Lie To Me

Lightman gives the young boy Max some tips about how to ask questions when he interviews the couple he suspects are not really his parents. Don’t ask them questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. That is one of the tips I always emphasize with police. You want people to use as many words as possible. The more words someone speaks the easier it is to determine if the person is being truthful; a pretty strong research finding. It is much easier to lie if you only have to say one word: yes or no. But in the courtroom in which juries have to evaluate the truthfulness of witnesses and defendants, the questions always have to be asked so that they can be answered with a simple yes or no. That is one of the many reasons why it is so hard to spot lies in a courtroom.

Max says that Lightman said in his book the best interrogations are when you can watch and don’t have to ask the questions. That is because having to ask the questions distracts some of your attention from observing everything the suspect is saying and doing. But sometimes it is crucial for the one doing the observing to be able to ask the question that pushes the suspect to stop dodging and directly answer. So it is ideal if there are two people doing the interviewing, who take turns as the need arises, as to who questions and who watches.

CAVEAT: How the Lightman Group spots lies is largely based on findings from my research. Because it is a drama not a documentary, Dr. Lightman is not as tentative about interpreting behavior as I am. Lies are uncovered more quickly and with more certainty than it happens in reality. But most of what you see is based on scientific evidence. Each show also provocatively raises the complex psychological and ethical issues involved in perpetrating and uncovering lies. In this weekly BLOG I explain more about the science behind what you have been seeing and when the show takes poetic license.

Lightman and Foster are certain Mrs. Knox is lying because she recalls a small detail from 16 years ago. While such details are not usually remembered, it is far from certain that such a memory would always be false. Poetic license.

Loker says Delicia faked anger because her anger did not include lowering her eyebrows and pressing or tightening her lips. He probably would be right, but the only reliable sign that anger is being faked is the absence of tightening or narrowing the red area of the lips. It is reliable because most people can’t make that movement deliberately, so it rarely appears in false anger. Most people can easily lower their brows or press their lips, if they remember to do so.

Covering your gonads might be a protective maneuver, but I would be very hesitant to tell someone who made that movement it was a sign he felt vulnerable. To extend that to explaining why Churchill put his hat in his lap is quite a reach. Where else can you put your hat if you are not going to wear it? But… It is not totally implausible, and it does move the story forward.

Lightman is correct. It is generally believed that people find it harder to lie when they confront the person who is the target of their lie. That is why with very rare exceptions when a defendant testifies it must be in front of the victim. I don’t know of any research that has actually tested this idea. Maybe it is so obvious that no one wants to bother. But then it seems obvious that the world is flat.

CAVEAT: How the Lightman Group spots lies is largely based on findings from my research. Because it is a drama not a documentary, Dr. Lightman is not as tentative about interpreting behavior as I am. Lies are uncovered more quickly and with more certainty than it happens in reality. But most of what you see is based on scientific evidence. Each show also provocatively raises the complex psychological and ethical issues involved in perpetrating and uncovering lies. In this weekly BLOG I explain more about the science behind what you have been seeing and when the show takes poetic license.

Trust is a matter of faith — that the person who is trusted wont exploit that trust. Intimacy in close working relationships, romance, and friendships requires, depends on trust. Yet it is well known that the last person to realize he or she is being sexually betrayed is the person betrayed, whose trust blocked out recognition of any the signs of betrayal that everyone else picked up.

We don’t want to learn that our trust has been betrayed: That the person you hired is embezzling? That your children are stealing money from your wallet or purse? It is terrible to discover that trust has been betrayed, and most of us avoid any clues to that discovery.

Once trust has been betrayed can it ever be restored? Not everyone can. Even when the betrayal is forgiven, when the betrayed person doesn’t want to give up the relationship, it may be hard to completely trust again. That is the price of lying about serious matters – the loss of trust, which may never be restored. Suspicion, the opposite of trust, undermines relationships that matter, and make the suspicious person miserable.

All of us face a choice about trust: do we take the risk of being misled by trusting, based on faith; or do we take the risk of not only disbelieving a truthful person, but never being able to establish close connections because of our suspicious distrust?

Foster points out that she is nodding yes when she is saying no, a gestural equivalent of a slip-of-the-tongue. I discovered gestural slips in my very first study of nonverbal behavior during graduate school. The one shown in the program – nodding yes when saying no I have seen in serious crimes. The person usually has no idea that his or her action has exposed the lie.

We later find out that Terry lied when he said he just owed twelve grand. Did Lightman miss it? With people we know well and with whom we are emotionally involved, we often fail to recognize signs of lying. We want to believe them; we overlook what total strangers might recognize. That’s why the cuckolded spouse is the last one to know what is happening.

Twice winners of the international poker tournament in Las Vegas sought me out. They claimed that they had won (more than a million dollars!) because they could spot bluffs. I tested them on how well they could distinguish lies from truthful responses during an interrogation. They were not much better than chance. Their knowledge was specialized to the very few behaviors that were shown in classical poker games – picking up cards, putting them down, moving chips, making a movement to indicate the wish to draw more cards. Today, in televised poker the game has changed; people talk for the camera and to each other, so my work might have more application.

Torres claims that the student’s body language and face show homicidal intent. I have been working for a number of years to identify when a person is about to physically assault someone. The research is not yet finished, and I don’t know yet if it will succeed. Unfortunately, some people who know my findings are not treating them as preliminary, but are going ahead to train people before the findings are in.