Honesty is among the top five characteristics people want in a leader, friend, or lover. From social media to online dating, identifying and coping with lying is a common topic of many conversations. Yet, although we’re skilled at producing lies, we’re terrible at detecting them. Why? Because we’re looking for the wrong signs.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Patrick Couwenberg had impeccable qualifications and impressive achievements. His education included an undergraduate degree in physics, a master’s degree in psychology and a law degree from Loyola University. He earned a Purple Heart in the Vietnam War and secretly served as a CIA operative in Laos in the 1960s. Before serving as a judge he worked for one of the most prestigious law firms in Los Angeles: Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.
Unfortunately, as impressive as his achievements were, none of them were real. When confronted, Judge Couwenberg blamed a condition called pseudologia fantastica, a compulsion to tell stories containing facts interwoven with fantasy often called pathological lying. His excuse didn’t save him from being removed from the bench. His story raises the questions: how can we be so effective at deception, yet so easily deceived? And how can we spot a liar?
For as long as there have been lies, there have been methods of lie detection. Over time, our talents for practising deception have outpaced our detection ability. The origins of our current approaches for lie detection began as early as 300 BCE with the notion that lying produces physical side effects. Past methods of detection used rituals that invoked supernatural aid through sacred signs and totems. However, these techniques relied more on the belief in their effectiveness to condemn the deceitful rather than their ability to separate liars from truth-tellers.
The modern-day version of these techniques is the notorious polygraph, which relies more on the belief in its effectiveness than its actual ability to detect lies. It’s sometimes described as a ‘lie detector’, ‘fear detector’ or even as an ‘emotion detector’. In fact, no reliable signs of deception have ever been identified. Worse, there’s no evidence whatsoever that what the polygraph actually measures – heart rate, blood pressure, sweating and breathing – are linked to whether or not you’re telling the truth. If you want to spot a liar, there are more humble – yet reliable – methods, which rely on people rather than machines.
We’ve all been on the receiving end of a lie. Try to remember a lie that you detected in the past. Recall as much as you can about the situation in which the person lied to you. Describe the event where you were lied to:
Now think about how you found out you were lied to:
Consider your evidence again. Was it based on behaviour or information? If your experience matches forensic research, you probably used evidence like third-party information (e.g. a friend told you about the lie), physical evidence (e.g. a text message or photo), or the liar’s confession. Unlike what you see in the entertainment media, discovering the lie takes time.
On average 4.1% of lies are detected in less than an hour, 20.6% in less than a day, 20.6% in less than a week, 20.6% in less than a month, 15.5% in less than a year and 1.5% more than a year after they were told! Do these results match your experience? If so, you now understand the advantages of using evidence over behaviours to detect deception.
If you want to know how to spot a liar, you need to know how to listen. Unlike telling the truth, telling false stories requires more imagination to describe events that didn’t happen in a style that appears sincere. As a result, stories based on imagined experiences are different from stories based on real experiences. One way to capture the differences between true and false stories is to examine the language people use to tell them.
The specific word choices and grammar often reveal more than the surface content of their story. Take, for example, the case of Susan Smith appearing on television claiming that her two young children were kidnapped at gunpoint. She tearfully pleaded for her children to be returned, telling reporters: “My children wanted me. They needed me. And now I can’t help them.” Her choice of the past tense was strange because, normally, relatives will speak of a missing person in the present tense. The fact that Smith used the past tense in this context suggested that she already viewed her missing children as dead.
But it was a small yet significant contradiction in her story that led to her confession. Smith told police about stopping at a red light on Monarch Mills Road. She said that she saw no other cars on the road. Yet the light turned red, contradicting the fact that the light on Monarch Mills Road was always green and only turned red if it was triggered by a car on the cross street. Since she said there were no other cars on the road, there was no reason for her to come up to a red light. This subtle verbal contradiction eventually led to Smith confessing that she drowned her children by pushing her car into the lake with them buckled securely in the back seat.
So, the best way to spot a liar? Look less and listen more.
Thomas Davis PhD is the author of Forensic Psychology: Fact and Fiction and a Professor of Psychology with over two decades of teaching experience in Forensic Psychology. His research centres around person perception, interviewing methods and false memory. He teaches with the belief that the problems of the future can only be solved by inspiring original applications, fresh connections, and novel ideas. Application is the foundation of his approach.
