to India and deliver presents there.

That's why my friends and I, after finding that awful letter in the kitchen trash, staying up late only to find our parents eating Santa's food, and sitting through that super awkward puberty talk, even after all of that, we will all lie to our children.

We will all tell our children that Santa exists.

Let's just hope they won't hear this story on air before they're ready.

Victoria Hurst is a junior at Stanford and is majoring in English.

For this story, she interviewed Stanford alumni, Anish Mitra, Ian Girard and Rebekah Morreale, as well as Ashley Artmann, who is a senior at Stanford.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

And this week, we're investigating how we learn to lie.

When we're kids, we often learn about lying and about how to lie indirectly by figuring out that a story we have been told for years, like the story of Santa Claus, is a bunch of hooey.

Or by watching those around us say they feel one thing while they clearly feel something else.

But sometimes, we learn to lie in a much more direct way.

Our parents ask us to lie.

Dana Kletter was only seven years old when she found herself in a situation where she needed to learn how to lie, and to lie well.

It was a matter of survival.

But like any little girl, she also felt a big pressure to tell the truth, no matter how dangerous that may be.

In 1966, my father and his brother owned Eastern Freightways, a large trucking company that was quite successful.

And we lived very comfortably, and in fact, were wealthy.

And had a big house in Buffalo, New York, with a swimming pool in the backyard, and a nanny to keep the children in order.

And my father, of course, took care of his parents.

And we lived a very nice life.

My father called it the years of fancy living.

This is Dana Kletter talking.

She's a Stegner Fellow here at Stanford.

In the last year of fancy living, Dana was a seven-year-old kid.

She lived in a big house in upstate New York with her mother, her three siblings, her two grandparents, and her dad, who happened to be wanted by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

See, Dana's father routinely had to deal with partners who were involved in organized crime.

He was in the garment trucking industry.

If you were in the trucking business in the 60s, you had to deal with organized crime.

This wasn't a problem until Dana's uncle, her father's business partner, died.

Her father, George Kletter, was left responsible for his company's not entirely legal business connections.

One day, my mother opened the door, and there were federal agents and sheriffs waiting there, and they came in and searched our whole house, and then they took anything that was deemed extraneous to our existence.

It was all removed from our house.

They opened up the break front in our dining room, and that's where the Passover dishes were, and they started wrapping them up, and then they cut the chandelier down from where it was the chain over the dining room table.

There was some guy walking with this giant chandelier just wandering around, which is a really odd looking thing.

My mother immediately regressed in time.

I mean, she just, she lost it.

She hit hysterical at about the speed of sound.

My mother was, you know, crying and screaming.

Everyone else was frozen.

And I remember like crying, but I was crying like, because my mother was crying.

And so like when you're a little kid, if your mother cries, or anyone cries, you automatically cry, just like when someone throws up in the school cafeteria, everyone does.

My mother, who is a survivor of the Holocaust and was in a concentration camp, is a very delicate woman, and any sort of trauma will kind of reel her right back to this most traumatic moment, and so it must have been a complete flashback for her, because this is exactly, in some way, what happened to her in 1940, whatever it was.

So, yeah, we just, you know, life just changed overnight.

Less than a year later, the Kletter family was on the run.

Agents, federal agents, IRS agents, even local police, were all looking for Dana's father because of his ties to organized crime.

To keep a low profile, the Kletter family lived in a series of cheap motels.

Finally, someone stepped in to help Dana's mother find a house in New York.

But that didn't mean they were out of danger.

Law enforcement agents still wanted Dana's father, and they started calling, coming to the house, knocking on the door to see if he was around.

If they found him, he could go to prison.

And that meant the whole family, mom, siblings, grandparents, Dana, would lose their only provider.

So the family began taking precautions to make sure that wouldn't happen.

My parents had an elaborate system for sneaking my father back into our house.

They came up with a system after the first time they brought Dana's father home.

My mother, she woke us up and we'd been put to bed in our jammies and she let us all out to the car.

And she told us, we're going to meet daddy.

And of course we were excited and at the same time, terrified because we thought, well, what does that mean?

If we see my father, is everyone going to see my father?

So my father was waiting in between two cars, slouching there, smoking cigarettes, waiting for my mother to show up.

And we just cruised through long-term parking, just through all the aisles until my father stepped out.

And he dressed like a gangster, had a fedora.

He always wore a fedora, and he had a big coat on.

We opened the door, and he, instead of getting into the car like an adult, he just crouched down and got onto the floor of the car.

Okay.

I remember picking my feet up and looking down there, and there was no, after that, the door was shut and my mother just took off.

The family gets home and closes the blinds.

Then Dana's father sits the kids down for a talk.

My father, he was very matter of fact.

He just said, daddy's in trouble.

It's not his fault, which is not exactly true.

When the phone rings, you know, it's important that you don't tell anyone that I'm here.

It's important that you never tell anyone that I ever come home, if I ever come home.

It's important to not tell your teacher, not to tell your friends at school.

Then this was just delivered to us, you know.

But I think because it was so calmly done, it was a relief to have my father just give us these instructions, to give us like a, you know, a code.

This is the code.

This is how you behave.

This is how we keep things safe.

You know, we were harboring a fugitive.

Our neighborhood was filled with kids, and everyone rode their bikes, and, you know, on the weekends, everybody, like, went to the pool, or had snowball fights, or whatever.

And on weekends, we simply couldn't do that, because we had to disappear.

But also, we just simply had to pretend that we were okay, and that life was normal, and that nothing odd was happening at our house.

And so, it was, like, a much bigger lie.

And it was a kind of lie that we had to inhabit, the way you inhabit a house.

Dana and her siblings, all still younger than 10, became the guardians of the house.

They became the most important line of defense between their father and law enforcement.

They were the ones who answered the door when his pursuers came knocking.

They knew that they would have to send us to the door because a child standing there, a seven, eight-year-old, the police don't think that you're going to lie.

They trust that you will act in the way that you've been taught to act in public school.

So, you know, we were always sent to the door, even though we were little kids, because it just was more credible.

Our lives were more credible.

I mean, I think we did all look fairly angelic, actually.

Right, because we had like ringlets, blonde ringlets, and my twin sister and I were always dressed in matching clothes.

Do you just have to erase your face, erase your own persona in a way, and assume the guise of a younger child?

Part of that was to have this more higher-pitched voice.

My twin sister and I were very good at this.

You would just look breathlessly at them, eyes widened, is your daddy home?

No.

Do you know where your daddy is?

I don't know, he's not here.

When will he be home?

I don't know.

Does he ever come home?

Do you ever go to see your father?

We learned that the best lie is a simple lie, so don't elaborate.

Act as if you did not know anything, and as if they couldn't get any information out of you, so you didn't engage, actually, with these guys who, you know, we're just kind of looking for a vulnerability.

For a while, all went according to plan.

Dana's dad disappeared all week, and on the weekends, he came home.

They closed the curtains, and he hid himself indoors.

The kids answered the phone and the door, but they didn't answer questions.

And it worked.

Dana kept the secret.

And then one day, she was playing in the driveway, and a sheriff approached her.

And he was a very tall man, and he was a sheriff, so he had a big, round hat, like Smokey the Bear, and he looked a little like Smokey the Bear, and he had this big mustache.

So, you know, he got down sort of on his haunches, and I was like probably, you know, three feet tall, so he just made himself as small as possible.

And he had a friendly face, so I didn't want to lie.

He said, where's your daddy?

And I said, he's not here.

And I knew what I was supposed to say, but he was so nice, and he looked so much like Snooki the Bear that I felt compelled to say at least something to appease him.

So I said, he might come home, maybe Friday.

And once I said that, he started sort of pressing a little further, and almost like an interrogation.

Even his face, his whole countenance changed completely.

And then his voice got kind of sharper and louder.

And he said, when is your father coming home?

How do you know he's coming home?

What time do you think he'll be home?

And then I just completely backed off.

And I did what I always do, and I'm terrified, or what I did when I was a child, which was to throw up, and which I did right on his shoes, on his very shiny, shiny black policeman's shoes.

And then I ran into the house and hid in a closet.

I was so ashamed that I hadn't lied, and that I had given in to like this urge to, I think maybe it was even just to be a regular kid.

I was afraid because I knew what I was supposed to do, because telling the truth at that point had so much potential for endangering all of us that I just was so horrified that I told a partial truth.

It was nice and dark in the closet, and it was just filled with like nice woolen coats and my father's great coat, which was this cashmere old coat that I was really fond of.

And I thought, well, I'll just live here.

One of my sisters had seen that I spoke to the policeman a little too long, and she suspected that I had told him the truth.

My mother walked in the front door, and they ran down the stairs and they were terrified, and I was just hauled out of the closet.

And my mother didn't like hit me or anything.

Her punishment for my telling the truth was to demonstrate to me how distressed she was.

And so she wept and screamed and sort of like, you know, banged on the walls and like, what are the children doing?

What have they done?

What has Dana done?

She's ruined our lives.

It reinforced my belief that the truth was way too dangerous.

Thank you.

And so that is the day that I learned the meaning of the word collaborator, which is, in my mother's sort of world view, a woman who had been hunted by Nazis, a person who tells the truth to people who are bad and will cause death and mayhem.

So, you know, who wants to be a collaborator?

And this is also kind of connected to my mother's life because my mother's father did not survive the war.

And so, and she saw very bad things happen to him.

And so, and she told us that.

So our fear for our father was tremendous.

Dana's grandfather served in World War I.

He spoke German and taught his family to speak German, even though they were Hungarian.

He even had a visa to see the World's Fair, which would have gotten him out of Hungary and safely into the United States.

But he didn't believe he needed to save himself.

German culture held a great deal of resonance for him, and he strongly believed that this country would not betray him.

Dana's mother last saw him on the selection platform, and he died in a concentration camp.

Nothing like this ever happened to Dana's father.

And over time, the threat to him from investigators and the mob passed.

But for a family that had lived through the Holocaust, that had lost a father once before, it was difficult to let go of the peril they felt and the lying that seemed so necessary.

There was always this sort of sense that, you know, I should trust these people, I've been told to trust these people, but I know that I can't.

Maybe it didn't feel like we were doing something so terribly bad because we knew what had happened to my grandfather.

My father continued to do imprudent things, but it never felt as obviously as immediate as it did when there's a guy cutting your chandelier off the ceiling.

We consistently remained fearful and worried about my father and believed that my father was in danger from anything, like not necessarily from the cops, but like, you know, from cigarettes, from like eating too many scones, from driving too fast, you know, all the things that he did.

We understood that it was incumbent upon us to deflect attention and to protect my father.

So, my father would step into the street and, you know, my sister and I would just fall to the ground and he'd be like, what, the light's red.

It's time to cross the street.

But if my father had gone to jail, then I don't know what would have happened to us, actually.

And had we lost that house, it would have been a terrible disaster.

The most important thing was allegiance to our family.

And the most, most important thing was to protect my father.

Dana Kletter is a writer, musician, and current Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Her story was produced by Poncie Rutsch, a senior majoring in biology.

The radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week, we're learning when to lie.

For a child like Dana, lying was the only weapon to protect her family from the outside world.

But what happens when lying takes over your home and comes between you and the ones you love?

In our next story, Christy Hartman explores how hard it can be to face the truth about your family and how learning to lie can be a gift of love.

I'm seven years old, and my dad and I are looking at mummies.

We're at Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.

The mummies, their tombs are black and gold, burnt sienna.

Inside, the remains of an ancient civilization.

Tucked away behind glass, they beg for a closer look.

But we can't get closer.

There's guards, security alarms.

We continue on to the earth in jars.

Small things, which once held the organs of human beings.

That night, my dad passes me a velvet box.

Inside, there's a ring.

It has three diamonds that glitter in the light.

It's gold and amazingly tiny.

It fits only on my smallest fingers.

This ring, dad says, belonged to an Egyptian pharaoh.

But it's so small, I protest.

How could it belong to a pharaoh?

Dad replies, he died very young.

They killed him.

They wanted his power.

They were very jealous.

How my dad came to have a pharaoh's ring is this.

Dad had once worked at Walter's Art Gallery.

Late one night, while performing security rounds, dad and his pal Frankie break into the display case of the boy king.

Dad takes the ring, Frankie takes the bag and stuffs it with jewels.

And together, they escape, slipping quietly back into the concrete jungle of Baltimore.

I didn't believe it, at least not in front of my mom.

Dad was constantly bringing home stories that my mom quickly dismissed.

He'd come home from work and I would run downstairs to meet him, flying into his arms.

When dad would launch into an account of anything, even slightly outlandish, my mother would appear out of nowhere and say, don't tell her that.

My mom hates liars.

Aided by my mother, I had my own doubts about dad telling it straight.

But this story was flawless.

It fit my father's character.

Dad loved Egypt.

More than just loved it like a historian might love a place, dad was Egypt.

He had actually been a pharaoh in a past life.

At least that's what he'd been telling me for years.

So as time passed, how and why he came to have such a rare treasure made more and more sense.

And his far-fetched tale about the robbery became the story.

With the ring in my hands, I was being entrusted with ancient treasure.

In bed at night, I began to imagine wild, dangerous things.

Maybe grave robbers would come for me.

Breaking into our suburban home and sneaking down the dark hallways, pressing their bodies against the golden wallpaper as they inched their way closer to my bedroom.

Maybe someday, I would return the ring to the museum, to Mr.

Walter's gallery, if there was a living man with such a name.

I pledged never to tell Walter how I came to have the ring.

I worried they might be able to track it back to my dad.

So even though I didn't entirely believe the story, I acted like I did.

I even maintained a secret supremacy over others while I wore the ring.

Maybe the pharaoh's powers could be reactivated if I found the right words.

I prayed, chanting solemn gibberish to the pharaohs to grant me the powers imbued to all pharaohs.

Besides, as the daughter of a reincarnated pharaoh, that meant that I was technically at least half princess.

So maybe you can understand why the seven-year-old me really wanted this story to be true.

I can't remember the exact moment the ring appeared.

He didn't show me a ring right away.

That's Billy, my mom.

I interviewed her last November in 2011.

I was 24 years old.

I love stories, but I wanted to find out the truth.

I needed my mom to help me see past my own corrupt nostalgia.

I remember at some point, he showed me this ring and he said that you were a baby and he wanted to give it to you.

All I ever heard was that story, that it's a Pharaoh's ring.

He told me it was a Pharaoh's ring.

That's it, he never told me where it came from, how he happened upon it or anything.

I did not believe him.

So, when he was at work, I took the ring and I took it to a jeweler's.

I told them I wanted to know what this ring was all about.

Is this a real ring or is it just a piece of junk?

And I took it to a really high class jeweler's and I had the guy look at it with his eyepiece and everything under his microscope and he looked up at me and he said, it's a real diamond and it's a real gold and it is a child's ring and it was very old.

He didn't know anything else to say about it.

It was high quality.

Did part of you think maybe it was a pharaoh's ring?

I never, ever believed it was a pharaoh's ring.

He loved saying that he was a reincarnated pharaoh.

He told you that too.

Oh yeah.

He loved that story.

He really believed it.

I'd like to know if you truly believed it, if it was like something that he really wanted to believe.

It was certainly a whole lot better than the life he led as a trash man.

So I don't know.

We'll never know.

The reason we'll never know the truth is because my dad passed away in October of 2010.

Not that he would have told it to us anyway.

At the time I was walking around wearing the pharaoh's ring, here's what I knew about my dad.

I knew he had a tattoo of the devil on his forearm and a cross on his chest.

I knew he'd been orphaned at the age of five and that he'd been in the Marine Corps and had a sleeping bag, military green, to prove it.

Had a son, Chuck, my half-brother, who was not someone I got to see much.

He liked to steal cars and had been in jail a few times before I was even born.

Dad had gotten married and divorced, and later he ended up meeting my mother and driving a garbage truck.

His teenage years and his 20s were kind of a black hole.

But every now and then, dark stuff would emerge because of my half-brother.

It's summer, 2008.

I'm 21 and alone with Chuck for the first time.

We're riding around in his janky air conditioning repair service van, hardcore metal music blasting, mixing with the scrap metal that's crashing around behind us.

My half-brother, who looks like Steve Harris from Iron Maiden, but with all his hair shaved off, has me trapped in his van, and we're zooming around Baltimore, looking for a place to dump the scrap when he decides to unload on me.

He tells me that our dad has kept a secret from us.

I stare at the jostling image of my knee stangling from the rearview mirror.

I only half believe him.

But then, a year later, I hear the full story, the secret, straight from my father.

Back in 2009, when I still lived in Virginia, dad and I would go for hikes, and one weekend we went up to Harper's Ferry.

It's a park made up of large plantations where Civil War battles took place, the site of John Brown's Rebellion.

It's kind of an eerie place.

It was a year after my conversation with Chuck.

I was 22 at the time and complaining.

I had recently made some pretty bad choices.

I quit a good job and lived in my car until I gave up and moved in with my grandma, who is a paranoid schizophrenic and kind of a handful.

So I decided to blame my dad.

It was his fault.

He hadn't given me any advice about these hard things.

We're walking around through one of the battlefields and we keep stepping on these, I think they're chestnuts.

They really hurt when you step on them.

They're big, round things.

So we're awkwardly walking on these chestnuts.

And there was fog that morning.

There's hardly anyone around.

Just old plantation fences and restored cannons.

It's just the two of us and I was really harping on him.

What the hell had happened to my life?

How had I gotten so off course?

I said something like, why didn't you teach me how to be a grown up?

And he started telling me this story about how he'd accidentally killed his ex-wife's cat.

He'd been chasing it for fun and there'd been an accident.

And he's almost crying about it.

I'm really surprised and I'm telling him, it's okay, I can tell you feel bad about it and that means you're not a bad person.

It's really strange for him to cry.

And he keeps crying and he asks, did your brother ever tell you that I was in prison?

And I said, yeah.

Chuck told me.

What did he tell you?

Dad says.

And I want to hear dad's version before revealing the one I know, but he isn't saying anything.

He said that a long time ago, you overheard a guy say something about your girlfriend and that your friends and you started punching him and that you happened to be the one whose punch made him fall backwards and hit his head on the toilet bowl.

Dad begins.

I visited him in the hospital.

A nurse told me that if the kid lived, he'd be a vegetable.

But that's not what happened.

He died.

Dad grabs my hand.

Do you still love me?

And I don't really have time to think.

My gut response is, of course I do.

This doesn't change anything.

I don't feel angry.

I feel frustrated.

I'm thinking, why couldn't you just tell me?

Why did it take you 22 years, dad?

Everything that I'm going to say is what he has told me.

So assuming what he told me is accurate, okay?

And I'm only telling you this because he's already told you this.

I swore to him that I would never, ever tell you or Chuck because he didn't want you all to know.

Does Chuck know?

What he told me was there were gang fights.

I think he was 17 years old, and they were in a fight, and he was punching a guy, and the guy had a chain, and the guy was trying to kill him and hurt him.

And he got the upper hand, and once he got, he punched him a few times, and the guy went down, he kept punching him because he didn't want him to get back up.

And he kept punching and punching and punching.

When the cops came, they all took off, but he got caught.

And this kid that he was fighting would have probably done the same thing to him, but with a chain, probably would have killed him.

But this kid went into the hospital, and he was in a coma, and then he died.

So he got charged with that.

So he was in jail until he was, I think he was 28 or 29.

He got out of jail.

The version of that story that you just told me, that I heard, was slightly different.

And so I think like, I think even in telling me the truth, as he told me the truth, quote unquote, he was still lying to me.

To make himself...

What if that is the true version?

What if he lied to me?

I'm telling you, this man tells some stories.

Now I understand why my dad didn't have much advice to give me.

What advice can you give your daughter when all you have to show for your 20s is a prison sentence?

What was he going to do?

Teach me how to build a knife out of a toothbrush?

I wonder about the effect lying has on a person.

How much of my dad's time was spent maintaining the world he'd built?

The one where he's pretending beating a human being to death had never happened.

I wonder if it hurt him to lie, if he wished he could tell the truth.

I wonder if he was scared nobody would love him.

I wonder if it helped him cope with reality or if it just made it worse.

When I was a kid, my dad had a green military sleeping bag.

It was sandy, uncomfortable, and I loved it.

I'd often pull the sleeping bag around me and wonder which war had he fought in.

Our living room was covered in Korean paintings, dolls, and vases, so I figured it must have been the Korean War.

Now it's 2012.

I'm 25 and finally able to do basic math.

I realize the actual dates of the Korean War.

The war began in 1950 and officially ended July 27, 1953.

This would make my dad 14 and a half years old at the time the war ended.

There's at least one record of a 14-year-old that forged his mother's signature and joined the Marines in World War II.

He went on to win the Medal of Honor, but I've seen that kid's picture.

He might have been 14, but he looks 20.

I've seen a picture of my dad and his teens.

He was a runt, a gaunt kid.

So did he really help stem the tide of communist aggression?

Probably not.

And then, finally, after interviewing my mother and doing this simple math, I put two and two together and get prison.

One way to avoid talking about 11 years of your life, pretend you were in a war and you just don't want to talk about it.

I know that lying can help avoid confronting uncomfortable truths.

It can make a really horrific thing seem not as bad, which is useful when you're face to face with your daughter, the one you're trying like hell to raise right.

But what about when someone asks you to lie to them, begs you, maybe not outright, but say with their eyes?

So they know you're lying and you know you're lying, but it will make them happy, so you do it.

It's now been a year since my dad and I visited Harper's Ferry.

I'm 23.

It's late summer.

The beach in Delaware is almost empty.

There are a few people hanging around buying ice cream and wearing sandy swimsuits.

A little girl is feeding seagulls and shrieking as they dive at her.

Too close.

My dad, at this point, needs two canes to walk.

He's been living with stage four lung cancer for two and a half months.

Three months ago, he drove a dump truck and stopped at a 7-Eleven every morning to buy a coffee and a banana.

But today, walking to the boardwalk, something is really wrong.

Dad has broken out in a cold sweat and is literally shaking with the effort it's taking to walk from the car to the beachfront.

Inch by inch, we make our way towards the sea.

A lady whose kids are running all over the place reaches out to grab one of them by the back of his t-shirt just before he cuts my dad off.

She seems to know.

It's just after this that we reach the threshold of boardwalk and sand.

Dad stops, holds onto the fence and stares out at the sea.

I didn't bring my swim trunks, he says.

I laugh, but I see he's not joking.

He stares deeply into my eyes and seems a little hurt.

His eyes seem to say, why are you laughing?

I'm going to remember to grab them next time.

But even though we both want very badly to believe that there will be another day like this, just eating ice cream and watching the waves roll and crash, I know that he's never again going to swim in the ocean.

He turns and says, promise me we'll come back here next summer.

All along, I've been telling him that he has to take his medicine if he wants to get better, get better, get well.

I've been feeding him hope, that promise of light at the end of a dark tunnel.

So now I feel trapped, standing at the fence between the boardwalk and the sea.

He looks at me imploringly, and what can I say?

I keep lying.

Yeah, sure dad, if you want to.

I try to mean it, but it's no use.

The stress of the last few months has caught up with me.

And hearing the hollowness in my own words, I feel ill.

He just wanted something to believe in, if only for a moment.

And judging by the look on his face, now he knows that I don't actually think he's going to get better.

Suddenly, he's walking out to the beach, maneuvering with his canes.

I holster the backpack with his supplies inside.

I can hear the morphine and the gazillion other pills rattling around, and I hate them.

I hate carrying them around, jangling in their plastic cases like some cheap obnoxious orchestra.

And dad's on the beach, pitching around in the loose, ungroomed sand.

He makes his way to the edge of the surf and makes me take his picture.

He holds the canes up in the air, over his head, one in each hand.

I am scared to death.

I've felt the cold fear chill my skin and turn my will into cotton balls.

When you lie, you cut yourself off from other people.

You're like an island.

It's a lonely place when no one knows the real you.

Now I can pretty well guess the effect lying has had on him.

I understand.

I wonder if my 7-year-old eyes looked at his in the same way he looked at me that day, begging for a story.

He gave me this thing, this lie.

And regardless of the effect the lie had on him, it made my childhood pretty memorable.

I'm grateful that he lied.

Dad used to wish he could be a bird, so maybe that's where he is now.

He's been reincarnated again, a young bird watching a familiar girl write in the park.

His eyes are bright, already full of promise, mischief.

He's been a pharaoh, a trash collector, and who knows what else.

In his next life, he finds love, courage.

He has good parents.

He's not afraid.

That's my story anyway, the one I tell myself.

Christy Hartman works at Stanford and is a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project.

To tell the story of her father, Robert Charles Hartman, Christy interviewed her mother, Billy Hartman.

Today's program was produced by Natacha Ruck and Jonah Willinghans, with help from Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg and Zandra Clark.

Thanks to John Lee for his help, and special thanks to Joshua Hoyt, Victoria Hurst, Poncie Rutsch and Christy Hartman, as well as Dana Kletter, Professor Gail Heyman, Dr.

Karl Rosengren and Dr.

Jacqueline Woolley.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this in every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Tune in next week for more stories about the State of the Human.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Austin Meyer.

Thanks for listening and choose to lie wisely.