Lie Detecting as a Step Towards Critical Literacy

Author

Affiliation

Francesco Caviglia

Aarhus University

Quote as: Caviglia, Francesco. (2002). Lie Detecting as a Step Towards Critical Literacy. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 2:(3), 179–220. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021356011948

ABSTRACT. A lie mediated by the printed word can be more difficult to spot and more dangerous than one told in a face-to-face situation. However, lies are not a common item of study in the L1 curriculum. This paper describes an attempt to foster better understanding of lies as an initial step towards critical literacy. A survey of approaches to ‘criticality’ suggests that while general skills for lie detecting may not exist, there are cases in which expertise about lies pertaining to a given domain is demonstrated. Fiction provides a wealth of examples to establish a language for discussing lies in the classroom and to highlight the key role of the victim’s expectations and how a lie often sports multiple layers of deceit, such as misleading representation of reality and of the liar’s relationship to the victim and to the topic. The paper then describes classroom activities carried out with Italian students aged 14–16, who were either told a lie in controlled situations or encouraged to fabricate innocuous lies. A reassessment of that experience confirms that it is extremely difficult for lie detecting to be learned on a general basis, as personal motives and topic knowledge are decisive in triggering a critical attitude. On the other hand, working with lies at school seems effective in raising students’ communication awareness. Finally, cross-curricular contributions and attention to non-verbal communication are suggested for more general and ambitious approaches to lies and criticality.

KEYWORDS: cheating, critical discourse analysis, critical literacy, lie, literacy, literature teaching

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Introduction

This paper proposes a way of teaching the ability to recognize situations in which a written text may be instrumental in a lie. Attention will first be focused on the connection between literacy and lies, and on the reasons why that connection should concern education. I will then review some tenets of the existing critical traditions involving education, language and culture, and finally proceed to describe and discuss the conceptual tools and activities that I employed in the classroom.

L1 teaching provides a wealth of possibilities – a selection is examined here – for fostering this kind of ‘enhanced literacy’; special focus will be placed on literature’s ability to reproduce and expose the mechanics of the lie. At the same time, it is worth remembering from the outset that discovering whether a statement is accurate or not usually requires in-depth inquiry about facts as well as about motives and ideologies of all [p. 180] the parties involved in the communication. This complex approach may best be addressed from a cross-curricular point of view.

A note on terminology. At least in the first part of this paper, lie will be used to label a “statement made with the will to state the false” (enuntiatio cum voluntate falsi enuntiandi, Augustinus, De mendacio, I, 4 – in Weinrich, 2000: 9); this excludes euphemisms, courtesy and irony, while including hoaxes, frauds and inaccurate or misleading messages, as long as they seek to induce misjudgement and error in the reader. In addition, I will sometimes use ‘cheating’ or ‘deceiving’ instead of ‘lying’ when referring to a course of action rather than to statements. As for the slippery epistemological status of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, I would take the empirical stance of accepting any claims for ‘truth’ as a clue to potential cheating. I do believe, on the other hand, that it is sometimes possible to be adequately confident that a statement is a lie (a more detailed discussion below, Section 6.2).

Defining the Problem: Lies and the Culture of Literacy

Lying has long been part of our culture: not being gullible and being able to invent effective lies have been valued qualities since the times of archetypal characters Odysseus and Jacob (the latter as opposed to Esau in the Bible). Recent diachronic accounts of the lie (Bettettini, 2001) mainly focused on the interplay of literature, history and ethics while the more philosophically oriented Tagliapietra (2001) provides a wide choice of examples and insightful observation. Neither, however, pays much attention to the influence of communication tools in shaping our understanding of lies (and truth, for that matter). Hence, I will try to highlight briefly the connection between lies and literacy in a cultural-historical perspective, with the aim of defining the educational problem more clearly.

The onset of literacy may have had mixed effects on the attitude to lies and truth(s). Ong (1982) suggests that writing has played a crucial role as the ‘thinking tool’ that made possible the development of scientific reasoning and psychological introspection; for example, the very distinction between facts and fiction, as can be seen in ancient Greek historiography, notably in Thucydides (Ginzburg, 1999: 45–48), coincides with the development of a modern scientific prose clearly distinct from poetry.

However, the transformation of Western societies from the mainly oral to the mainly literate only arrives much later, fuelled by the advent of print technology; the inception in Europe of this process is observed by Gumbrecht (1985) through examples from late fifteenth-century Spain. As the paramount element of change Gumbrecht recognizes the end of [p. 181] the tie between the word and the ‘body in presence’, which Zumthor (1987, 1994) had recognized as a typical mark of the ‘theatrical culture’ of the Middle Ages. In this respect – and back to our concern on lies – Gumbrecht sees a modern trait in the Inquisition’s refusal to content itself with the defendants’ ‘spontaneous’ public declarations of Christian faith and obedience to the Church. Indeed, by that time literacy had provided a frame for conceiving inner thoughts as both accessible and ‘more true’ than ostensible behaviour. Hence, for example, the Inquisition’s claim for full access to and control of inner life (Prosperi, 1996).¹

Obviously, that does not mean that people could not hide their thoughts before. However, both the diffusion of records of inner thoughts in the form of diaries and letters and the development of a modern scientific method – both mediated by literacy – contributed to defining today’s standards for what we consider reliable in terms of truth.² Over recent centuries, then, the written and later the broadcast word has largely replaced the spoken-in-presence word as the most important and official source of authority (Ong, 1982), with the notable exception of time-honoured rituals in churches and tribunals.³

However, a large part of everyday life is still based on interaction with and in the presence of other people through acts and words. Children usually learn fairly well how to cope with a full range of communication devices, including lies, simply by taking part in social practice, the same way they learn to talk or to walk, even though (or maybe even because) lying is officially discouraged in families and school institutions (Chandler & Afifi, 1996). For the neo-Darwinist branch of Evolutionary Psychology, humans (together with a few other animals) might be innately endowed with ‘cognitive modules’ for cheating and for detecting cheaters (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992: 19–196 and 163–228), that is with biologically [p. 182] evolved mechanisms that under environmental pressure could ‘evoke’, for example, a sensitivity to a potential breach of the social contract. The modular view of cognition and the assumption of biologically transmitted behaviour patterns have been seriously criticized (Kamiloff-Smith, 2000; Bateson, 2000, with important distinctions), but – for our purposes – the very hypothesis of biological roots of cheating and anti-cheating points to deeply rooted knowledge and skills.

The quite sophisticated knowledge involved in handling lies and cheaters is also difficult to elicit, because it is eminently ‘situated’, that is, amenable to the culture of a given social group, but mainly informal in its contents and largely unconscious in use (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989; Lave, 1990; a criticism of ‘situated cognition’ in Bereiter, 1997). An example may help clarify this point. During the 1960 presidential campaign in the USA an anti-Nixon poster portraying an unshaven Richard Nixon asked the voters “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Though there is no obvious connection between buying a second-hand car and voting for a president, the poster was perfectly designed to activate a setting (buying a used car) that elicits a cautious and basically mistrusting attitude. Moreover, the picture of Nixon was carefully chosen to exemplify an image that many people would readily have labelled with his nickname: Tricky Dick; recognizing signs from people’s faces is a kind of informal, impressionistic knowledge that may be difficult to explain, but seems shared (another hallmark of ‘situated cognition’) inside and even across cultures (Darwin, 1872; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Twelve years later, Nixon’s face again betrayed him by undermining the effect of carefully chosen words during the crucial TV speech in which he responded to the accusations levelled at him during the Watergate scandal and tried to talk the American people into trusting him. Umberto Eco suggests that a large part of the audience, noticing the mismatch between the reassuring rhetoric of the speech and Nixon’s appalled gaze, decided he was guilty (Eco, 1977; Nixon, 1973). In both cases all the actors involved – Nixon, his supporters, his adversaries and the audience – showed a keen awareness of an informal but consistent body of knowledge about cheating.

What about lies mediated by the written word? Despite being almost second nature for many, literacy is far less natural than the spoken language and is acquired more slowly than either talk or body language. Its asynchronous nature frees the liar from the risk of betraying him- or herself by emitting unintentional body signals. Besides, the differences in language proficiency among the population are much wider with regard to the written word. In addition, the institutions in charge of fostering literacy seldom incorporate a culture of questioning the reliability of written state[p. 183] ments. Literacy itself is usually measured as the ability to decode a text, that is, to understand it well enough to answer questions about its content, assumed as trustworthy (OECD, 2000: 94). This limitation in a OECD’s International Adult Literacy Survey may be understandable (it can make sense to distinguish clearly between critical and decoding skills), but the ability to question the authority of a source remains a crucial requirement for functional literacy in a society which depends heavily on written or broadcast information, whose reliability is sometimes a matter of life or death.

Indeed, several people – many of whom would score in the higher end of the literacy scale – do become easy victims of lies, as in the case of this little harmless hoax:

Dear customer, Our main competitor, Nokia, is giving free mobile phones away on the Internet. Here at Ericsson we want to counter their offer. So we are giving our newest WAP-phones away as well. They are specially developed for Internet happy customers who value cutting edge technology. By giving free phones away, we get valuable customer feedback and a great Word-of-Mouth effect. All you have to do, is to forward this message to 8 friends. After two weeks delivery time, you will receive a Ericsson T18. If you forward it to 20 friends, you will receive the brand new Ericsson R320 WAP-phone. Just remember to send a copy to xxxx.xxxxxx@ericsson.com, that is the only way we can see, that you forwarded the message. Best of luck xxx xxxx, Executive Promotion Manager for Ericsson Marketing

This message has been forwarded by incautious Internet users who even took the time to translate the original (whose source I do not know) into took the time to translate the original (whose source I do not know) into a number of languages, including Italian, French, German and Swedish (Emery, 2001). I received this piece of junk-mail myself from four people, three of whom would never be regarded as gullible by people knowing them from face-to-face interaction.

Not all hoaxes are so harmless, as the last 100 years of European history has repeatedly manifested and as demonstrated, for example, by records of judicial errors. In this respect, I assume there is a need for empowering individuals and societies by providing conceptual tools and training in detecting lies, with special focus on the written ones or, more generally, on those mediated by devices, like printing or broadcasting, that detach communication from the ‘body in presence’ and therefore seem to shield the lie somewhat from already available cultural antibodies.

But is a ‘didactic of the lie’ possible?

[p. 184]

Different Traditions Approaching Lies and Criticality

There are people who are extremely proficient in debunking lies (at least in their domain of expertise) and they must have learnt how to do it. But serious questions emerge as soon as we try to elicit the knowledge that triggers a critical attitude and how to shape educational intervention to foster it.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to review the vast literature about lies and cheating [150 references in Castelfranchi and Poggi (1998)]. Instead, I will start with a brief reference to the approaches that first made me aware that lies can be a legitimate subject for studies in the human sciences, and led me to consider how to implement a didactic of lie detecting. I will then focus on educational approaches to ‘criticality’ – the larger area of which lie detecting can be viewed as a subset – to highlight some disagreement about what knowledge is involved in being critical, how general and transferable this knowledge is, and about the goals and scope of educational intervention in the area of language education.

Within the review of the educational literature, I will first consider approaches – such as Critical Thinking or Critical Pedagogy – that explicitly incorporate the goal of helping people to recognize when they are at risk of being deceived. I will then consider the same goal from two other viewpoints on education and criticality – Wertsch’s focus on societal knowledge and Bereiter’s on ‘expertise’; these were especially useful in defining and fostering the specific kind of criticality necessary to spot (some) lies within the possibilities and limitations of language education.

Table 1 categorizes approaches to lies and to teaching criticality according to degree and kind of specificity or generality, main focus for educational intervention and the model of knowledge incorporated.

Lies, Language and Beyond

In a study that took lies as a starting point for explaining the theory later known as Textlingvistik, Harald Weinrich focuses on the instructional trait of language that leads the listener or reader to form expectations that may be fulfilled, frustrated or further refined as long as the speech or text proceeds (Weinrich, 2000, 1976). But language not only provides decoding instructions, it also gives the listener instructions for action. Lying can be considered in this context as giving someone an incorrect basis for behaviour.

Looking at language as instruction rather than representation is a first step toward understanding its power to build (possibly false) expectations and beliefs. Weinrich then presents some compelling examples from

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TABLE 1

Different approaches to lies and to teaching ‘criticality’.

Approaches with main focus on analysis

	Special focus on individuals/institutions/tools
Linguistics of the lie	– Language as instruction – Language as tool for lying, but also for telling the truth – ‘Signals of the lie’ – Power of fiction to represent lies
Lying as cheating behaviour	– Lying as pretending to give information – Language as tool for influencing others – Relationships and roles (peer/tuition, co-operation/aggression) – Motives for lying, motives for believing

Approaches with main focus on educational intervention

	Specificity vs. generality	Main focus on individuals/institutions/tools	Model of knowledge
Critical thinking	Strong claim for generality and transferability of the skills involved	– Individual – ‘Faulty’ reasoning processes	– Facts + rules – The scientific method – Logic
Critical pedagogy/ Critical approaches to language or discourse	Strong claim for generality of the problem	– Institutions – Ideology and power relations hidden in language	– Marxist model – Focus on changing the world (and not just interpreting it) – Language reflects and constructs the world
Catalogues of lies	Domain-specific (e.g. health frauds, urban legends, etc.)	– Lies and hoaxes – Contents developed by a community of practice	– The scientific method
Socio-cultural approach	Learning as taking part in social practice and teaching as creating a setting with a ‘culture’ that makes learning necessary and possible	– Interplay between society and individuals and groups’ motives – Language as conceptual tool mediating action	– Knowledge embedded in tools (= cultural artefacts) and social practices – Appropriation of/resistance to tools
‘Being critical’ as ‘being expert’	– Against claims for generality – Need for specific factual knowledge but focus on (see next column)	– Progressive problem solving – Wide range competencies (e.g. on language communications, cognition) – Relevant content areas	– Knowledge as relation – Understanding as ‘intelligent action’ – Focus on learning to manipulate conceptual artefacts

[p. 186] literary texts of lies announced by “signals of lying”, that he sees as “inherited in rather stable form over the centuries” and defines as “topoi in form and content, that don’t even need to be forwarded through conscious learning, but are triggered automatically whenever one tries to write a story about lies” (Weinrich 2000: 72, my translation⁴ and emphasis). But how can one recognize indications of lying in fiction? According to Weinrich “literary education is not even necessary:”[…] It just takes some knowledge of mankind” (Weinrich 2000: 74); Weinrich insists, however, on literature’s special aptness in reproducing such signals for the pleasure of the (clever) reader: “The signals of lying are necessary ingredients of the lie in literature […]. They are a constituting element of the information and transform, for those who have ears to hear, the information in its opposite” (Weinrich 2000: 74). But are lies accompanied by signals of lying in real life too?

Weinrich is not explicit about this point, but his study implicitly suggests – at least, suggested to me – that a transfer to real life is possible. As discussed below in Section 4.4, I believe that fiction can teach us something relevant about lying behaviour, but I am sceptical about finding a general rule for spotting signals of lying in asynchronous communication; as a form of linguistic disguise, an effective lie will comply as closely as possible with the constraints of the textual/conversational genre it belongs to, and we cannot expect to spot in a text the small signs of body language that often betray those who lie in a face-to-face situation.

Focusing on the instructional trait of language remains, however, an important first step for highlighting the motives of the persons involved in communication, as independently proposed also by Bakhtinian approaches to linguistics that show how utterances reflect and answer (often unspoken) questions in a dialogue with the listener (Nølke, 1999, 2002; Tannen, 1997). The notion of ‘strategies of involvement’ as rationale beyond different styles in verbal communication, as developed by Tannen (1984, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1997), brings us a little further in understanding the function of discursive resources, like the use of details or expressive vs. understated evaluation, in shaping the relationship of the speaker or writer towards the listener/reader and the topic. But, as Deborah Tannen’s life- [p. 187] work itself illustrates, understanding a communicative situation requires help from disciplines other than linguistics, such as anthropology or social and cognitive psychology. Looking at language as a device for influencing others rather than just conveying information enables us to frame lying within the dichotomy of co-operation and cheating, as the opposite of a pattern of behaviour and communicating that is associated by default in our society with some readiness to co-operate, or at least to negotiate. An analysis of the different kinds of relationships and roles assumed by partners in communication, and their implications for lying and believing in lies, is a major contribution of Castelfranchi and Poggi’s (1994; and especially 1998) vast inventory of deceitful behaviour. The notion of co-operation and its opposite (‘cheating’ or ‘aggression’) is also useful for defining the goals and results of lies, and for identifying the kind of antisocial examples we wish to spot and counteract.

The power of language – including its ability in the field of fiction to simulate lies – but also the inadequacy of considering language alone as the criterion for assessing credibility will remain the pillars for the model of lying and lie detecting that I try to integrate into an L1 curriculum (see especially Section 4.2), after considering the contribution of different approaches to criticality.

Teaching Self-Defence: Critical Thinking

The mission of the body of research and intervention known as Critical Thinking is to provide the individual learner with appropriate thinking skills and the training for activating those skills. This tradition – which usually incorporates a view of knowledge as a body of facts and rules for manipulating them – is also positive about the existence of skills for thinking critically that are to some extent general and transferable across domains (Halpern, 1998; Paul, 1992, for examples of integration of Critical Thinking across the curriculum). Research in cognitive science, especially in problem solving skills and the pitfalls of flawed reasoning (whether autonomous or induced), provides much of the theoretical background for a tradition committed to endowing the learner with tools for rational inquiry and decision-making, as recently described for example in Halpern (1998) or in Burbules and Berk (1999).

A comparison of these two accounts, the first from a leading representative of Critical Thinking, the latter from more detached observers, gives some insight into the traditional basic tenets and the more recent concerns of this approach. Burbules and Berk’s (1999) documented and prototypical description of Critical Thinking, with scientific reasoning as a central reference, is clearly recognizable in Halpern’s as well, for example in [p. 188] her suggestion that “people function like intuitive scientists to explain, predict and control events” (Halpern, 1998: 452) and in her persistent concern with “faulty thinking patterns”. The model of intervention she proposes, however, also seems concerned with counteracting and integrating criticisms about the tradition’s lack of attention to dispositions or to institutional context (as for example in Burbules and Berk (1999)); Halpern (1998) places much emphasis on the “dispositional or attitudinal” component (p. 452), pays attention to the “skills needed to comprehend and defend against the persuasive techniques that are embedded in everyday language” (p. 452) and finally finds the transferability of the high order critical-thinking skills to educational settings consistent with a ‘situated cognition’ viewpoint (p. 453). On the same wavelength, Tsui (2001), another representative of Critical Thinking, focuses on the culture of the institution as a key condition for developing student criticality.

The ways in which the Critical Thinking approach has some relevance for our educational problem become more evident when we compare this approach with another kind of criticality.

Teaching Self-Defence: Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy shares with Critical Thinking the same set of general emancipatory goals but has a quite different agenda, as Burbules and Berk (1999) illustrate in their informative and insightful paper.

Rooted in neo-Marxist Critical Theory, committed to social and political engagement and devoting greater attention to the institutional settings, Critical Pedagogy⁵ seeks to shape education as a way to enable citizens to resist unjust power relations by fostering their critical capacities. Applied to language education, Critical Pedagogy translates for example into Fairclough’s campaign for a Critical Language Awareness; in this approach the student is assisted not only to meet the literacy needs imposed by society, but also to challenge and possibly change them through adaptation to her/his (and the group’s) real needs (Fairclough, 1989: 233–247 and 1992: 7–12). In a collection of papers on Critical Language Awareness, Wallace (1992: 59) illustrates a kind of classroom practice aimed at “reading between the lines” through activities that help the students to expose some subtle ideological biases that are potentially harmful to the unaware reader. This kind of critical approach has further developed into Critical Discourse Analysis, a research program about how discourse not only represents reality, but constructs it by shaping relations and identities (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997).

[p. 189] Burbules and Berk (1999) have highlighted important differences in roots and agendas between Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: while for example a typical polemic target for Critical Thinking would be an unsubstantiated truth claim, Critical Pedagogy (or Critical Discourse Analysis) would also (and maybe primarily) attack language-constructed assumptions that help reinforce an unjust status quo, such as power inequality between men and women.

Critical Pedagogy may be accused of crossing the threshold between criticism and indoctrination,⁶ while Critical Thinking’s concern for impartiality is prone to accusations of naïve positivism. As Burbules and Berk (1999) put it, “Critical Thinking’s claim is, at heart, to teach how to think critically, not how to think politically; for Critical Pedagogy, this is a false distinction”.

I will try to highlight the contrast by discussing the implicit ideology in a Critical Thinking text. Halpern (1998) uses the ‘sunk cost argument’ as a typical example of flawed reasoning, because “prior investments are not relevant to decisions about future costs”; that is, if I have to decide whether my old car is worth an expensive repair job, the amount of money I already spent on it should be irrelevant, as the only thing that matters is whether my car is now worth the repair. So far, so good, but Halpern wants to avoid the same flawed reasoning in the decision to eventually marry a longtime girlfriend because of the many years already spent together (p. 453). Now, framing together the decision to repair an old car and to marry an old girlfriend means (implicitly) assuming a wife-as-commodity metaphor, which I find both misleading and morally disgusting. Halpern might in turn answer – I suppose – that she meant something different, as she was referring to ‘investments’ in terms of quality of life; she might even retort, borrowing ‘my’ tools, that I misunderstood her because of an anti-capitalist bias of mine, and that anyway the ‘sunk cost argument’ remains bad reasoning whatever the realm, real or metaphoric.

I refrain now (with effort) from replying to that retort, but the point is that this discussion should continue. This is the conclusion reached by Burbules and Berk (1999), who see a value precisely in the unreconciled tension between the two ‘critical’ traditions and propose therefore to establish criticality as a practice based on dialogue, “a mark of what we do, of who we are, and not only how we think”. A focus on open dialogue aimed at further understanding will become extremely important when examining statements whose status as ‘lies’ is bound to remain unresolved.

[p. 190]

Teaching Self-Defence: Catalogues of Lies on Specific Topics

On the other end of the generality-axis, I wish to include some collections of domain-specific lies, although they are not traditionally part of the literature on education. As we saw in Section 2, the knowledge activated in lie detecting is typically situated, connected to a given setting. Providing knowledge about that setting plus some examples of typical frauds is the obvious, rather widespread and probably effective approach adopted by some short guides to evaluating online information that I have been able to locate on the Internet (e.g. Starr, 2000; Emery, 2001; Barrett, 2001; Harris, 1997).⁷ All follow a hands-on and rather prescriptive approach, though with different degrees of generality: Emery’s and Barrett’s sites offer a list of known hoaxes (urban legends for the former, health frauds for the latter) plus some rules of thumb for detecting cases that deserve suspicion, while Starr and Harris propose some guidelines plus a checklist.

These lists bear some resemblance to parents’ advice to children not to accept candy from strangers and to keep away from some notoriously nasty neighbour: sound, valuable advice, to be later integrated in a more adult and general model for relationships with others. The above-named sites indeed provide plenty of material that might be used in a classroom for raising awareness of the potentially deceitful character of information. However, the sites themselves do not provide any general understanding of the mechanics of lying and do not have any pretence of transferability to other domains. They content themselves with delivering updated information about hoaxing in some domains, thus giving the reader a chance for expanding her/his expertise and possibly empowering her/him, even for expanding her/his expertise and possibly empowering her/him eventually to spot not-yet-debunked lies. Quackwatch, for example (Barrett, 2001), works explicitly as a community of practice for people committed to exposing junk-science. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate research on the educational impact or use of these resources.

Teaching Self-Defence: A Note on a Socio-Cultural Perspective

The Vygotzkian traditions, which may share the political agenda of Critical Pedagogy but represent a quite unrelated line of research, move from the tenet that all thought and communication are embedded in cultural, historical and social processes, with language as a cultural tool for shaping both social and individual activity (for example, Wertsch, 1991; a

[p. 191] review of different approaches inside the traditions of societal knowledge in Hedegaard, 1999 and 2001). Learning is considered in this tradition as a form of participation in social practice, while teaching means creating a setting with a culture – incorporated for example in the tools and in the attitudes of the institution – that makes learning both necessary and possible. Lying and lie detecting could also be viewed in this tradition as mastering of cultural tools like language and narratives.

During a seminar on literacy, responding to a question about the possibility of teaching how to detect lies, James Wertsch answered that he had never encountered such widespread and advanced lie detecting skills as in the (then) Soviet Union (J. Wertsch, personal communication). At a more analytic level, Wertsch has demonstrated – through analysis connecting the macro level of social processes with the micro level of individual action – the centrality of different or even clashing motives, like passing an examination and affirming one’s identity as a rebel, in determining the strategies for appropriation and resistance to historical narratives in the former Soviet Union after 1991 (Wertsch, 1998).⁸

If we were to translate these observations into educational suggestion, a totalitarian state with pervasive propaganda – or maybe just a reproduction thereof on a small scale in school and family – would be a perfect setting for fostering the development of lie-detecting skills. On a more positive note, motivation, meaningful activities, but also dialogical confrontation as opposed to monovocality (Rodrigues Rojo, 2001) emerge again as central ingredients for the cognitive development of individuals and groups. A clear problem emerges however in this context: the qualities that make a good lie detector are dangerously close to those of a good liar and at any rate a distrusting attitude can be at odds with the values of the institution and of the families. He or she who engages in teaching lie detecting should let moral issues emerge and be willing to negotiate them.

Teaching Self-Defence: Being Critical as Being Expert

Carl Bereiter, in a chapter with the polemic title Critical Thinking, Creativity and Other Virtues, acknowledges that there is often “some value” in teaching inspired by Critical Thinking approaches, but sees motivation as a crucial factor for criticality, one that weakens the whole notion of critical thinking skills, as “people are usually quite adept at finding the flaws in arguments they are opposed to; logic tends to desert

[p. 192] us when it comes to recognizing the flaws in arguments we are disposed to believe”. Critical thinking should also be considered “as a virtue rather then a skill”: but “the problem, as with all virtues, is to practise it in the face of temptations to do otherwise” (Bereiter, 2002: 363).

The key to being critical, according to research that Bereiter first carried out with Marlene Scardamalia (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993), is being expert. Experts, however, are never general experts, but rather people who

• know a lot in a given area, that is, dispose of a large body of factual but also of implicit and impressionistic knowledge (for a discussion of different kinds of knowledge and understanding see Bereiter, 2002: 131–173; a previous elaboration in Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993: 43–69);
• can exercise progressive problem solving (that is, are able to move to increasing levels of complexity when facing a problem).

The very core of becoming an expert, or continuing to be one, lies especially in the ability to engage in progressive problem solving; here lies the difference between experts (or expert-like novices) and long-time practitioners, that is, people who can handle even complex routine tasks but perform poorly when things stop working the usual way (as may be the case – I would add – when decoding the surface of a text without perceiving its hidden agenda).

As for defining the knowledge possessed by experts in the form of educational goals, Bereiter – who wishes to keep his distance from learning models and teaching practice that imply mind-as-container metaphors – prefers to use the broader concept of ‘understanding’ as the ‘ability to act intelligently’ on the basis of a meaningful relation with something or someone. Understanding a person means also being able to act intelligently in relation to her/him (there can be of course many right ways to do so, depending on one’s relationship to that person); this in turn entails becoming interested in the person, understanding the relationship set in a broader context (family, occupations, personal history) and being able to talk about the person, her/his underlying motives, dispositions, strengths, weaknesses. A deep understanding is then demonstrated by insightful solution of problems involving the person and by telling stories that have depth of characterization. It is worth noting that a deep understanding can only arise from a deep involvement (the whole example is from Bereiter, 2002: 101–115). If we apply such a relational view of understanding to a text, we should not only become able to decode it, but also to feel about it, or – in the case of a narrative – to use it to exemplify or to produce other stories showing similar patterns. For example, laughing may reveal an adequate [p. 193] understanding of a joke, while an even deeper understanding is revealed by being able to adapt the joke to a different public (Bereiter, 2002: 194–195).

In this relational view of understanding, teaching means assisting the learner to establish and deepen a relation (Bereiter, 2002: 111–115), while the teaching model – a redefinition of the ‘community of practice’ after the model of a research and development team – suggests the need to provide a community with the necessary conceptual tools and to engage in activities of progressive problem solving, with students and teachers alike operating on the edge of their knowledge (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Bereiter, 2002).

This is the general educational platform of which my proposal for a didactic of the lie is an instance. But what does it mean to have expertise about lies?

In Summary: Bringing Expertise about Lies into the Classroom

Adequate understanding of a lie may range from becoming slightly suspicious to fully exposing both the lie and the motives of the liar. The literature reviewed above indicates that reaching such understanding requires some knowledge about language and communication and their role in shaping relationships among people, some knowledge about the people involved in the communication and their motives, and finally some knowledge about the topic which is lied about (see Section 4.3 below for examples). As for any educational intervention, all the revised approaches propose to involve a community in meaningful (that is, based on or close to real life) and motivating activities.

From 1992 to 1998 – the period when I introduced lie detecting in my agenda as a teacher of language and history in an Italian secondary school – and then to the present moment, my confidence that lie detecting could be taught as a rather general ability has diminished, as a retrospective analysis of my classroom practice will illustrate in Sections 5 and 6. I still believe, however, that it is possible to inoculate some awareness about lies, why they may be so successful and how it is possible to recognize ‘danger zones’. It is now especially Bereiter and Scardamalia’s concepts of ‘criticality as expertise’ and ‘understanding as intelligent action’ that encourage me to put students in contact with the approaches of writers, rhetoricians, psychologists, semioticians and linguists, taken in their role as experts on lying.

[p. 194] In particular, my proposal for a strand of ‘lie detecting’ within the institutional constraints of first language education incorporates the following principles:

1. teach enough about beliefs and communication to make the students aware that meaning is always constructed with the co-operation of the receiver (and not simply transmitted and received);
2. examine lies from literature and film from the point of view of the victim, of the liar, of the form of the lie, of the encyclopaedic knowledge involved; prompt the students to look for similarities with real life situations;
3. put the students in controlled situations where they are lied to, and then discuss the similarities with the other lies encountered;
4. let the students build lies and discuss them, since the requirements for being a successful lie detector are similar to those of the liar, who also needs a good understanding of the potential victim’s beliefs and expectations and of the communication tools at his/her disposal;
5. confront potential lies as problems posed to the classroom as a community of practice.

The next section will describe the activities 1–2, that is how concepts related to communication and beliefs can be integrated in an L1 curriculum; Section 5 will then focus on activities 3–5 with ‘real’ lies (controlled or not). The whole educational proposal is designed to run over two school years, with students aged 14 to 16.

The Study of Lies in Language Education

This section, which owes much to the comments of an anonymous reviewer, integrates some experience and reflection after I stopped teaching L1-Italian; in other words, the conceptual tools for discussing lies are described using the more evolved theoretical frame that I would propose to a classroom now. On the other hand, the activities involving lies from the real world – in Section 5 below – will be described exactly as they were originally carried out, so that the actual experience can be evaluated.

Meaning Is Always (Re)constructed, Not Just Transferred

A folk-psychological and folk-epistemological view of learning as mere transfer of knowledge from one source (the teacher, the book) into the head of a listener or reader (the student) still plagues a good deal of classroom practice and the culture of schooling as perceived by many pupils, parents and even teachers (Bereiter, 2002). However, by the age of 14 – at least in my experience – most Italian pupils have been exposed to classroom practice requiring them to take responsibility for their own and [p. 195] the group’s understanding.⁹ Not many of them, however, are capable of reflecting on their and the classroom’s learning process. My contribution to raising their epistemological awareness – in the sense indicated by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1989, 1996; also Bereiter, 1997) – focuses on a better understanding of communication, especially the all-but-passive role of the listener or reader.

This requires criticizing the transfer-of-knowledge view of communication and learning in favour of a more active role of the receiver in terms of appropriation and maybe resistance, that is actions involving awareness of and responsibility for one’s beliefs. Lie detecting activities also place themselves inside a more general educational path towards understanding communication and learning.

‘Structures of Expectations’ (‘Frames’) Steer our Understanding

The use of prior (linguistic and non-linguistic) knowledge is at the core of many methods of reading strategy instruction (Bimmel, 2001) and also the approach I practice most in language education in the first year of junior secondary school. A conceptual tool that my students become most acquainted with right from the start is the ‘structure of expectations’.

Tannen (1993) has demonstrated how terms such as ‘frames’, ‘scripts’ and ‘schema’ – all referring to what she generally defines as ‘structures of expectations’ – have been recognized by different traditions in the human sciences as playing a crucial role in a range of cognitive processes, from observing to recalling. In the same paper, Tannen then examines how such structures of expectations are reflected in language, by analysing a corpus of stories told by viewers of a short film; the examples show clearly how the whole process of understanding and recalling the film is steered by expectations (or ‘frames’) about situations, people, objects, genre, conventions.¹⁰ ‘Framing’ a speech act or a text means, in this perspective, recognizing its relevance to a situation and activating the [p. 196] related knowledge, attitudes and feelings involved. When communication occurs in a face-to-face situation, it is often the voice pitch and body language of the speaker (usually fine-tuned by the immediate feedback from the partner in communication) that help the listener to frame the message according to the intentions of the speaker (e.g. irony, sarcasm or friendliness). Elsewhere, Tannen (1986) provides convincing examples of how interpersonal misunderstandings are most likely to arise when technology transfers speech-like verbal content into a situation devoid of immediate feedback or mitigating devices, as with answering machines or hastily written e-mails.

All in all, however, language – through its instructional trait, see Section 3.1 – is an effective way for steering the listener’s expectations to build (possibly false) expectations and beliefs.

To help students grasp the notion of frames and the role of expectations, I would introduce riddles, and then prompt some reflection on how easy they became to understand, once given a small clue. In the subsequent study of written language and longer texts, the students became accustomed, during the whole first school year, to predicting activities based on prior knowledge about genre conventions and general knowledge about the topic.

As we will later discuss, the most difficult problem for spotting a lie is to frame a speech act or a text as a potential lie. Activating this frame is often 90% of the work, as with the clues to solving a riddle. My working hypothesis is that theoretical knowledge about language and the psychology of communication blended with examples of lies – the subject of the next two paragraphs – provides a basis for establishing a more alert attitude towards believing what one is told. At the same time, becoming aware of the paramount importance of expectations for understanding should make it clear that the more we know, the more appropriate our expectations will be; conversely, a shallow understanding of a topic makes a person a more likely victim of lies and hoaxes, like the economically naïve academics eager to receive free mobile phones.

Language Can Lie, but Also Tell the Truth

Human beings mainly lie with words, or rather with speeches and texts (German even uses the expression ‘er lügt wie gedruckt’, ‘he lies like a printed book’). This does not mean that language itself is untrustworthy. The natural languages at the basis of speeches and texts are adequate tools for communicating: they have developed into the blend of precision and generality required by interpersonal communication inside the community of reference and are by far more apt to convey any nuance in meaning than [p. 197] any known artificial language (Weinrich, 1976: §4; Winograd & Flores, 1986). Adequate translations of texts are possible (Weinrich, 2000: 14–24).

This does not mean that language is easy; it is a quite complex device which often has conflicting goals to satisfy, such as showing affection, maintaining independence, or obtaining something from others without imposing on them (Tannen, 1986). In many situations, one will not and cannot say what one means, and communication then relies on a rather sophisticated exchange requiring that words and sentences not be taken at face value but at a meta-level. However, as long as communication proceeds on a co-operative basis, no form of indirectness – such as courtesy or understatement – is devised to hide rather than to reveal thoughts (Weinrich, 1976; in a more problematic perspective, Tannen, 1986, 1990).

In summary, language (or ‘discourse’, as it is now often referred to) not only represents and constructs reality, but also the identity of the communication partners and their relationship (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997); understanding also makes it necessary to recognize (to frame!) these different levels. Given this presupposition, we can now attempt a definition of the ‘lie’.

If we look at language as instruction, as proposed in Sections 3.1 and 4.2, lying means giving someone an incorrect basis for behaviour. More precisely, if we integrate the instructional function with the multiple layers on which language operates, a lie is typically aimed at misleading the potential victim from several points of view: about the ‘facts’, about the identity of the speaker and about her/his relationship to the listener.

But how can a person be so thoroughly fooled?

Let us consider ‘total lies’, like Hitler’s statement at the 1938 Munich conference that Germany had no further territorial claims after settling the dispute with Czechoslovakia, when he was actually organizing the invasion of Poland; or the radio transmissions persuading Serbian-Bosnian citizens to fight their Muslim neighbours, who were allegedly planning to kill Serbs and imprison their women in harems, at the onset of civil war in the former Yugoslavia (Maass, 1996: 113–114 and 227–229). In both cases, the lie fell on fertile ground, that is a situation loaded with expectations: war or peace? And the listeners and victims believed these lies, as long as they matched their expectations, desires or fears.

It would be a dangerous mistake, however, to think that the people who became victims of these and other lies were just stupid or backwards; journalist Peter Maass, after describing the decisive role of Serbian propaganda in the outbreak of civil war, notes that “[it was] simple, clean, [p. 198] effective. Serbs swallowed it. In a similar situation, so might we” (Maass, 1996: 228).

A recent and most gripping document permits first-hand observation of a lie that played a role in the loss of 7,000 human lives. During the siege of Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb army in 1995, the town was supposedly defended by a small troop of Dutch peace-keeping soldiers under the UN flag. General Ratko Mladic, the Serb commander, carried out negotiations with the Dutch UN commander in order to assure a ‘peaceful’ takeover of the town. The encounters were tape-recorded and long sequences can now be heard in Leslie Woodhead’s documentary Srebrenica: A cry from the grave (2000). General Mladic, who was at the time by far the strongest player on the field, acts as the hard but honest soldier, trustworthy in his claim not to harm civilians in the case of a peaceful surrender. Almost everybody knew instead that a massacre was likely to happen as soon as the Dutch troops were out of sight, and plenty of precedents could confirm this fear, but the Dutch general – under the pressure of the situation, and feeling abandoned by the UN and NATO, who failed to provide military assistance – was possibly acting in good faith when he finally ‘believed’ Mladic and left Srebrenica’s citizens to their destiny.

In these three examples, as in most others cases taken from real life, the liars lied first of all about their personal trustworthiness – respectively as statesmen, journalists or soldiers – but their victims also had a part too, as willing accomplices.

But how is it possible to expand one’s awareness about lies through ways different from bitter personal experience?

Fictional Narrative Can Also Help Understand Lies

Literature can be used as a tool to provide insights into many aspects of real life, “… for gaining leverage over social and psychological problems, for meeting needs, for making possible a variety of pleasures and satisfactions, for patterning expectations, assumptions, values and behavioral norms” (Raskin, 1982: 16; the quotation actually refers more generally to art).

Following another metaphor, compatible with Raskin’s functional view of art, and with Rosenblatt’s (1995) idea of exploration, literature can be seen as a safe space for simulation (Oatley, 1999, 2001). Oatley, a psychologist who made an important contribution to the understanding of the function of feelings (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996), re-reads Aristotle in the light of research on cognition and underlines how mimesis by the writer or narrator and identification by the reader or spectator make fiction a safe playground for expanding experience, and therefore a resource that [p. 199] may have played an important role in the development of the human species.

Of course, any human behaviour can be simulated through fiction. My point, however, is that language and especially the lie can find in fiction a ‘natural’ representation. Tannen (1986, 1989, 1992, 1997) has focused much of her research on the strategies of involvement operated by communication partners and has demonstrated how everyday conversation and literature share a good deal of stylistic tools designed to create involvement in communication. Combining Tannen’s view with the above mentioned levels at which language constructs and reflects the world (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), we can finally spot possible lies by setting our focus on the rhetorical devices that promote involvement with the topic, with the speaker’s or writer’s identity, with the relationship of the partners in communication.

This is how I would now explain Weinrich’s assertion that fictional lies are made recognizable to the reader through ‘lie signals’ (Weinrich, 2000: 70–76). In a typical narrative situation, the reader or spectator realizes that a character is lying; the lying character may even call the attention of the audience to his/her mastery in the art of lying, as in the scene (I,2) in which Richard III seduces the wife of the man he has just murdered and turns her hate into trust by exploiting her distress and need for protection.

I will present now other instances of fiction which can contribute to our understanding of lying behaviour and even provide a language for discussing lies in the real world.

Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) invented a symbol, a nose growing longer with every lie, that has become part of the language for talking about lies in Western culture. The tale of Pinocchio can be seen as a kind of Bildungsroman in which the puppet/boy has to learn through bitter experience not to lie to friends, but also to keep silent when necessary and not to trust strangers who make improbable claims (Caviglia, 2000). As the story was written for barely literate young people at the end of nineteenth century, the lie signals are sometimes almost too evident, as when the Fox and the Cat, claiming to “work only to enrich others”, persuade Pinocchio to sow his five gold pieces in the Field of Wonders, in order to harvest two thousand after one night. This emblematic tale of naivety bears, however, more than some resemblance with the true story of the loss suffered by many investors in dot-com firms, according to culture critic Michele Serra (2001), who laughs at

the silent and bewildered crowd that for months have been switching on their computers every morning to go to the Field of Wonders site, and can’t find their gold pieces any more, and curse the day they believed that the old economy, the one based on labour and sweat, [p. 200] had been replaced by a brand new one where money ceaselessly grows out of money, by natural cloning […].¹¹

Serra recalls Pinocchio’s wondering question to Cat&Fox Consulting, “But how can they [the five gold pieces] possibly become so many?” and answers: “This is possible, in Collodi’s tale as well as in today’s story, only in a kingdom of infinite naivety. And thanks to an instinctive, dreaming greed, as of children who can still believe that money is a magic fruit […].”¹² In any case, if Pinocchio may seem too naive for today’s teenagers to identify with, the Harry Potter series offers a more refined picture of the power of lies, expectations and fears.

One of the main characters, Sirius Black, though innocent, still faces a pending life sentence for complicity in the homicide of a friend, while the true supposedly dead traitor is still officially revered as a hero (Rowling, 1999). The vicious journalist Rita Seeker spreads misinformation through the whole fourth book; she even makes up a story about Hermione being Harry’s girlfriend and then betraying him; it is worth noting that even a positive and anything-but-stupid character like Mrs. Weasley falls victim to this outright lie (Rowling, 2000: 476).

Throughout Rowling’s books, the reader also witnesses how lies work and how it happens that good and even clever people – characters he or she may easily identify with – can be victimized by liars.¹³ Moral implications are handled in an increasingly sophisticated way across the four books, for example in the dialectic between fair play and cheating (possibly by [p. 201] necessity) in games and in real life. Magic powers can produce dangerous illusions: the Mirror of Erises reflects a person’s deepest, most desperate desires (Rowling, 1997: 157), while the wicked Dementors can evoke the worst memories and deepest fears (Rowling, 1998). But at the end of lies, disguises and mysteries, ‘truth’ is the only keyword to personal development and action, a point made most clearly in the gripping finale of the fourth book (Rowling, 2000: 590, 610–617, 626).

There is surely other fiction that can be used just as well (Homer and Shakespeare, in the first place), but J. K. Rowling’s books do provide a consistent body of enjoyable material for building theoretical knowledge on lies.¹⁴

Fiction can also provide the insight that focusing on language may not be enough for lie detecting. In Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Sun behind the Moon (2001), a street-wise Afghan boy is offered a sum for leading an Afghan-Canadian woman through the desert to Kandahar; as she is completely covered with a burqa, the boy asks to see her face before coming to a deal: “Show me your face, I want to see that you are not a liar”.

The typical lesson based on fiction in literature or film consisted of reading or viewing the piece of work together and then discussing the topics which most interested the students, with some prompting questions from me in the few cases when the students failed to address a topic on my list. Other activities such as putting short scenes on a classroom stage or re-writing stories were used as well. On the whole, however, I have been using fiction in the classroom with as little intervention as possible from my side, in part as a compensation for a much tougher approach in teaching reading comprehension, which was almost exclusively based on non-literary texts; during the first year of secondary school, fiction and creative writing were also a kind of reward for the whole classroom and I believed that literature’s sheer power was almost enough to foster growth and insight, once reading comprehension had been secured. The choice of the appropriate texts (or films) for a given topic and group of students was also my primary concern.

I would now be less radical in dividing between literature-as-reward and non-literature-as-toil and would propose a more structured approach to fiction in the classroom, aimed at bringing impressionistic knowledge

[p. 202] to a higher level of awareness and refinement, with the help of reading response logs and activities “bridging the creative and the critical”, as proposed by Kooy and Wells (1996) and Woods (2001). In particular, I would be more daring in exploring student feelings about a text and more explicit in making them aware of their own beliefs and values, and of existing conflicts, for example integrating the approach described by Poyas (2001) with my own research on conflicting value systems in Italy (Caviglia, 2000).

Imitation (and Then Lies) Require Deep Understanding of Communication

The ability to imitate a behaviour consciously is an important and complex tool for human development (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Leland & Bateson, 2001), and has come of age mainly in the last decade as a productive approach to the teaching of writing (Geist, 1996; Couzijn & Rijlaarsdam, 1996; Ferraris, Caviglia & Degl’Innocenti, 1992); it is one that I myself have extensively proposed in the classroom right from the beginning.

Lies and hoaxes are forgeries based on conscious imitation and carry the hallmark of ‘deep understanding’ (Bereiter, 2002: 103–104; also here, Section 3.6) of texts and situations; the liar is someone who pinpoints some vital features of an original model of communicative/co-operative behaviour and reproduces them in a different context under different constraints [an intriguing and controversial academic hoax is described in Sokal (2000)].

Lie producing can also be an effective way to understand lying, possibly even more productive than activities focused on lie detecting (G. Rijlaarsdam, personal communication).

Understanding and Producing Lies at School

A didactic of the lie cannot be implemented as a short-term course; it is only too easy to spot a lie if one has been warned in advance, and the activities with ‘real lies’ were therefore spread across the central months of the second school year, as well as to make lie detecting (and, with some risks, joking with hoaxes) become part of the culture of the learning community. I propose here a few units, each covering some aspect of coping with lies, that can be developed in one session (from one to four 45-min. periods, in some cases requiring homework). They are designed first to assess and then to help further the student’s mastery of the tools described in the previous section.

[p. 203]

You Won…: Exposing Techniques for Involvement

In the 1990s, in Italy, people could quite often find in their mail boxes letters starting with these or equivalent words. When I submitted one of them to the classroom, the students could immediately see that such letters were just trying to sell something. There is little point in asking the students if these texts are trustworthy (“we are not that stupid to believe advertising”, is their typical claim); it is more rewarding to let them expose the involvement techniques used by these letters, which are often sophisticated enough to convince a target that it has been selected as belonging to a community of, for example, “customers who value cutting edge technology” (see Section 2 above). Technology can help give the receiver the feeling of having being chosen out of many simply by letting his/her name pop up throughout the text. Imposing letterheads seek to lend trustworthiness to the firms sending them. Imitation and parody of these letters in the classroom, with use of mail-merge facilities linked to a small database of people and their occupations and interests (for example, connecting the students with their favourite football team and offering them the appropriate fan-club gadgets), can provide some insight in how easily the trick works.

This analysis of techniques can later develop into analysis of more refined advertising that does not contain blatant lies but implicitly appeals to the same ‘rhetoric of exclusiveness’, usually through visual associations of a given product with smart people and ambiences.

Debunking a Hoax

Once the students have become familiar – through analysis of fictional or historical lies – with the idea that people are vulnerable to being cheated in situations loaded with deep-seated fears or desires, it should be time for them to be put on trial and confronted with a ‘true hoax’. My favourite is a leaflet warning parents against evil people standing in front of schools giving away adhesive picture-cards that had LSD mixed with glue on the reverse side to be licked for sticking them on paper [this is now a certified hoax, see Emery (2001)].

I gave the students the leaflet and asked them an ambiguous question like “What do you think about it?”; after some expressed their outrage at all the evil in the world, we shifted our focus to a more clearly defined problem: whether it was our duty – as requested in the leaflet – to make copies and distribute them, in our case to other students in our school and to the elementary school on the other side of the road. In Italy leaflets must have their origin printed on them; in this case we would have had to write our school’s name and address, because there was no other [p. 204] indication on the leaflet, apart from a generic reference to the police as the source of the warning. Just facing the decision to become personally responsible for that piece of information made some students question if it was reliable; as the danger to students was so serious, some actually wanted to make copies right away, but a more reflective group insisted on looking first for more evidence. As soon as the first suspicions began to surface, it became easy to spot that the text was anything but trustworthy: the source was unknown, the story rather incredible (why should anyone invent such a system?) and focused on a typical deep-seated parental fear. After half an hour’s discussion, even the hard-liners were in doubt and proposed (sensibly) to call the local police department first. By the end of the lesson, everybody was almost sure the leaflet was a hoax, and sure that it would have been irresponsible to distribute it without further checking. The same pattern was repeated in six other classes, with little variation and minimal intervention from the teacher. The only embarrassing note came once from a student who confessed, rather bewildered, that in his former school exactly the same leaflet had been distributed to everybody by the principal himself.

This little incident presented the opportunity to make clear the need to take into consideration the persons and media which forward a piece of information and not just the intent of the text (intentio operis in Eco, 1990 and 1992) in its interplay with the reader, after the typical approach to texts at school. If a lie is received and forwarded in good faith, it remains a lie, while the person who forwards it should not be called a liar (for lack of intention), but becomes a victim and an unwilling accomplice at the same time. Once again, technology can help lend credibility to a lie simply because many people tend to respect printed or broadcast matters, or else because e-mail makes it easy – just a click – to forward whatsoever unchecked piece of information with the crucial added value of one’s signature. This is the reason why chain letters or hoaxes, like the one about free mobile phones, can quickly spread like viruses; no automated filter against junk mail will ever stop a message from someone who is among our usual correspondents.

At the conclusion of this crucial stage of our path, I wish to reiterate how the decisive prompt leading to understanding was having to take direct responsibility for a piece of information. The same basic mechanism – unwillingness to make a fool of himself in front of others – saved a colleague from becoming another victim of the free mobile phones hoax (he has been so kind as to confess the near miss after reading this paper).

[p. 205]

A Modest Proposal: The Teacher as a Liar

A couple of months later, the same students were confronted with Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729), a pamphlet suggesting poor Irish people should raise children as a food source in order to alleviate their plight and improve their country’s economy. This time the students had the text at their disposal for an hour (not much, given the length) and their task was to write an individual answer to the question as to whether Swift’s proposal was: a) reasonable; b) reasonable, but morally unacceptable; c) other (specify).

Most students in all 7 classes chose b), while only about 15% understood within the hour that Swift’s proposal was not to be taken at face value. In the next hour this latter group were to announce proudly that they had discovered that the text was “kind of a tall story”, and then the whole class went back to the text to discover the many clues to its paradoxical tone and the author’s moral outrage at the conditions of poor people in Ireland. The few answers that considered the proposal reasonable were considered a provocative joke, without further questioning. On more than one occasion I noticed that those who approved of the idea of raising children for food were not the worst readers or the students considered the most gullible by their peers, but those with most trust in the authority of the teacher; in one case a student was really shattered at realizing his potential acceptance of a crime.

When conducting classroom discussions about the high rate of non-detection, I mainly focused on the failure to recognize irony in written form and an excessive trust in the authority of the text. What I did not see form and on excessive trust in the authority of the text. What I did not see so clearly at the time was that the liar was me, the teacher, and mine the authority, expressed by the task the students had to solve, that they had to challenge. The ones that understood the text rather quickly were not so much alerted by some places in the text where Swift gives way to his outrage at the English policy towards the Irish people (they found them only later), but by suspecting some connection between the enormity of the Modest Proposal and my hidden educational agenda.

I now think also that the emotional distance (Ginzburg, 1998) from a weird old text may have induced many students into a task-oriented strategy of minimal effort, that is taking the text at face value. I would now rephrase the task, referring the same questions in terms of today’s policy-making for some distant and poor country, after some minimal editing of Swift’s text.

[p. 206]

Producing a Hoax

As already pointed out, imitation tasks can play a major role in developing an understanding of the different constraints in writing. Once the students have gained some practice in imitation and even parody, it becomes tempting, although not free of risks, to encourage them to develop hoaxes themselves, maybe for the canonical 1st of April. At this stage, the moral implications of hoaxes were discussed by asking the students to focus on their own reactions as victims of lies and to develop a code of conduct to prevent jokes from becoming too nasty. It may be safer, although slightly unfair to the students, to leak some information to colleagues about such activities going on.

More Risky Enterprises: Challenging ‘True’ Public Lies

The only real test to see if a class (including the teacher) has made progress in lie detecting is the challenge of a new public lie. That means sticking one’s neck out and claiming that a piece of information on TV and newspapers is likely to have been made up. It happens. Just two examples.

In Italy, in 1997–1998, a certain doctor Di Bella received enormous media attention after claiming to have developed a cure for cancer; no evidence whatsoever was produced, but the Ministry of Public Health was forced by a media campaign using keywords like ‘freedom of information’, ‘freedom of treatment’ or ‘right to hope’ to start a testing program. In the meantime, however, some patients – often backed by politicians from different parties eager to jump on the publicity bandwagon – obtained court orders forcing public health institutions to pay the cost of treatment for the ‘Di Bella method’, even after the testing suggested, months later, that the cure was ineffective (Barrett, 2001, search for ‘Di Bella’).¹⁵ There now exist interesting analyses of the Di Bella affair [Rositi (1999), on mass media treatment of the story and Minerva (1998), more focused on political intervention; a review of Minerva in Lovisolo, 1998], but discussing in the

[p. 207] classroom the different motives of the different actors right in the middle of the public debate could only have been educationally valuable at a moment when polls suggested that more than 50% of Italians were more inclined to support Di Bella than official science (Repubblica, 31.07.1998: 9 “Con Di Bella 2 italiani su 3”).¹⁶

Again in Italy, a 17-year-old girl in the little town of Novi Ligure accused on the February 21 2001, “immigrants, probably from Albania” of breaking into her house to commit robbery, and subsequently killing her mother and brother and trying to kill her. With few important exceptions,¹⁷ most newspapers and TV news bulletins in the two following days reported the story to their public as the girl told it to the police – despite the fact that it seemed rather inconsistent from the start [e.g. Preve (2001), who actually keeps some distance by sparsely using reported speech]. Fuelled especially by the local TV station TeleNord and right-wing parties, outrage at immigrants and at the government’s policies toward immigration rose in the small town (Valli, 2001) and in Italy at large (Portanova, 2001). On the evening of February 23rd, a demonstration against immigrants was about to take place in Novi Ligure when it was revealed that it was the girl herself who had killed her family with the help of her boyfriend (Ponte, 2001); the demonstration was cancelled (Repubblica, 24 February 2002, “E la Lega annulla la fiaccolata”; Fontana, 2001). In the following days, many newspapers sent correspondents to describe the ambience of the crime scene. Journalist Luca Fontana (2001) wrote a brilliant report on the day of the funeral, mainly based on declarations by young people who knew the victims and perpetrators, but, in my view, gave excessive credit to the bizarre hypothesis that the triggering factor for the killing was the couple being surprised by the girl’s mother while making love; Fontana speaks of it as “probably reliable information” (‘informazione probabile’ in the original) and then refers to that unsupported speculation as “the fact that”. It is interesting how the rumour acquires some sort of credibility through a detail, namely the question as to whether it had been the mother or the younger brother who surprised the couple; if the uncertainty lies in who surprised them, this suggests that someone had indeed surprised them; and details count as ‘lie signals’ for Weinrich (2000) and as signals of involvement/literariness for Tannen (1989 and 1992). It came out later [p. 208] and was confirmed in court that the young couple had been planning the crime for months.

These cases may be different from the point of view of ethics; Dr Di Bella was possibly in good faith while the family killer obviously was not. In any event, most media were at the very least irresponsible in backing their claims, and Fontana at least inaccurate in the way he reported a rumour. From the point of view of the lie detector, however, all three lies were rather easy to suspect, as they were tailor-made for meeting the expectations of the target audience: people longing for hope against a dangerous disease, people fearing immigrants, or even a smaller group of liberated progressives with a strong prejudice against the influence on education of sexophobic Italian Catholicism (the family of the victims were known as regular churchgoers).

I discussed the stories of Di Bella and of the family killer in a ‘synchronous’ manner only with friends and colleagues, as I was no longer teaching at an Italian school at that point. During the experimentation with lie detecting, I had not spotted any examples of public lies that were suitable for use in the classroom, or maybe I was just not brave and self-confident enough. In one case we did discuss a somewhat inaccurate report by a local newspaper about our school; in another case we just contented ourselves with catastrophic announcements of computer viruses and chain letters on the Internet. As discussed in the next session, however, the habit of focusing on the interplay between the motivations of the writer and the reader’s expectations becomes extremely valuable in classroom activities involving the questioning of other texts or statements on complex and fundamentally ideological issues, ones that would be inappropriate to consider merely in terms of lies and truth.

Discussion and Perspectives for Further Development

Is Lie Detecting Teachable? Can Related Skills Be Transferred across Domains?

As for the long-term effects of teaching lie detecting, I can only report one successful case of its application in real life: a student, whose parents owned a small business, asked to talk with me in private and showed me a letter in English – bearing the letterhead of a foreign bank – apparently from an employee asking for (well compensated) help to collect a sum from the account of a dead man by acting as his foreign partner;¹⁸ the [p. 209] parents of the student may have shown some interest, as the letter was addressed to them and they had done business with that country in the past, but the student was rather sure it was a hoax and asked for my confirmation. Of course, a single elementary case does not prove anything about transferability of lie-detecting skills and just shows that, once in a while, an issue dealt with at school has been perceived by a student as relevant to real life.

Looking more generally at the students’ response to the classroom activities, most striking was the direct connection between the assumption of responsibility for accepting and transmitting information and the emergence of an attitude to challenge and verify the validity of the source, as in the case of the LSD cards (Section 5.2 above). This confirms the tight link between motivation and the development of strategies of appropriation and resistance proposed by Wertsch (1998), and calls for the need to focus, whenever possible, on relevant themes and problems not too remote from the students’ potential sphere of influence and commitment. On a less positive note, I would expect, for the same reasons, that absurd and even dangerous misconceptions might easily be believed and encounter little resistance, as long as they do not seem to jeopardize any direct interest.

This observation sums up and in a way confirms the theoretical criticism by an anonymous reviewer to a previous version of this paper:

[…] lies are performed in the different realms […] according to their inherent laws, laws that not always (not necessarily) can be exported from one realm to the other without any reformulation. These laws depend on the linguistic features of the pertaining texts, of the characterisation of one type of consumer (individual or universal), on the discourse or the characterisation of one type of consumer (individual or universal), on the discourse or on the logic to which each one of the vehicles (books newspapers, pamphlets, television, movies, papers) are subject. (reviewer n. 65, with minor editing)

I still believe that focusing on the motives and expectations of all the actors involved in public discourse (that is, the people addressing the media, the media themselves and their audience), and on the identities and roles they build through discourse, would help lie detecting (and, more generally, critical literacy) across different genres and topics. At the same time, however, specific (situated) factual knowledge about a given topic or genre and about a given person as sender or receiver of a statement is also of paramount importance in deciding the attitude toward a source.

If we go back once again to the hoax about free mobile phones, some of the people who contributed in spreading it are reputed professionals not easily fooled in their own field, but with a shallow understanding of economics and marketing, so they did not perceive at once that something had to be wrong with the generous offer (they probably only activated their ‘frames’ for buying and thought there was nothing to lose). At the same [p. 210] time they would have discarded the offer – two of them told me later – if it had not been forwarded to them by close work associates, people they had good reason to trust.

Would they have spotted the hoax immediately if they had previously attended lessons on lie detecting? Possibly, but not for certain (personal trust can be to some extent a reason to override standard caution in evaluating information),¹⁹ and maybe not even so crucial in this specific case, as, after all, their blunder just inflicted a harmless blow to their self-esteem and did not damage anybody else. On the positive side, this small incident and the ensuing discussion helped establish a common language for speaking about more serious lies.

To summarize this section and attempt a brief answer to the question in its title, the mixture of general and specific knowledge required for lie detecting in real life should limit any excess of confidence in general purpose lie detecting skills. It still seems possible, however, to foster a better awareness of lies as a particular dimension in communication and to find a language for understanding them. Examples from fictional lies and the production of lies in a controlled environment have proved especially effective in establishing some shared knowledge on the topic.

Reconsidering Limits and the Scope of Lie Detecting

Public discourse that presents itself – usually via the mediation of technology – as a trusted piece of advice should in my view remain the focus of classroom activities centred on lies from the real world. However, to what extent it may be appropriate to use the word lie is a critical issue. The same reviewer mentioned above, while recognizing that states and other powers often lie and that “it would be desirable that citizens develop a critical awareness as regards these deceiving voices” cautioned that

[…] when truth is discussed in terms of historic – political events, the only valid sense of any analysis is to discuss the opposing ideological statements. Any consideration about the formal features of such lies should be, in fine, complementary or subsidiary to the previous one. Doing otherwise would end in banalizing the issue […]. Doing otherwise risks […] suggest[ing] to the students a positive vision of history, according to which there exists a truth immanent to facts, prior and unrelated to any interpretation of the discourse, alien to ideology that needs no justifying (the lecturer is in danger of being asked by students to produce such a truth). (reviewer n. 65)

The risk of oversimplifying a complex issue in terms of lie and truth is a serious one, even more dangerous because of the enlightening goals and

[p. 211] aura of critical literacy. I also agree with the reviewer that the choice of topic to discuss is a crucial one.

The reviewer’s criticism also asks for a more explicit epistemological position about the possibility of knowing. I follow the empirical stand proposed among others by Umberto Eco and Carlo Ginzburg, of which I try to give here some basic tenets in extreme synthesis. Knowing in the human sciences cannot reach the same degree of certainty as in, say, physics, as long as such knowledge has to be meaningful (Ginzburg, 1992); besides, in the human sciences the object of knowledge is itself a subject, which brings another layer of complexity (Todorov, 1981, explaining Bakhtin). But by connecting pieces of evidence into a coherent discourse we can further our understanding (Ginzburg, 1999; for the role of language, Weinrich, 1976 and 2000). Truth is also a slippery concept and a claim that something is true (even worse, ‘the only truth’) can also be seen as signals of a potential lie;²⁰ there may be different adequate interpretations of human phenomena. However, there are also interpretations that are inadequate or wrong (Eco, 1990).

Back to the examples proposed in this paper, I still think that there is enough documentation to say that in 1938 Hitler lied in Munich about his lack of further territorial claims or that the Serbian-Bosnian media lied about Moslem-Bosnian plans to imprison Serbian women in harems, and that it may be fruitful to examine these lies also in the context of critical literacy, because these lies did work – for reasons that do also require a historical perspective – and had a momentous effect on the lives of many. But I also see more clearly now that the category lie should only be applied in the classroom to cognitively manageable contexts, which is seldom the case with political-historical issues.

To avoid misunderstandings, I do think it relevant to discuss at school hot current issues and events, and to develop opinions. But, as suggested by the anonymous reviewer, analysis in this realm should first begin with examination of the conflicting ideological stances. For example, topics such as the Kosovo crisis in 2000 or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (that is, situations that seem to have triggered a good deal of lying by the sides involved and their associates) do not lend themselves in the first place to explaining lies, but rather to showing how things can be complex and difficult to grasp, and maybe also to showing how distinguishing and [p. 212] developing better understanding is necessary and to some extent possible. Understanding can then also entail exposing a lie, but only as an activity which is subsidiary to a wider historical perspective.

In brief, the concept of lie needs to be used at school with extreme caution and with awareness of the shortcomings of ‘lie’ and ‘truth’ as binary categories for comprehending the world. However, while the idea of a ‘truth immanent to facts’ would be misleading, lies do manifest themselves as artefacts which can be manipulated through analysis and production activities. Deciding to what extent such manipulation is possible and fruitful in an educational setting, however, requires a clear definition of the limits of one’s knowledgebility. Doing otherwise would end up reinforcing the very practices (misinformation, propaganda, inaccurate journalism) that critical language education aims to oppose.

A Caveat Against Making Classrooms into Tribunals and a Proposal

Any reason is good for lying, as Castelfranchi and Poggi (1998) summarized in their extended analysis. There are even circumstances in which a lie can be defensible from the point of view of ethics. Bok (1978) presents a valuable selection of dilemmas, analysed with the tools of moral philosophy, which offer a good starting point for discussing the conflicting moral values about concrete issues.

However, when moving in classroom discussion from fiction to real life, I have experienced the considerable risk of forgetting the human misery and suffering emerging from true stories or, worse, enjoying the spectacle of this suffering as an element of the show. This attitude seems common for example in the crime news coverage by the Italian media, whose most compelling rationale seems to be keeping alive the attention of a large audience with morbid details, under the disguise of information (Caviglia, in preparation). The same sensationalist logic seems to drive the transmission of recorded excerpts from famous trials on evening TV.²¹ Crime-based [p. 213] stories are a continuous source of lies: criminals lie on trial, of course, as do their affiliates, but victims also sometimes lie, as do witnesses and the police, while the media are often ambiguous accomplices of these lies. My suggestion, whenever such stories become the matter for classroom discussion, is to resist with all one’s strength the sensationalist attitude of a media-based trial in the classroom and to focus, in the first place, on the motives of the media and of its audience, that is us.

I cannot exclude, however, that the teacher and the class in their role of citizens might feel required to take a position. In 1983, the showman Enzo Tortora was arrested for allegedly associating with the mafia and later sentenced to 10 years in prison. While he was serving time, a newspaper campaigning for his innocence, Il Manifesto, decided to publish the complete findings by the judges who tried the case. In that specific case, just reading that text made it patently clear to everybody, and eventually to the judges in the retrial, that Tortora was in prison because a petty criminal had issued a false accusation which was swallowed by the first judges who, apparently in good faith, had then twisted any other element into appearing as evidence of Tortora’s guilt (for example, two newspaper articles he had once written against the mafia were considered as a way to secure himself an alibi). I was not yet a teacher at the time, but I remember myself posing the question as to whether I would dare examine the judges’ motivation in a classroom while Tortora was still in prison.

Also, to receive or give notification of similar situations, I am currently looking for support for an initiative to monitor a few publications and TV programmes for examples of good and bad practice. One thread of such an activity would be spotting questionable pieces of information and discussing with fellow teachers and media professionals, practically in real time, whether and how a given material could be appropriate for classroom activities on critical language education.

Enlarging the Perspective

The behaviour of lying has dimensions stretching well beyond those taken into consideration here. For example, throughout this paper I have been using a model focused on conscious lies, thus neglecting self-deceiving components that can play a major role in shaping memories and beliefs, and therefore the behaviour of lying (Weinrich, 2000: 82–83; an account of eyewitnesses’ memories in Loftus, 1997). Extending a didactic of the lie to include self-deceit and ‘assisted self-deceit’ seems a perspective worthy of further investigation.

Furthermore, this presentation has focused only on verbal language, while pictures, graphics, body language, and even actions can also deceive. [p. 214] In the educational context, a useful and viable addition both to our didactic of the lie and more generally to any intervention aimed at enhancing criticality should be some work on statistics and visual design, two tools that play a significant role in public discourse [see Tufte (1983) for cogent examples on visual design]. For example, the ability to decode information in the form of graphics or tables is already classified as a requirement for adult literacy (OECD, 2000; Gallina, 2000) but, as for the case of prose, adequate understanding should include, whenever possible, critical insight into the possible manipulations of the presented data. It would be useful to understand, for example, the meaningfulness of the result of an opinion poll based on X answers out of a population of Y, or to understand how the techniques for the visual presentation of data can give different messages according to, for example, the scale factor. Or how to understand statements about the correlation of two indexes.

As we are starting to see, language education can cover but a portion – albeit an important one – of a whole approach to lie detecting. Besides, in a wider perspective, criticality may require more than excellent skills in discourse analysis.

Today’s most dangerous lies are likely to be presented as scientific truth – a tactic used in the past for justifying discrimination and racist policies and now to support sometimes false allegations in trials (Scheck & Neufeld, 2001). While a sensitivity to potential lies might certainly help to develop antibodies against generic claims for scientificity, it would take a better and more widespread understanding of the subject matters involved to raise public awareness on issues that require some sophisticated pre-knowledge, for example in biology or statistics or computer science. On the positive side, the scientific method itself is an excellent tool for exposing lies.

As a conclusion and wish, I would imagine a full-fledged ‘didactic of the lie’ as a cross-curricular path over more than one school-year, organized in modules that co-ordinate different subject matters, such as physics and history (say, ‘Galileo’s method, his discoveries and the political problems he had to face’), biology and literature (‘the theory of evolution, the creationism/evolutionism contrast and the literal vs. metaphorical reading of texts’), history and biology (‘big lies in the twentieth century’, with special focus on those based on alleged biological evidence), math and social sciences (‘statistics and misleading visual presentations’).

Only a multidisciplinary approach of this kind could, in my view, effectively respond to the need for critical information awareness that first language education has many possibilities to initiate and promote.

[p. 215]

Acknowledgements

For their comments, suggestions and encouragement I am extremely grateful to Leonardo Cecchini, Seth Chaiklin, Jeff Earp, Tanja M. Janssen, Maria Ferraris, Annette & Ernst-Martin Füchtbauer, Richard Raskin, and two critical and helpful anonymous reviewers. A special thanks to those who introduced me to the world of Hogwarts: David, Winnie and Laila Füchtbauer, aged 12 to 18 and Elena Ferrillo, 12.

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Films

Blue Steel, by Kathrin Bigelow. USA, 1990. Cape Fear, by Martin Scorsese. USA, 1991. Srebrenica: A cry from the grave, by Leslie Woodhead. UK, 2000. F for Fake, by Orson Welles. France/Iran/West Germany, 1975. Looking for Richard, by Al Pacino. USA, 1996. Monsieur Verdoux, by Charlie Chaplin. USA, 1947. Rashomon, by Akira Kurosawa. Japan, 1950. Scream, by Wes Craven. USA, 1996. The sixth sense, by Bryan Singer. USA, 1999. The usual suspects, by Bryan Singer. USA, 1995.

Footnotes

1. A formal homage to religious and political authority, without questioning inner thoughts, was usually considered sufficient during the Roman Empire or the first wave of the Inquisition, between the XIII and the XIV century; investigation of a deeper level begins with the Spanish and proceeded with the Roman Inquisition, respectively XV and XVI centuries (the totalitarian regimes of the XX century have displayed an analogous concern for control of inner thoughts). The separation of the word from the body in presence could even help define a semiotic awareness of and disposition to language manipulation that, according to Todorov (1982), facilitated the Spanish domination over illiterate populations in America.

2. Albeit at the price of a devaluation of the body and the consequent misunderstanding of the ‘embodied’ character of our knowledge [Descartes’s error, according to Damasio (1994) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999)].

3. The cultural hegemony of the written word may actually be seen as challenged by the broadcast image plus word (Simone, 2000). At any rate, writing or broadcasting both enhance a lie’s potential danger.

4. Original: “Die Lügendichtung […] ist von einer Fülle von Lügensignale durchsetzt, die sich übrigens mit großer Beständigkeit durch die Jahrhunderte vererben. Es sind formale und inhaltliche Topoi, die nicht einmal durch bewußtes Lernen weitergegeben zu werden brauchen, sonder die sich wie von selbst einstellen, wenn man eine Lügengeschichte zu schreiben versucht. Die Lügensignale gehören genauso notwendig zur literarischen Lüge wie die Ironiesignale zur Ironie [analysed in a previous chapter]. Sie sind Bestandteil der Information und kehren für jeden, der zu hören Ohren hat, die Information in ihr Gegenteil um.”

5. Paulo Freire is possibly the best known representative of this tradition. A critical analysis of his relevance to today can be found in Glass (2001).

6. This accusation lurks for example in Widdowson’s criticism of critical discourse analysis [Widdowson (2000), with references to other instances of a debate opposing himself to Fairclough].

7. As a first step toward finding these sites, I searched in turn for “hoaxes”, “debunking”, “urban legends”, and “bad science” on the Google search engine (<www.google.com>), which orders its results by placing the ones linked to “authoritative sites” on the top of the list (Specter, 2000).

8. Wertsch’s focus is not primarily on educational intervention, but on cultural-psychological analysis, with Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke and de Certeau as the main reference figures. The appropriation/resistance dichotomy comes originally from de Certeau (1984).

9. Until very recently, teachers in the Italian school system have usually received an amount of instruction in pedagogical issues which is inversely proportional to the age of their students. Teachers in kindergartens and elementary school (3–6 and 6–11) are on average pedagogically far more advanced then their colleagues in secondary schools, who were educated almost exclusively in their subject areas.

10. Tannen’s proposal to recognize similar “structures of expectation” in the “frames” proposed by Bateson (1972) and by Minsky (1975), or in Schank and Abelson’s (1977) “scripts, plans and goals” or already in Bartlett’s (1932) “active, developing patterns”, can in my view also apply to later approaches, such as George Lakoff’s (1987) theory of metaphors or Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s concepts of “mental spaces” and “conceptual blends” as building blocks of imagination and creativity (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002).

11. Original: la folla silenziosa e smarrita che ogni mattina, da mesi, quando apre il computer sul sito «Campo dei Miracoli» non trova più i suoi zecchini, e bestemmia il giorno in cui ha creduto che davvero la vecchia economia, quella fondata sulla maledizione del lavoro e del sudore, fosse rimpiazzata da una nuova di zecca, nella quale dal denaro nasce denaro, ininterrottamente, per naturale clonazione […].

12. Original: “E’ possibile, nel racconto di Collodi come nel nostro, solo nel regno della sua sterminata ingenuità. E in virtù di quella spontanea, sognante avidità che è tipica dei bambini, che ancora possono illudersi che i soldi siano un frutto magico […].”

13. Variations on this pattern are possible, of course, like in Chaplin’s film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), where the viewer would probably sympathize with the liar. But in the most typical pattern we find, an ‘innocent’ character tricked or seduced by some villain that he or she recognizes as such only too late, and anyway later than the reader or spectator, like in Martin Scorsese’s film Cape Fear (1991), where maniac Max Cady (Robert de Niro) seduces and kisses his enemy’s teenage daughter. The same pattern applies to Kathrin Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990) or Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), while in the more sophisticated The Usual Suspects (1995) by Bryan Singer and The Sixth Sense (1999) by M. Night Shyalaman, the audience is also misled until the last scene. An absolute masterpiece on lying, truth and narrative, maybe too old for the standards of most of today’s students, is Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1956), where the same story of murder and rape is ‘seen’ through the eyes of the murderer, the victim, the raped wife of the victim and finally a casual witness, who reveals the human misery of the other three.

14. Actually, during my teaching in Italy 1992–1998 I mainly used texts from Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare (especially Richard III, also with help from Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard, 1996), combined with some of the films listed in the previous note. My decision to propose instead J. K. Rowling’s books is based on extensive discussions on literature and lies with the young people mentioned in the “Acknowledgments”.

15. There have still been court rulings in 2001 and a decision by the Lazio Regional Council in 2002 granting economical support to those who wish to be cured with the Di Bella treatment. ‘A right to hope’ seems the rationale behind the defence of public support for those who wish to be treated with the Di Bella method, according to Lazio Regional Council president Francesco Storace (retrieved from http://www.adnkronos.com/Politica/servizi/enti/regione_lazio/comunicati/29.htm on 5 May 2002), while ‘freedom of treatment’ is still invoked (via the newspaper of a political party) by Giuseppe Di Bella (2001), son of the controversial MD. A presentation of professor Di Bella’s viewpoint can be found on his web site: http://www.luigidibella.it/ (retrieved on 5 May 2002). The site http://www.qlmEd.org/DiBella/index.html provides several analyses of the ‘Di Bella affair’ from the point of view of official science, conducted by MDs, sociologists and anthropologists.

16. One document I found on a site devoted to school (http://www.altrascuola.org/ altrascuola1.htm) suggests that there has been some interest on the part of teachers. However, I have not been able to locate reports of classroom activities.

17. A notably exception was La Stampa, whose local correspondent was extremely cautious from the beginning, according to Fontana (2001).

18. Money transfer hoaxes are described, for example, at http://www.europe.f-secure/com./hoaxes/moneytr.shtml (retrieved on 5 May 2002).

19. Personal relationships have not suffered in the least from this small incident, which sparked a lively exchange that actually reinforced the personal bonds.

20. In a documentary film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1975), forgeries of famous paintings are confiscated after the authorities receive an anonymous tip off (from the forger himself) about an art dealer trying to smuggle into the USA some valuable paintings by renown European artists; the receiver had therefore to pay a substantial sum to get back his paintings, but won the added value of a patent of authenticity issued by the State authority itself!

21. The program, which is called Un giorno in pretura (‘one day in court’), began in the 1980s with exemplary cases of petty crime, but has since moved on to cover high-profile political trials (such as hearings in the ‘Clean Hands’ trails of the early 1990s) and more recently some appalling family crimes. I suppose that the defendants receive some compensation for permitting the TV-broadcasting, but I have been unable to substantiate this. A manifest example of the sensationalist attitude was the coverage by the Italian media of the killing of a three-year-old boy in a small village in northern Italy in January 2002. Long before the mother was officially indicted for the crime, the media kept the public ‘informed’ about the investigations by mixing rumours from the village with leaks from the police, while the mother defended herself directly on a TV programme by obliquely accusing other people.