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.
Countless times when I was a kid (and sometimes now) people thought I lied when I was innocent because of timidity (and not diagnosed but maybe on the spectrum), so yeah I was unsettled. Uncontrollable smiles were the worst ("that makes you laugh!"). I can’t blame neurotypical people for having heuristics, but I’m still afraid to be interrogated in something serious with my reactions analyzed.
So how does one take this over to metaphorical poker? Because if the situation calls for having physical control over someone with the threat that they're about to go to jail, then okay, sure.
"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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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 :)
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.
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?
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).
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.
A lie is a mismatch between what I believe and what I say. It has nothing to do with objective truth.
We sometimes talk about lying versus telling the truth, but this is a shorthand. What we mean by telling the truth is saying what we believe to be true. No reasonable person would say that someone is lying if they say what they believe to be true, but it turns out they are mistaken.
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.
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.
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.
There’s an interesting take[0] on defensive mechanisms societies have apparently evolved in order to detect a psychopath in their midst in daily life without having to know that person for a long time.
This is another good point: you can be interrogating (or interviewing) a suspect under investigation, use a withholding technique and successfully catch them in a lie, only to have them lying for a completely unrelated reason to the original inquiry.
From what I've gathered, the best lies under interrogation are the ones with the most components of the truth and minimal superfluous information. The police will do everything to get you to talk and keep talking, which is why legal representation is so key.
It gets even hazier, frankly, when you realize that not every statement you make can be firmly categorized as a truth or lie. Due to cognitive dissonance our lies to others can soon become lies to ourselves, and where do you draw the line between wholly believing in a lie to yourself and being flat-out mistaken?
> 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.
>> 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).
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.
> 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?
I think what underlies this discussion are assumptions that lying is, by default, unethical and that we can trust truth-telling to be beneficial. I have found that neither of these things are factual.
Truths can be devastatingly harmful with no discernible benefit. I have found this outcome more likely when one assumes truth is a moral high-ground, while disregarding the well being of the person on the receiving end.
This led me to conclude that honesty is a poor goal, in and of itself. It is at best a tool, that often requires consideration and compassion to yield a positive outcome.
Much of the same can be said for lying. It isn't the opposite of truthing so much as it is a different tool. Wielded like a blunt weapon, it's harms are legendary. Used with precision, with empathy and with wise consideration of larger outcomes - lying can be used to smooth over small rough spots and avoid large disasters.
In short, it isn't uncommon for lying to be the most ethical of our choices.
Yes. I'm struggling to keep from bursting out laughing because the answer to both these questions are so plainly obvious that even young children know them, even if they're unable to articulate to you why its lying.
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.
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.
[+] [-] foobiekr|5 years ago|reply
"""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.
[+] [-] tarsinge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zakember|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kaminar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raducu|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, he couldn't.
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] pain_perdu|5 years ago|reply
If anyone is interested, please contact me at the address in my HN profile!
[+] [-] jvanderbot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] routerl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blablabla123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mettamage|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] easton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sloshnmosh|5 years ago|reply
The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.
[+] [-] superasn|5 years ago|reply
"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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meiraleal|5 years ago|reply
The only proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to get evidence.
[+] [-] themgt|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lotophage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
Prison escapee convinces cop he is actually a jogger: 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).
[+] [-] wildermuthn|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonh|5 years ago|reply
We sometimes talk about lying versus telling the truth, but this is a shorthand. What we mean by telling the truth is saying what we believe to be true. No reasonable person would say that someone is lying if they say what they believe to be true, but it turns out they are mistaken.
[+] [-] lazide|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
-- Robert A. Heinlein
[+] [-] jmcgough|5 years ago|reply
Way better to rely on actual evidence and not hunches, even more so when it comes to giving someone a prison sentence.
[+] [-] parsimo2010|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] strogonoff|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/05/05/dares-costly-signals-a... on dares and costly signals, also discussing The Psychopath Code by late Pieter Hintjens.
[+] [-] clouddrover|5 years ago|reply
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.salon.com/2000/03/02/polygraph/
And inadmissible in court in many places:
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.
[+] [-] wespiser_2018|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airhead969|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmonk|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
If British detective shows were realistic, Midsummer county would be dangerous murder hotspot, hehe
[+] [-] johnsmith4739|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
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-Everyda...)
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|5 years ago|reply
I think what underlies this discussion are assumptions that lying is, by default, unethical and that we can trust truth-telling to be beneficial. I have found that neither of these things are factual.
Truths can be devastatingly harmful with no discernible benefit. I have found this outcome more likely when one assumes truth is a moral high-ground, while disregarding the well being of the person on the receiving end.
This led me to conclude that honesty is a poor goal, in and of itself. It is at best a tool, that often requires consideration and compassion to yield a positive outcome.
Much of the same can be said for lying. It isn't the opposite of truthing so much as it is a different tool. Wielded like a blunt weapon, it's harms are legendary. Used with precision, with empathy and with wise consideration of larger outcomes - lying can be used to smooth over small rough spots and avoid large disasters.
In short, it isn't uncommon for lying to be the most ethical of our choices.
[+] [-] cbozeman|5 years ago|reply
Yes. It's literally called "lying by omission".
> Is it lying if I believe it is true?
Yes. I'm struggling to keep from bursting out laughing because the answer to both these questions are so plainly obvious that even young children know them, even if they're unable to articulate to you why its lying.
A lie is a lie is a lie.
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hntrader|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] withinboredom|5 years ago|reply
1. FM 2-22.3 (section 9-6)
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Which might be why LEO are so partial to them. The power to ruin vulnerable people is irresistible to some folks.
[+] [-] wespiser_2018|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aidenn0|5 years ago|reply
Lake Wobegon effect for people reading.