Discussion Group Report

"I'd love to give you that pay raise," says your boss, but we're not in a financial position to make that happen right now; maybe next year." Or perhaps your children are fighting again: "He hit me first."

"…a surprising number of our social interactions involve trying to deceive each other--and spotting if we are being deceived," says Raj Persaud in an article with the same name as this present article in www.newscientist.com July 30,2005. Psychologists are starting to get a handle on what it takes to be good deception detector.

Humans are not the only primates to deceive, but with our unique intelligence and language abilities we are the only ones to have made it such a fine art. Whether we are trying to attract a mate or gain wealth or status, lying can be an effective strategy, especially since humans are so bad at detecting deception. Even people whose job it is to detect deception--police officers, FBI agent, therapists, judges, customs officers, etc., perform on average little better than if they had taken a guess. Successions of scientifically well-conducted studies have shown that most of us are not very good at spotting if someone is lying.

However, some people are an exception to the rule. Two psychologists, Paul Eckman of the University of California, San Francisco, and Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of San Francisco located 29 "wizards" of deception detection out of 14,000 people studied. The odds of passing the test by chance were less than 25 in one million. Preliminary analyses of their study confirm some of these researchers' findings: that fleeting facial expressions leaking emotions such as anger or guilt are key indicators of lying. Some of these "micro-expressions may last less than one-fifth of a second. Women often perform better on the average in nonverbal communication tasks, such as gauging people's emotions through their expressions. And a study by Eckman found superior lie-detecting ability in people with damage to the left hemisphere to the brain. These people apparently were forced to rely more on nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions.

Another intriguing finding is that wizards tended to have had difficult childhoods, in which sensitivity to emotional temperature at home could have been useful. Some, for example had alcoholic parents. Others had unusual family backgrounds, such as parents who were immigrants, or mothers with demanding careers at time when this was less common.

An investigation at Montclair State University of women's tested skills at detecting men who were pretending to have appealing attributes--sometimes called "faking good." An example is a man claiming he owned the Ferrari outside, rather than admitting he had borrowed it from a friend for the night. The single women seemed to be better in detecting men who were faking good than those who were in a committed relationship. "Women," says Julian Paul Keenan, leader of the research team, "have a kind of radar for deception in men, which they switch on and off, depending on the context."

Mixing your genes with a man who borrows rather than owns a Ferrari could have serious implications. Becoming pregnant by a deceptive male could have "huge negative consequences," Keenan points out.

His group also investigated what makes a good liar. This and other studies show evidence that people with higher self-awareness, as indicated by self-recognition, self-pronoun use, and self-conscious emotions were better deceivers.

How do you know if someone is lying to you? Bella de Paula of the University of California at Santa Barbara says there can be some tell-tale signs. Contrary to folklore, liars are not more fidgety, nor do they blink more or look less relaxed. Rather they tend to seem more nervous than truth-tellers in other ways. Their voices are pitched higher. And there is an association between lying and larger pupil size, a sign of tension and concentration. Other signs are becoming unusually still; making notably less eye contact with listeners; starting their answers more quickly than truth tellers; if taken by surprise, taking longer to start answering questions and talking less; seeming more negative than truth tellers--more complaining and less cooperative; tending to withhold information, either from guilt or to make it easier to get their stories straight; repeating words and phrases; sounding more discrepant and ambivalent; and telling stories that are less logical. There is a technique called content-based criteria analysis used by forensic scientists to analyze witness statements to work out if they are true or fabricated. True statements are supposed to include more superfluous details, spontaneous self-corrections and speculation about other people's mental states. The truthful witness is also more likely to be self-deprecating and to make comments that go some way toward pardoning the alleged perpetrator

For those who wish to learn more about the subject of this piece, Persaud in his article also explores deception in animals, especially primates, as well as the tricks used by mediums, magicians and illusionists who give the appearance of mind-reading and thought control.