ABSTRACT
Adolescents tend to think about the world in absolute terms: true/false, right/wrong, good/evil (Perry, 1999). We believe that the idealism peculiar to youth springs from dualistic thinking. Like the wily detective in the interrogation room, we can extract the truth after sifting through layers of fabrication. Like Don Quixote, we can venture out and try to right the wrongs of the world. Like Michael the archangel, we can wage a winning battle against evil. When we cross the ambiguous threshold into adulthood, however, we realize that dualistic thinking is, well, sort of naïve. We begin to perceive the world as a conundrum fi lled more with shades of gray than with neat rows of absolute black and white. When we talk specifi cally about deception and truth in this chapter, we will assert that those endpoints are not black and white opposites, but are rather crude, arbitrarily-drawn communicative boundaries. Even the defi nitions of deception and truth carry with them several exceptions, as noted next.
