People Lying Sometimes Don't Show Signs Of Nervousness

Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t help but feel that the husband was a dishonest and shifty guy, someone who could not be trusted. I later found out that my colleague’s husband had a deeply rooted social anxiety disorder that led him to dread social situations. His evasion of eye contact signaled only that he felt extreme unease and apprehension when having to carry out conversations with people he didn’t know. The power of the gaze aversion stereotype is so great that even after I learned the true reason behind his behavior, I was still unable to shake the initial suspicion that he was lying to me. And as a psychologist I knew full well that the link between gaze aversion and deceptiveness is a myth! Experts on deception have concluded that there are no physical tics that universally signal that a person is lying. Individual differences in how people lie are strong. To understand how difficult it really is to tell, from someone’s behavior, if he’s lying, consider polygraph machines. Movies like Meet the Parents suggest that if you want to know if someone is telling the truth, all you need to do is hook him up to a polygraph. The suspect’s lies will be recognized by the machine’s instruments, and his deceit will be uncovered. Despite the media myths, though, polygraphs are not actually lie detectors in the strictest sense. They don’t buzz when someone tells a lie or ring pleasantly when someone tells the truth. Instead, the polygraph is predicated on the idea that when people lie, they experience anxiety.

Don't Run Away

Modern polygraphs are far more sophisticated. A polygraph machine is really only a scientific tool for picking up these signals. And this, it turns out, is the problem. Although many studies have concluded that polygraphs work more than 80 percent of the time, a recent report issued by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council questioned the value of much of this research. This is troubling when you consider that polygraphs are used by the police to determine guilt or innocence, and by federal agencies to ferret out moles. Yet cases of polygraph failures abound. If you ran up five flights of stairs and then sat down for a polygraph, everything you said would look like a lie, because you’d be panting, sweaty, and your heart would be pounding. The physical signs of exertion are often the same as the signs for anxiety. Think back to the example of my colleague’s anxious husband. Just because you are showing signs typically associated with lying doesn’t mean you’re lying. This remains the inherent flaw of polygraph machines. Such phenomena make polygraph testing intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results.

Have It Your Way

The report thus acknowledges that people sometimes show signs of nervousness even when they’re telling the truth. By the same token, people lying sometimes don’t show signs of nervousness. We are wrong to assume that everyone who lies feels guilty or anxious about it. Liars can rehearse their fabrications to the point where repeating them becomes second nature, an automatic response that elicits no particular physical arousal. Further, we have all known people who lie to themselves as well as to us. These individuals can embrace a lie so fully that it seems to supplant the truth even in their own minds. And as Ames showed, even if 80 percent of liars exhibit signs of nervousness, the detection gaps remain extremely significant. All of these technologies have demonstrated flaws, though. And remember that in a setting in which a polygraph is used, the entire focus is on whether a certain person is telling the truth. In our daily lives, our attention is far more divided. The lack of reliable physical clues to deception contributes to the Liar’s Advantage in two ways. First, and simply, since there are no universal behaviors that signal deception, liars can’t be given away by them.

Goodbye Is Forever

Most liars don’t do anything in particular when they lie. This makes it easier for them to pass off their deception as truth. Second, and more subtly, we think there are physical clues to deception. We rely on stereotypical behaviors like the averted gaze to help us spot dishonesty. In effect, we’re waiting to hear an alarm bell that doesn’t exist. So far, we’ve been examining the physical dimensions to lie detection. Look me in the eye and tell me that! is the old adage for detecting deceit. We know by now that all of these notions are mistaken. Yet the difficulty of noticing a lie goes beyond what we do, or do not, see in a person’s eyes or face. The Liar’s Advantage, it turns out, extends even into the very way we think. To begin to understand how, write down a list of all the conversations you had today. The pleasantries you exchanged with the tollbooth worker on your morning commute count as much as a long talk with your spouse. Now look over the list and put a check mark beside every conversation you had during which you wondered if the person you were conversing with was lying. Note that this isn’t a question of whether, in retrospect, you now believe someone could have been lying to you. Make a check only if you considered at the time whether your partner in the conversation was lying. Unless your job involves collecting homework or evaluating felons for parole, you probably haven’t made a lot of check marks. Most of us, in fact, don’t spend a lot time in our daily lives wondering, Am I being lied to? What’s interesting about this is that, as we know by now, we are lied to fairly regularly. You just assumed it. This psychological phenomenon, in which we assume that we aren’t being deceived, is known as the truth bias. The truth bias means that rather than objectively judging the honesty of those with whom we interact based on their behavior and what they say, our default belief is that they’re telling the truth.