It's very likely that JVS learned that it was okay to be a liar, but not necessarily because he witnessed express (blatant) lies in his home. At birth, our brains are relatively undeveloped save a few reflexive instincts. At birth, neurons number a little over 100 billion, but they are not connected up for the most part ("wired together"). At that time, there are ONLY about 2,500 connections per neuron. From the moment of birth up to three years of age, our brains are on a mad mission to form these neural connections. They are ONLY formed by activity (and NON activity, as in neglect) and interaction. That is to say that the day-to-day environment that they are in "wires up" the brain.
By age 3, there are 15,000 connections per neuron, or about 1,000 trillion total. But this is an over abundance. The brain does this to ensure that it is *first* making all the connections it will need *to survive* in its environment (once we survive, only then will we need higher functions). The area of the brain where these connections are rapidly being formed is the limbic system. Because it's our "survival" center, it is of course the area of the brain responsible for our "fight or flight" response (danger evaluation), our instincts (facial expression interpretation...friend or foe, or sometimes friend, sometimes not), emotional memory, etc.
When the brain feels it has all of the necessary connections (is fully programmed to at least survive), the brain starts pruning the connections. It keeps connections that were used often (for better or worse), and rids itself of the ones that were not used often, so that the ones that were used often can strengthen and "firm up."
At 2 & 3 yrs of age, you don't have a firm grasp on what "lying" or "honesty" really is. What your brain learns, or not, is if it can RELY on other people to provide what it needs to survive. Or, does it have to devise ways to trick others into getting or taking what it needs. The brain learns if this is a world where you could be attacked at random (so that you're brain better on constant alert...not so focused on a task that it can't react...i.e. ADD or ADHD, which is often co-morbid with a couple of personality disorders), and so it goes.
The development of the limbic system is by-and-large completed at this point never to be re-developed. The brain goes on to developing higher functions (language skills, reasoning, etc.). Those "skills" and other functions, like sight, also have these "windows of opportunity" that close if you do not learn them by a certain age.
So for pathological liars then, yes, they "learned" that lying was okay, but, perhaps, again, not because they were expressly lied to in the home, but because that was one of the strategies their brain learned in order to survive in their environment. For example, they could not get comforted (protection) by Mom or Dad when they were simply crying because they skinned fell and bumped their toe, so they said they hit their head too. That got Mom's attention, who only then picked up junior and rubbed his head...
That, of course, is a simplified picture. And the mild example above would be pruned away if Mom was just having a bad hair day & normally responded to Junior in a concerned & caring manner. But at the other end of the spectrum is extreme neglect, like the babies in Romanian & Chinese orphanages that just stopped crying when they were hungry because it got them nothing. If the extreme neglect continues, they'll begin banging their heads for stimulation (these were normal babies at birth and up until orphaned, mind you).
Somewhere in between these examples are children that somewhat regularly or unpredictably neglected and/or emotionally abused. Their brains learn to respond with whatever tricks work to get them by (and high, or at least some feeling...that's the head banging, or later the drugs, or the high that psychopaths get from having dominion over another human being's life).
I've taken to looking at family pictures, if they are available, for clues into childhoods of dysfunctional people. There is a couple of pictures of PVS & JVS together that look odd to me. For example there is one where JVS is a teen & the family is around a dinner table. JVS has one arm around PVS and the other hand touching/underneath his dad's hand and JVS also leaned his head over to touch his dad's head. PVS is not reciprocating in his body language at all. Normally, a teenage boy would not be all over his dad like that, unless he was just goofing. But that's not what was going on in this photo. The picture seems to suggest a relationship that is not healthy (e.g. a JVS enmeshed relationship or a wanna-be relationship, not a healthy love-respect relationship). Another photo on a couch portrays a similar image of JVS feigning/wanting a loving relationship with PVS while PVS is just looking at the camera with his hands in his lap.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/popup?id=1586267
Another oddity is, perhaps, that I've noticed in listening to dsyfunctional people (i.e. criminals or the mentally ill) rather than use the term "I was afraid", they often use the term "I was in fear," as if they were *in a place,* not experiencing an emotion. Some day I'm going to delve into that further as I don't have the time in my life now, but it's quite interesting, especially if there is something to it.
