How Can We Spot A Liar?

The difficulty of detecting deceit is shown even more starkly when you examine those with a professional interest in catching liars. When it comes right down to it and someone lies, do we just know, like Maura claims she would? These two leading researchers into deception wanted to determine how good, statistically, people are at judging when they’re being told a lie. In other words, we are actually a little worse at figuring out when someone is deceiving us than we would be if we just guessed randomly. The media has fed this perception for decades. More recently, television shows like 24 and Law and Order depict interrogators who can spot a suspect’s lies without fail. Selecting as their subjects members of groups like polygraph administrators, judges, psychiatrists, and police officers, they sought to test people, in the words of their study, who have a specialized interest, and presumably more experience, in detecting deceit. The researchers showed these professionals a series of short video clips. Each clip featured the face of a young woman as she described her reaction to a film she was watching. Sometimes the woman was watching a soothing nature film, other times a gruesome horror movie. Regardless, she talked about how enjoyable it was to see scenes of nature. Could the police officers and the rest tell the difference between a clip of a woman honestly describing her reactions and a clip of a woman lying about them? In other words, they were not very good at all. The implications of Ekman’s findings to our legal and justice systems, for instance, are serious.

An Ordinary World

Consider the case of Richard Jewell. He immediately notified police and began evacuating the area. The backpack exploded moments later, and Jewell’s quick thinking probably saved scores of lives. It was months before Jewell was formally cleared, and years before the real Olympic bomber was identified. When we realize that even those with specialized interest in identifying deception usually can’t do it right more than half the time, we begin to appreciate the true difficulty the average person has in spotting lies. In Ekman’s experiment, the subjects knew that they were supposed to be on the lookout for liars. Even then, they weren’t very successful in finding them. In our daily lives, no one taps us on the shoulder and says, By the way, one of the people you are about to meet is going to lie to you. It becomes clearer and clearer how James Hogue, a man in his thirties, was able to pose as a college freshman. We are just not very good at knowing when someone is lying to us. This forms the first element of the Liar’s Advantage. Our poor performance at catching lies probably shouldn’t surprise us as much as it does, though.

Tales Of Glory

A few years ago I decided to take up golf. So I went to the local course and rented a club and paid for a bucket of balls. Then I spent the next hour hitting golf ball after golf ball after golf ball off the tee. After every shot I would watch the path of the ball, then adjust my swing accordingly. The fact that I never picked up a golf club again should tell you how much my practice paid off, but my golf game isn’t the issue here. Now let’s go back to lying. Let’s assume that lie detection is a skill like any other. The way you acquire and improve upon a skill is through practice. I wanted to learn to play golf, so I practiced. How, though, does one practice lie detection in ordinary life? So you might suspect that someone is lying to you, but there is virtually no way to find out if your suspicion is correct. It’s as if when I tried to learn to golf, I played in the dead of night. I could take swing after swing after swing, but without seeing where the ball went, I would have no way of knowing how I was doing.

Nine More Lives

With catching a liar, we can make guess after guess after guess about what is true and what is not, but we rarely, if ever, know when we’re right. This forms a significant piece of the Liar’s Advantage. In a sense, liars exploit one of our weaknesses, challenging us to use an ability we often don’t possess. How can we spot a liar? What clues to deceit can we look for? In such works of fiction, the hustler is portrayed as unflappable, glib, always one step ahead of anyone he is trying to con. So why does the media offer these depictions of ultraslick liars? And, more importantly, why do we respond to them? We take for granted that liars usually exhibit some signal that they are lying. And we assume it takes extraordinary poise not to show these signs. Subsequently, anyone who can tell lies without it being written all over his or her face must be worthy of portrayal on the silver screen. They must have the cool befitting a movie star. A person lying will avert his gaze. He’ll shuffle his feet or drum his fingers. Perhaps his face reddens. A particularly big lie, he might even start to sweat. When wewewewewe don’t see these red flags, we often conclude that the person is telling the truth. The most frequent answer was the averted gaze. The idea that liars shift their eyes in the course of deceit is widespread and crosses most borders. Numerous researchers have conducted experiments, and all conclude that a shifted gaze is not a telltale sign of a liar. Yet the stereotype that gaze aversion signals deception remains a powerful one. It is these responses that a polygraph machine measures. He simply would not look me in the face, instead looking off to one side or the other. The first few times I did meet him at such an event and tried to engage him in conversation, he made little eye contact.