Spotting Lies: Can Humans Learn to Do Better?

Abstract

Though cynicism may seem ram pant, the empirical fact is that most people seem to believe most of what they hear most of the time. I have seen this repeatedly in the studies my colleagues and I have conducted on the detection of deception.1 To determine whether people can sep arate truths from lies, we show them videotapes we have made of people we know to be lying or telling the truth. The topics of these lies and truths vary widely. For example, sometimes the people on the tape are talking about their feelings about other people they know; other times, the speakers are describing their opinions about controversial is sues; in still other studies, they are talking to an artist about their pref erences for various paintings, some of which are the artist's own work. When we show people (judges) these tapes, we ask them to tell us, for each segment that they watch, whether they think the person on the tape (the speaker) was lying or telling the truth. We also ask them to indicate, on rating scales, just how deceptive or truthful the speaker seemed to be. We might also ask them how they think the speaker really did feel and what impression the speaker was trying to convey about how he or she felt. For exam ple, it might seem that the speaker was politely trying to give the im pression that she liked the person she was describing, when in fact she detested that person. Typically, the tapes that we play for our judges include equal num bers of truths and lies. Yet when judges watch or hear the tapes, they almost always think that many more of the messages are truths than lies. (One of the rare exceptions was a study in which the speakers on the tape were experienced salespersons pitching the kinds of products that they sell; in that study, the judges more often thought that the salesper sons were lying.2) Similarly, judges typically believe that the speakers really do feel the way they are claim ing to feel. When a speaker claims to like a painting, the judges are more inclined to believe that he or she