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Liars do not look down or look to the left. They do not shift from side to side. They don’t fidget. Actually, liars often hold themselves still, restraining their movements so that they appear truthful. And liars don’t get nervous, because they’re sure you believe them. (In comparison, shy, truth-telling introverts often get anxious during a confrontation and thus mistakenly get accused of lying.)
The University of Portsmouth’s Dr. Alvert Vrij has studied videotapes of police interrogations of murder and rape suspects. His team found scant differences between truth-tellers and liars. The liars blinked a little less; they moved their arms a little less; and they paused a little more before answering. That was about it.
University of California San Francisco’s Paul Ekman has become famous (thanks to the Fox drama Lie to Me) with his method of identifying “microexpressions.” Microexpressions are involuntary facial expressions and gestures, subconscious revelations of emotion occurring in fractions of a second. However Ekman freely admits: “There is no perfect, foolproof way to catch liars, and I bet [there] never will be.” And microexpressions aren’t something everyone can use to catch a liar: Ekman’s system requires extensive training and experience.
Experience, however, can have its own drawbacks.
In one study, Talwar had police officers come into the lab. During their years on the job, the officers developed a list of “sure-fire” behaviors to watch for. But it turned out that the officers had it exactly backwards. The behaviors they were looking for meant that they identified truth- tellers as liars, and they said liars were telling the truth.
Other studies have come up with similar results. In lab tests, FBI agents are better than average at identifying liars, but the longer they are in the field, the worse at it they become.
German scholars have pioneered Criteria Based Content Analysis (CBCA). Armed with a 19-point list of identifiers, analysts ask if the story was incoherent or disorganized. They count the number of details, how frequently the storyteller self-corrected wrong facts, or admitted not knowing something about his own story.
According to CBCA proponents, liars tell stories in chronological order to keep the facts straight. They rarely correct a misstatement, and they’re less willing to say, “I don’t know.” Some scholars using CBCA can accurately predict lying as high as 78 percent of the time. But that’s nowhere near perfect, and it’s not a method easily used in real-time conversation.
Another intriguing lie-detection test is Reality Monitoring. The idea behind Reality Monitoring is that a truth-teller will, without prompting, relay spatial and sensory details. They won’t just say where the man stood in the room: they’ll include if the man was near or far from the window, how the room smelled, the sudden bang of door slamming. Liars are creating a story intended to make sense, so they rely on logic to supply the details. For example, a truth-teller might say, “I remember he had an umbrella, because it was dripping on the floor,” while the liar would say, “Well, he must have had an umbrella with him because it rained earlier.” The liar’s story is based in a rational inference, compared to the truth-teller’s sensation. Reality Monitoring, like CBCA, has shown some surprising success.
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