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How can you tell if someone is lying?

• Shoop 6y ago
  Archived version: https://archive.is/9d6iG https://archive.is/9d6iG
• jvanderbot 6y ago
  I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies, the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.
  • routerl 6y ago
    I'll also recommend the actual talking to strangers meetups, though I assume they're on hold due to plague.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    Can you give more info on that podcast? I'm finding a bunch with that name.
    • GavinMcG 6y ago
      It's a book, by Malcolm Gladwell. The comment said the audiobook is like a good podcast.
      • Robin_Message 6y ago
        If it's a book by Malcolm Gladwell, I can't anti-recommend it enough. All of the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read have been tripe. Unless he has radically improved his writing and grasp of nuance in the last decade (and published retractions of his earlier books), his books are dangerous anti-knowledge which will make you feel smarter but actually be dumber. Gladwell takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising. Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right.
        • doublejay1999 6y ago
          Well, I'm pleased to read this. I say that as someone who fell for the schtick, and he made a couple of sales out of me. He tells a decent story, and you feel like you've learn something after reading him. Scratch below the surface, and it turns out you haven't.
          • randycupertino 6y ago
            Ahh! Thank you for finally articulating what has always bugged me so much about his books. I am reading along thinking, "yeah, yeah, this makes sense" and then realizing later that it actually had no depth.
            • flycaliguy 6y ago
              This is boiler plate Gladwell critique and has been part of his reputation for a long time. Ironically I think we are due for a contrarian shift back to him being brilliant.
            • quesera 6y ago
              I like the term "insight porn" to describe that feeling.
            • selimthegrim 6y ago
              Igon value. Enough said.
        • lordnacho 6y ago
          Someone here used this brilliant phrase: "Insight Porn"
        • frereubu 6y ago
          When studying sculpture a tutor talked to me about people making “things that look like art”, which really stuck with me - they made objects that mimicked what they thought art should be like, but had a kind of conceptual hollowness. I think Malcolm Gladwell is similar in that he produces content that has the appearance of science, but once you start digging it doesn’t hold up. A bit like a version of “truthiness”, except that in his case it’s “scienciness”.
  • blablabla123 6y ago
    Yeah I need to check it out. I think it's also that people (me included) are deeply fascinated by the ability the read other people and what they think.
• mettamage 6y ago
  Two thoughts: 1) If law enforcement ever has the time, they might want to play Maffia or Werewolf. Playing those games enough makes you realize how idiosyncratic lying can be. 2) I'm glad to know that my lecture on lying when I studied psychology basically had the same conclusions as this article.
  • thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Playing those games enough makes you realize how idiosyncratic lying can be. In my view this is just one more error springing from the root error of turning "a jury of your peers" into "a jury of random strangers". One point of being judged by a jury of your peers is that they are familiar with the types of things you're likely to do. But another is that your peers are familiar with the ways in which you're likely to react to things.
    • edmundsauto 6y ago
      People are practiced at telling lies that their peers believe. Random strangers are better at being skeptical because they are not empathetic about the excuses that are necessary to smooth out an explanation.
      • greggman3 6y ago
        Are random strangers better? The stereotype is they just based on looks and mannerisms. Dark skin + sweats = guilty. etc...
        • edmundsauto 6y ago
          No, I think everyone is probably equally terrible at detecting lies. Except for the few people who have actually been tested and shown to be good at it. Any other narrative is just a story - we're all pretty bad at guessing each others intentions.
  • easton 6y ago
    Among Us is the most recent version of those games, and it made me realize how good my friends were at gaslighting me.
• jchook 6y ago
  If you liked this you might like Embassytown
  • zeroonetwothree 6y ago
    Great suggestion. It’s very underrated
  • selimthegrim 6y ago
    Seconding, one of my top 5 SF reads.
• aidenn0 6y ago
  Any time I talk to someone about this evidence it's always "yeah, most people suck at telling liars, but I'm good at it." Lake Wobegon effect for people reading.
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    Any time I read about spotting liars I thought "man, I don't know how other people do it, but I suck at detecting lies". I mostly think this because every time someone on TV insists they're innocent, I believe them, and then they turn out to be guilty.
    • sdf435t3 6y ago
      Why do you choose to "believe" or not to "believe" an actor based off of what you know to be a performance?
      • DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I think that is the joke.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        Not actors, actual criminals from the news.
  • sushisource 6y ago
    I think people probably immediately think about how they react to their spouse or other very close relationships, and I suspect (haven't looked it up) that people are actually pretty good at detecting lies in those situations because we have so much experience with how that person acts. Detecting the lies of strangers? Yeah... good luck.
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • dwaltrip 6y ago
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Most policemen aren't really learning state of the art stuff. It's institutional knowledge passed down over time. So they're likely to be far behind the truth. They likely usually don't have the tools necessary¹ to even understand these studies since they are not taught how. This manifests in hard to prove stuff like this, but also obviously in things like when facial recognition or shot spotter tech is used. Scientists and engineers comprehend the limitations of these tools, but the users here are similar to prehistoric man before the monolith. The tools are magic to them and they rely on them like they are magical truths. This isn't particularly changeable. So for those who build for these users, it's important to guide them to the right truths and express the right uncertainties. ¹ After all, even the most basic adversarial analysis would be that people are aware of the "eyes averted" nonsense and would subsequently compensate. As a matter of fact, almost anyone who believes in this stuff also believes they can dodge detection because they know these secret truths that everyone knows.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• seibelj 6y ago
  The only way to lie effectively (if you are committed to lying, which IMO is not a good longterm strategy) is to commit to the lie 100% and then believe it yourself. For example, if you want to lie about where you were, you have to believe yourself that you were there. If you consciously think you are lying, it won’t work. It’s like forming a new truth and then fully accepting that reality. Many years ago I worked at a Dominos pizza with a pathological liar. It was so obvious everything he said was false, and he couldn’t stop himself from lying about literally everything. That is not effective lying. Effective lying is believable.
  • tasty_freeze 6y ago
    I worked with a pathological liar for about a year. We didn't have day to day interactions, but he was always eager for an audience and if I had time I'd humor him. My goal was to let him spin his yarn and wait for him to contradict himself in some way. Rather than directly going a "gotcha" I'd act sincerely confused, "Oh, you just said you met him yesterday, but earlier you said you met that person months ago. I must be misunderstanding." Then I'd just enjoy how effortlessly he would create a new fabrication to cover up the gap in his story. I guess practice makes perfect, or at least better. He was incredibly bold. Once he told me about spending Thanksgiving with a coworker ... and that coworker was in his cube immediately adjacent to mine. After the BS artist left I asked the guy in the next cube if her heard that ... nope, he was wearing his headphones. When I relayed the story, he said nope, he was more likely to shoot the BS artist than invite him over for a meal. He ended up getting fired because he was taking time off work to attend classes at Stanford. After a few months of this someone in HR checked with Stanford and they said they had no record of a student by that name. LA few weeks after getting fired, HR received a call from another company checking references on one of our former employees, Dr. <bs artist surname>.
• themgt 6y ago
  This was good, and I mostly agree that using verbal strategies that amount to digging into/reviewing the details of what a person is claiming is the best way to detect liars. The TSA thing at the end seems like a bit of a derail though: But, Mann says, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time. I don't doubt the TSA "behavioral detection" is extremely ineffective, but presumably TSA is mostly leaning on other means to detect dangers and failure to detect weapons is more on the xray/backscatter scanners. It doesn't strike me as realistic for TSA to use verbal techniques like asking each passenger to sketch out his travel story to detect if he's lying about having a gun. One interesting difference it raises is lying about the past/experienced events vs. lying about future intentions. Their techniques seem mostly geared towards differentiating between a person accurately recalling an event from memory vs reciting a fabricated version of their memory/actions. It makes sense this would be helpful for police interrogating a suspect, but it's not intuitively obvious the underlying idea maps to detecting someone lying about their intended future actions.
  • airstrike 6y ago
    IIRC their 95% failure includes failing to spot explosives and the like in their scanners
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      Here’s a nice article about their internal tests that failed 95% of the time: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-homeland-security_n_7485558 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-ho... > In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back during a follow-on pat down. That doesn’t inspire much confidence.
      • 6y ago
• Leary 6y ago
  Just think of it as like a GAN neural network. The liar and the discriminator continue to evolve in an arms race. I, as an average discriminator can probably tell the bad liars but could be fooled by the good ones.
  • notsuoh 6y ago
    I read the article. It sounds more like practically everyone is stuck in a steady state of believing the same "tells" like fidgeting, averting gaze, and stuttering they have been told forever, and those things don't work. That's not really like a GAN at all. Additionally what you say about being able to spot the average liar, as an average person, is contrary to the article. I would encourage you to read the article more carefully to distill the main points.
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    That's not how GANs work.
• parsimo2010 6y ago
  Most of us can’t reliably tell when a romantic interest is actively signaling their mutual interest. If we can’t get cooperative activities right, most of us don’t have a chance to spot a liar through nonverbal cues. The fact is that random effects are huge when dealing with people. Is that person you’re interrogating not showing emotion because they’re a psychopath, or because they were taught not to display emotion? Is someone not looking a cop in the eye because they are lying, or because staring someone in the eye is perceived as defiance in many cultures and they don’t want to anger the cop? We’ll probably never be perfectly accurate at spotting lies. A bunch of biometric measurements might help, but current polygraph techniques can allegedly be beaten with training. If trained polygraph techs with special equipment can be beat I don’t know what rules of thumb we’re ever going to give to the general public that will work. If you know someone really well, you might have a decent chance of knowing when they are acting unusual. Such is the case with parents and teenagers, but suspicion often gets the best of the parents and they misinterpret the cues that they spotted. A good method would seem to be to catch someone on a logical contradiction, but that has issues when someone is under emotional distress. And emotional distress tends to appear often when someone is innocent but is afraid the evidence points towards them. The family cat may have knocked over Mom’s favorite vase, but the child is less interested in the truth and more interested in avoiding a spanking- so they embellish whatever story they had (in a misguided attempt to make it more believable), which introduces contradictions that the mom notices. The kid technically lied with the embellishments but was innocent of breaking a vase, and gets spanked when they didn’t deserve it. Then imagine the kid’s emotional distress being even higher the next time something happens. I’m sure that there are a lot of learned people out there that study lying, but I agree with the article’s main theme that most of us can’t reliably tell when our why someone is lying, and we’re overconfident in our abilities.
  • clouddrover 6y ago
    > current polygraph techniques can allegedly be beaten with training No training is needed because polygraphs don't work. Polygraph testing is about as worthwhile as astrology: https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph https://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/polygraph/ https://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/polygraph/ And inadmissible in court in many places: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MurUEJL/2000/6.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MurUEJL/2000/6.html > if trained polygraph techs with special equipment There are no trained polygraph techs. They are, at best, con artists.
• withinboredom 6y ago
  I find it interesting that the TSA uses these behaviors but their own army’s interrogation school[1] tells their students not to use them. 1. FM 2-22.3 (section 9-6)
  • arbitrage 6y ago
    The TSA is security theater. They don't accomplish anything statistically significant. The TSA is designed to make citizens of the United States feel better about their absurdly outsized risk of dying in a plane highjacking compared to literally every other civilised country on the planet. Also, it's a huge cash-funnel for the plutocracy. Some people make an enormous amount of money selling this lie.
    • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      filed under: Things so true they're nearly physics.
• roenxi 6y ago
  The article seems to have avoided mentioning the easy way of detecting a lie - go and collect some evidence then compare it to what the person is saying. Incentives count as weak evidence for detecting lies. While not foolproof, it is much more effective than looking for verbal cues. Detecting lies by assessing someone's demeanour is a symptom. The average person seem to have this unshakeable belief that they are psychic and can deduce other people's thoughts. They can't.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    > the easy way of detecting a lie The problem is that is not easy. Lies can be generated easily. Disproving them requires probably 20x the time.
  • dataflow 6y ago
    > go and collect some evidence then compare it to what the person is saying It's so much easier said than done though. Think about an example that might come up in daily life. Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their schedule just changed. How can you possibly tell? Either you have to do it repeatedly and look at it statistically, or go prying around or asking other people to vouch for their story, or you have to ask them directly. Are you willing to do that? Especially if it happens multiple times? What if they in fact didn't lie, but also feel it's an invasion of their privacy to have to give a compelling explanation of what happened? Or what if they did lie, but only due to circumstances beyond your imagination where you might have lied, too? Are you willing to risk your relationship with that person to make a determination?
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      > Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their schedule just changed. Maybe they were just busy with the thing you spotted them doing? I’ve been “caught” a zillion times doing a thing by myself because I was booked on my own calendar and didn’t have time for anyone else
• jmcgough 6y ago
  I played a ton of Among Us in 2020, which is a game where you have to figure out which of your friends are lying. I quickly learned that going off "well they're acting pretty guilty" was an easy way to lose. A friend of mine would immediately jump to accuse me whenever I cast suspicion on them, even if they were innocent. Way better to rely on actual evidence and not hunches, even more so when it comes to giving someone a prison sentence.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • Natsu 6y ago
    I did the same, though there are weird people who lie for no reason and screw over the team, too, and sometimes you catch those idiots in a provable lie. The best way to catch liars is to know things they don't know and trap them with that. In Among Us, it could be as simple as two people saw each other do a visual task (one that proves they're not an impostor) then have someone accuse the wrong person, or worse, be the only person that wasn't cleared that's left.
  • dllthomas 6y ago
    One Night Ultimate Werewolf has the additional wrinkle that initially most (or all) players don't even know whether they should be lying or not.
  • IIAOPSW 6y ago
    For me the best game for this is Diplomacy.
  • gizmo686 6y ago
    There is something of a meta-game there that doesn't exist in "real" cases like criminal investigations. Since everyone knows that they will be guilty some of the time, a reasonably strategy is to act guilty all of the time.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      Except this comes in in real life all the time: "you don't need a lawyer here, you're not guilty..." - yes you do. You always need a lawyer. You always should plead the 5th if it applies. No, you should never be talking to law enforcement without a lawyer. No you should not let law enforcement "take a look around" without a warrant. Real life is full of things you absolutely should do which are sold up and down through media as "looking guilty".
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  "The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time -- and then shut up." -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • seppin 6y ago
    Two ways to lie, say something false or only give 1/2 of the story.
    • tim333 6y ago
      A third is to come out with a lot of nonsense all the time so people don't really differentiate the important lies. I've noticed that technique in certain well known politicians.
      • seppin 6y ago
        That's more disinformation (saying something known to be false to destroy the ability to have a conversation) than misinformation (a lie or a simple mistake).
  • airhead969 6y ago
    Yes, the best lies are based mostly in truth with a key substitution. And, it is a novice's mistake to keep babbling. The best liars are the ones who must do so their entire lives in order to survive. To be honest, I do the opposite: I intentionally play with random people by telling them truths in a manner that comes across as lying.
• mxcrossb 6y ago
  > One person was not upset enough. The other was too upset. This immediately made me think of Camus’s The Stranger, though maybe it’s an overreaction to bring existentialism into the conversation!
• plasma 6y ago
  A great TED talk video about trying to spot kids lying https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6diqpGKOvic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6diqpGKOvic
• alexpc201 6y ago
  I recall reading about a patient with split-brain (severed corpus callosum) could tell when people were lying. It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie.
  • carapace 6y ago
    > It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie. Yes. Not being able to detect lies is a social construction, part of culture. (And so the results reported in TFA are technically useless because everyone involved is operating as part of the unconscious "conspiracy" and so would naturally "discover" that it's hard to detect lies.) You can tap into this with hypnosis, but it's unpleasant, like being an alien. Imagine being the only person in the room that can tell when someone, anyone, is lying. It would be pretty creepy, eh? Like Twilight Zone creepy. People would shun you. You'd have to hide the ability, eh? And so we come full circle: we all can tell but we're taught not to as children.
    • wnoise 6y ago
      If we have to be taught not to recognize lies, then why is it so easy to lie to young children?
      • carapace 6y ago
        Seems kind of obvious, eh? When they're really young their minds are not yet formed. And children are biased to trust their parents and adults in general.
• deleted 6y ago
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• wespiser_2018 6y ago
  I think there are three decent ways to tell if someone is lying: the statement itself (did it contain self-contradictions), the context around the statement (was their hand in the cookie jar), and credibility (does the person have a history of lying). You can use each of these questions to sway your belief in the truth of a statement, but nothing, short of corroborating facts at hand will give you an absolute assessment. Most of the time you just don't know, and it's a good reminder just how important trust is to a functioning society, and amazing how far some pathological liars can get. Importantly, behavioral queues are often misleading, and a person might be acting nervous for an independent reason, yet register all the behavioral clues of lying.
• dathinab 6y ago
  Yup, many of the "signs someone is lying". Are actually signs someone is uncomfortable/insecure. And while you might be such because you lie, you might also be such without lying and you might not be such when lying.
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > Yup, many of the "signs someone is lying". Are actually signs someone is uncomfortable/insecure. Which might be why LEO are so partial to them. The power to ruin vulnerable people is irresistible to some folks.
• foobiekr 6y ago
  David Simon's book, Homicide, has an apropos section: """Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little. Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too much, avoids eye contact. Doesn’t blink. Stares.""" ... which (although in a slightly different context) captures the problem of detecting lies in interrogation very well.
  • raducu 6y ago
    I'd like to see some hot-shot detective try to get a random number from 1-1000 out of my head by using those techniques. Yeah, he couldn't.
    • sillysaurusx 6y ago
      You might want to watch this in full before gambling on that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE In summary, you lose the moment you agree to talk.
      • kilroy123 6y ago
        I knew it was going to be that video before I even clicked the link. I agree completely.
        • deleted 6y ago
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      • MrDrDr 6y ago
        Thank you for posting - I found this video fascinating. Made me think about the law in the UK. Interestingly when arrested here we are told : “You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” I’d be interested if anyone has experience of the UK system and if the same strategy of staying silent would be advised in the uk.
• pain_perdu 6y ago
  I recently got to spend some time with Jeff Deskovic (we met while he was on vacation), the exoneree mentioned at the top of the article for having spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He is looking for folks with technical backgrounds to to consult with Deskovic.org which has helped exonerate 9 other wrong-fully convicted persons. If anyone is interested, please contact me at the address in my HN profile!
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  I've had two especially notable experiences with pathological liars, discounting smaller encounters with hucksters and various sales/marketing types (not all, but some, and an absolute showstopper when it occurs). The first was at a part-time job during my days at uni. A new guy had joined the crew, intelligent and affable, but it turned out, simply a pathological lair. We weren't aware of this until ... I forget precisely what had occurred, but apparently lying when filling out bank cheques was among his failings.... The second was a more personal relationship, in which it transpired that I'd been lied to from the very beginning. This person displayed many of the characteristics of borderline / narcissistic personality disorder, and would often become wildly (and increasingly inappropriately) upset under questioning, deflecting or projecting questions and accusations back. I'd had little experience with the behaviour previously and it was exceedingly disconcerting. This essay on diversion tactics covers many of the behaviours I'd experienced in that incident (I'd submitted it to HN a few months back, though there was no traction): https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversion-tactics-highly-manipulative-narcissists-sociopaths-and-psychopaths-use-to-silence-you/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversio... What ultimately broke that case for me was: - Finding several people who'd known something of the person's background, and comparing notes. Inconsistencies immediately started popping up. Score one for the consistency rule of truth determination. Various audit methods rely heavily on these. - Realising I had a trove of communications from the person (legitimately obtained --- they'd given them to me, though some reverse-engineering was required to recover data, both points that held significance in later proceedings). It took some patching together of these to generate a clear picture, which was hampered by the false / incomplete story I'd been told, but the full story eventually was clear. Eventually we were able to pin down the individual under testimony showing the scope of deception and the fact that it was intentional, premeditated, and predated my encounter with the person (I happened to be the sufficiently clueless victim appearing at the right or wrong time, depending on whose viewpoint you take). Many standard bullshit-detection tactics (see several referenced in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...) turn out to apply. Sloppy logic, imprecise language, deflecting questions, various forms of special pleading, turning to accusations against the questioner when the situation gets too heated, etc., vagueness as to facts, and inconsistencies within the story (these can require close listening) were ultimately the tells. Even once presented, there was a lot of work left to uncover the actual truth. In more mundane dealings, what I find is that fairly sensitive and alert to unqualified claims, inconsistent actions, or statements at odds with facts of which I'm aware. It's interesting to see just how often this occurs (I'm thinking of examples from an appliance purchase, broadband service calls, and medial services, within the past year or three), and once those occur, I call the person on their bullshit. I've walked away from purchases or services strictly due to such behaviours --- if you cannot be trusted to tell the truth or admit to the limits of your knowledge or understanding on the simple stuff, much as with Van Halen's brown M&Ms, why the hell should I trust you with the complex bits I don't have knowledge of? There's a book by an underappreciated author, Jeremy Cambbell, which I've yet to read though it's premise is fascinating. It's The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood (https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-falsehood/oclc/1064417737 https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false...), and concludes that lying is a universal behaviour. (Campbell's other notable book, the 1982 title Grammatical Man, is about information theory, and was a fascinating introduction to the field for me.)
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  Best liar ever if you want to see how good some people’s poker face can be: Prison escapee convinces cop he is actually a jogger: https://youtu.be/vBrnBmUmVzI https://youtu.be/vBrnBmUmVzI Liars of this type probably have been practicing in real situations where their lies got them something. I think most of us (non nefarious people) don’t have to deal with lies of real significance. I’ve lied at stand-up, and I’m sure people know it. It’s a polite request for dignified forgiveness. The only real lie that can happen in your life is with a spouse/partner, since that is a calamity in relative terms (betrayal). Kids/Teens will lie about a lot of things, but that should be expected (immaturity). Your company has to lie to you (business). If for whatever reason you are dealing with major lies of any other kind, then you are probably dealing with a criminal. So yeah, we should be bad at spotting serious liars since we have no business being around them (e.g your business is crime).
  • bluecalm 6y ago
    The guy isn't dressed like a jogger. Joggers don't usually carry bottles of water either. That's some actual evidence he is unlikely to be a jogger. Instead the policeman is focusing on what the person say.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      It’s not the first time he escaped. Here’s his track record: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lee_McNair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lee_McNair
• surajs 6y ago
  You have the right to be suspicious
• lotophage 6y ago
  I'm surprised that "micro-expressions" and the work of Dr. Paul Ekman weren't mentioned given how hyped it was several years ago (there was even a drama series called "Lie to Me" I believe). Has this all been debunked?
  • rhizome 6y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6158306/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6158306/
• hntrader 6y ago
  We evolved to be effective deceivers, so if there was a systemic and obvious physical tell (looking left = liar) then evolution would try to eliminate it.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Also self deception helps.
    • lazyweb 6y ago
      I often think about that. If I can thoroughly convince myself to believe a factual lie, would classic lie detector devices still work on me?
      • tim333 6y ago
        There was an interesting book on the theme that we've evolved to deceive ourselves especially on moral stuff like my side is good, the others are the bad guys https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology-ebook/dp/B00486U8N6 https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psy...
      • hntrader 6y ago
        Do classic lie detectors work on anyone or is it mostly pseudoscience and theatre?
• Lio 6y ago
  I wonder if there was a reliable method to spot lying if efforts would be made to keep it secret in the same way that broken ciphers are.
  • raducu 6y ago
    A non-invasive lie detection method would completely change our society, whoever has it, keeps it to themselves.
• yawaworht1978 6y ago
  If it is a politician, you will know as soon their lips are moving /s On a serious note, there is no way to know on a sophisticated liar, and there are 1000 tell tales on a bad liar.
  • raducu 6y ago
    Immagine there was a non invasive method to detect lies. Presidential debates would be interesting. If we still had such debates or presidential elections after that :)
  • fargle 6y ago
    Very true. And sadly this works for all those amateur politicians we encounter every day too.
• airhead969 6y ago
  It's always about probing for consistency, congruence, and naturalness. You're never going to be able to spot every lie every time, only individual lies. For example, most women and a few men are able to act improv, that is lie fluidly without hesitation. It's only if you know directly what they're saying isn't true or after asking deeper questions that it becomes apparent if they don't know what they're talking about or begin to contradict themselves. As my grandmother used to say: "One lie leads to another. Tell the truth because lying is too much work." I would also add that getting caught lying severely destroys trust and so isn't conducive to society either.
• sriku 6y ago
  "As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they don’t meet academic standards of scientific evidence." What does that even mean? ... like there is a separate standard of evidence and there is a "we can get by without evidence" standard of evidence?
  • graeme 6y ago
    It can mean no one has done a study of a thing or existing studies are poor. I don’t know if that’s what the official means, but all kinds of common sense things never end up being studied because they’re commonly believed to be true. Edit: having read the article more closely, however, it sounds like the official may be referring to things scientists believe they have debunked.
  • runawaybottle 6y ago
    Sounds like code for ‘profiling’ post 9/11, where it took very little due diligence to ship someone off to Guantanamo or pick someone out at an airport. Conjecture based on the department in question, DHS literally exists because of Islamic terrorists. I’ll add that I think profiling is a necessary evil in tense situations, and terrible as a blanket policy (racial profiling en masse).
  • doubleunplussed 6y ago
    It's pretty obvious that there are useful truths that don't yet meet rigorous scientific standards of evidence. Like masks being useful in a pandemic or parachutes working. Non-serious "randomised trials" have been done with parachutes, and found no measurable effect - because for safety reasons the participants only jumped from an altitude of 2 metres or something. In sports medicine there are loads of things where the anecdotal evidence is fairly strong and yet there is no rigorous evidence in favour of something. Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your heels. Sometimes these things are hard to study, or simply haven't been studied yet. In those cases it's OK to fall back on anecdotal evidence, particularly when you don't have reason to believe the evidence is biased (like it would be if someone was trying to sell you a product or an ideology). Some of these things I'm sure will turn out to not be real results, if and when "proper" science gets around to studying them. But in the meantime the anecdotal, uncodified folk knowledge is better than useless. When folk knowledge is "debunked" by science I sometimes still don't rule out that it might be true, because so much science is simply of too poor quality to be able to properly make any such conclusion. See the replication crisis. I'm a scientist with nothing but respect for the scientific method itself, but "has this been scientifically proven" can be a really weak way to determine what's true and what's not in many cases. In those cases you kind of have to do your own reasoning with the data you have, anecdotal or otherwise, and try to get closest to the truth that you can. Which I think can be a valuable process in practice that shouldn't be discarded merely because it's not "proper" science. Scientists are also flawed and sometimes publish results in a biased way to conform to an ideology. For example, I expect folk beliefs about gender differences to be somewhat accurate (not perfect), and for the official science to be hopelessly muddled.
• hbarka 6y ago
  Then there’s the cousin of lying. Bullshitting. It is outright practiced at work and job interviews. Elon Musk at one time was interviewed on how he spots it.
  • bobmaxup 6y ago
    Isn't Elon Musk a great bullshitter himself?
    • fluxinflex 6y ago
      Takes one to know one, perhaps that's how Elon Musk does it.
      • bobmaxup 6y ago
        Or his comments on detecting bullshit are bullshit?
• hotz 6y ago
  It's quite easy, if it's got two legs and the ability to speak... Expect to hear lies.
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    Amusingly, dogs can lie too. I noticed this recently.
• oftenwrong 6y ago
  This video is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BemHqUqcpI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BemHqUqcpI8 It's about interrogation, and the common notion that a guilt can be inferred by the suspect's behaviour. It shows two example interrogations of innocent suspects, each displaying completely different behaviour.
• derryrover 6y ago
  Or could it be that: It is actually possible to spot a lie, but it depends heavily on the skill of the liar vs interrogator: did they have experience with a previous lie that was similar? People that are good at lying will specialize in bluffing professions (smuggler, conman, undercover, sales, politics, gambling) and people good at spotting lies will specialize in interrogative jobs (police, inspection, acquiring business, teacher, journalist, border control). This is an arms race where specific interrogators may specialize in specific liars or specific type of lies. The problem appears when there is a mismatch between the interrogator vs the suspect or if the interrogator is just incompetent. Or maybe the suspect is just a awkward person, or has a guilty rest face. Yes spotting a lie is by far not 100% correct. To now conclude that spotting lies never works is basically claiming the whole range of aforementioned professions may just as well be done by inexperienced people, so why would one then ever hire a experienced journalist or interrogator?
• tim333 6y ago
  I relieved in a way that it's hard or impossible to tell based on the kind of stuff in the article as I've always been a bit rubbish at that and kind of assumed it was just me. Sometimes a practical way to tell if people are lying is observe them when they don't think you are looking or don't think it matters.
• eric4smith 6y ago
  They open their mouths. No seriously, we all, mostly lie. Stop and think about it for a second. It could be just a simple thing to make an otherwise humdrum experience seem interesting. No harm no foul. But there it is, its a lie. Heck, even my dog lies. He overplays the negative to get sympathy... and more food and petting. Children lie. A lot. If you have a child, you know what I mean. So yea, just open your mouth. That's how you can tell.
  • phkahler 6y ago
    >> They open their mouths. No seriously, we all, mostly lie. Stop and think about it for a second. I disagree. That's one of the oldest falsehoods in psychology. Sure, there are some people who lie all the time, but that's more of a symptom than a universal behavior.
  • arbitrage 6y ago
    > even my dog lies. [...] Children lie. A lot. If you have a child, you know what I mean. This really sold it to me right here.
• hutrdvnj 6y ago
  In short, you can't.
  • jstummbillig 6y ago
    Well, actually, according to the article, you can.
    • hutrdvnj 6y ago
      True, but these claims do not survive a scientific review.
      • arbitrage 6y ago
        I prefer to trust the science. Haven't seen a review about this specific article we are discussing yet.
        • hutrdvnj 6y ago
          Would be interesting though if we had a scientific way to tell if someone is lying. Would make life easier for courts.
• mihaaly 6y ago
  People are lying when they make false statements deliberately with the intention to deceive. I guess to know if someone is lying we need: - to know the facts - if the person knows the facts - and the intentions of the person all the rest is just guesswork, woodoo. (and yes, many times we will not know if someone is lying or not. But listening to what a person says and confirming it from independent sources could help a lot in the third of the discovery)
• arbitrage 6y ago
  Liars and abusers are emotionally invested in what they're trying to convince you of. They try to sell you their story. That's the best common theme I've found in reality. If someone is trying to convince you to believe them, they don't have your interests as their primary concern. It's all about them.
• elygre 6y ago
  This is a solved problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDc_5zpBj7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDc_5zpBj7s
• sloshnmosh 6y ago
  This is just silly pseudoscience, new-age BS if you ask me. The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.
  • meiraleal 6y ago
    > The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull. The only proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to get evidence.
    • tarruda 6y ago
      > The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull. Sarcasm?
    • swayvil 6y ago
      I question your skull-bulges, sir.
    • johncearls 6y ago
      Of course you’d say that, you have the brainpan of stage coach tilter.
  • superasn 6y ago
    And the rabbit hole only goes deeper! "Craniometrists virtually without exception dismissed Phrenology as crackpot science while promulgating an alternative nonsense of their own. Craniometry focused on more precise and comprehensive measurements of volume, shape, and structure of the head and brain but in pursuit, it must be said, of equally preposterous conclusions. (Bill Bryson)" It's so funny how these pseudosciences diss each other and think the other one is nonsense :)
  • m463 6y ago
    Well, or if they have neatly trimmed facial hair or wear dark clothing.
• williesleg 6y ago
  They're chinese or indian?
• michael_vo 6y ago
  This seems to be one specific category of lying detection (new training data with no prior training). This article doesn't seem to discuss machine learning techniques. For example what if we could have someone talk about "nothing" for x hours for a training set, then interrogate them. That's essentially what lie detection machines do when they ask a series of baseline questions. But heart rate is the only input feature they use. We could use word frequency, spoken word speed, sentence patterns, and all the rich feature sets of ML. For those who have watched the popularity of deception games like Among Us, Secret Hitler, Werewolf, etc, there are verbal and non-verbal cues we all use. And playing with the same players iteratively yields a lot of meta sussing. For example: "You sound guilty because you're usually calm when you're guilty and accused of being imposter. Right now you're excitedly defending yourself"
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tocoder 6y ago
  I guess my question is, "why would you like to know?" Of course, there are times when knowing important information can be the difference between helping people and harming people. Otherwise, I think there are other ways to either ascertain the truth or even find peace in not knowing. I take some solace in being okay with not knowing some things.
• johnsmith4739 6y ago
  >> Psychologists have long known how hard it is to spot a liar. Absolutely this. Lying is a loose concept. Is it lying if I believe it is true? Is it lying if it's just an omission of truth? You can spot nervousness, you can spot defiance. I work in a field where people deceive almost 80% of the time, and less than 1 in 10 where caught. The way we approach this is by flanking. Using falsifiable questions the subject cannot determine your intentions, therefore is much more likely to tell the truth (less cognitive taxing).
  • paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what field is that?
    • johnsmith4739 6y ago
      Recruiting
  • BurningFrog 6y ago
    Our brains are complex things, with many independent actors. There are pragmatic parts that determine what actions would best serve your interest. These parts mostly make the decisions. There are other "press secretary" parts that come up with good sounding motivations for these decisions. You will believe those reasons, and state them with conviction. You may then be lying, if the press secretary lied to "you", but you don't consciously know that. Apparently evolution has favored that model, and here we are. I learned this reading "The Elephant in the Brain" (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...)
  • r0rshrk 6y ago
    Is the field law?
    • johnsmith4739 6y ago
      Recruiting - behavioural interviews to be precise - and you're pretty close, I work with methodologies developed by law enforcement/intelligence as well as psychotherapy.
• effnorwood 6y ago
  they
• effnorwood 6y ago
  They publish an article in the atlantic.com
• adrianmonk 6y ago
  > U.K. police, who regularly use sketching interviews and work with psychology researchers as part of the nation’s switch to non-guilt-assumptive questioning, which officially replaced accusation-style interrogations in the 1980s and 1990s after scandals involving wrongful conviction and abuse. I wonder if this explains a trope I notice in British detective TV shows but not in American ones. Writers have the fictional detectives speculatively throwing around accusations whenever they have a vaguely plausible guess as to what might have happened. Apparently in the hopes that it will scare the accused into confessing right then and there. Ten minutes into the investigation, and based on no evidence, the detective will say something like, "You were in love with your best friend's husband, weren't you? You wanted him for yourself, and jealousy is the reason that you killed her, isn't it?" And the just-accused person will reply, "Hardly. It's well known among all of us that I felt he was a terrible husband and encouraged her to leave him." And then both will continue on as if all that was no big deal and you can't fault the detective for asking. Was this once a real technique, and now there's a cultural perception of it still lingering? I'm sure fictional portrayals are inaccurate everywhere, but this particular thing seems unique to British shows.
  • jopsen 6y ago
    I don't think we should confuse a technique for drama in TV with reality. If British detective shows were realistic, Midsummer county would be dangerous murder hotspot, hehe
• hikerclimb 6y ago
  It’s impossible...
• SMAAART 6y ago
  You can't. When I was younger I had both severe case of Anxiety and I had mastered the art of covering it up very well. Too many times I have been accused of things I didn't do or lying because of my counterintuitive behaviors.
• wildermuthn 6y ago
  A lie-detector that works is a trillion-dollar business. A great sci-fi novel that explores the implications of an accurate lie-detector is "The Truth Machine". I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, and have concluded that the way to tackle this problem is indirectly. The problem with "truth" is that it is subjective. There is a better metric to judge: "false-confidence". There is a subtle but distinct difference between a lie and false-confidence. A lie is subjective, being a mismatch between what I believe and what is true. But false-confidence is objective, in that what I believe (regardless of the truth of what I believe) may not match what I assert. We can never know, objectively, if a person is speaking the truth. But we can know, objectively, if a person is speaking with false-confidence. This might seem like semantics, but focusing on "false-confidence" rather than "truth" is quite helpful in highlighting the real problem that is being solved: communication.
  • rdiddly 6y ago
    The best liars, like the best actors, actually believe what they're saying though, so I don't think false confidence is the answer.
    • wildermuthn 6y ago
      That's my point, though. A lie-detector tries to do the impossible. A false-confidence assessor only does what it claims to do.
  • lazide 6y ago
    That doesn’t seem like the real problem being solved or highlighted? Communication is a vector here that is surfacing a fundamental competitive force and strategy between actors? Information is power. Knowing something, and that being representative of reality and providing predictive ability related to that thing provides you power in a number of ways (ability to predict and intervene or not depending on desired outcomes being a huge one). Someone presenting you plausibly correct, yet misleading information (a good lie) provides them a major advantage (short term, or long term depending on the situation). It allows them to influence your behavior and actions in a way they can likely predict and influence your ability to predict or react accurately to something. A lie detector (as compared to an objective truth detector) would tell you if you were being manipulated or mislead intentionally. Very different from a ‘do they actually know what they are talking about’ aka truth detector like you are referring to, but a very valuable tool if one existed in a competitive world like the one we exist in.
• dfilppi 6y ago
  I'd settle for knowing when I'm lying to myself.
• xchip 6y ago
  Dr;tl: you can't. 'They found no evidence that people were any better at detecting lies told by criminals or wrongly accused suspects in police investigations than those told by laboratory volunteers.'