When you absolutely have to know the truth, the person you love is most likely to lie to you. This is the point of crisis, when the relationship hangs on the answer to a question such as, “Are you cheating on me?” Or, “Are you using drugs again?” Or, “Where did that thousand dollars from our savings account go?” You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t have probable cause, so you know something’s up. But when it comes to closing the gap between suspicion and the truth, you’re at a big disadvantage. Although we’re marvelously intuitive at certain inner states of the person we’re talking to—depression, anger, intoxication, psychosis—human beings are hopeless at detecting lies. In fact, psychological studies show that the performance of untrained subjects isn’t much better than tossing a coin. It’s a double-whammy, because as liars improve their game, we, the truth-seekers, get worse. Even people who start out as bad liars get feedback on their performance. They know at once whether the person they’re trying to fool believes them, and if they don’t, liars learn to change tactics. To make matters worse, some people—the sociopaths—are born liars. He (or she) doesn’t have a conscience to get in the way of his taking advantage of you. The sociopath has to lie to cover his predatory life-style, but he’s aided in this by a nervous system that is different from the rest of us: He simply doesn’t react emotionally. When he lies, he’s as cool as a cucumber. If you think of all the people in your family, your friends, and your colleagues at work, at least one of them—one in twenty-five—is a sociopath. We’re not at their mercy unless we put ourselves at their mercy. No one wants to go through life in a constant state of paranoia, but we lay ourselves open if we trust without question. Because our natural bias is to believe what people say, we rarely switch into lie-detection mode and so we lack practice at sorting truth from lies. Our greatest liability isn’t that we can’t tell whether we’re being deceived but that we never ask the question in the first place. And the reason we don’t is because we don’t really want to know. If you do want to know the truth, you have to get science on your side. Lying is an art, part acting, part script writing. Telling the truth is different: It’s remembering. Because these are two distinct psychological processes, they look different to the trained eye. 1. Truth is cool: Lies are hot. The liar lies because she has something to hide. Something she feels guilty about or something she’s ashamed of. If you find out what she’s trying to hide from you, she’ll lose something important. Therefore, the liar is threatened, and she will experience fear in proportion to what she risks to lose by the truth being revealed. Also, unless she’s a sociopath, the fact that she’s lying is itself a source of emotional stress, because whatever else she’s done, she’s now betraying your trust. On the other hand, if you haven’t done anything wrong and you tell the truth, there’s nothing for you to be worried about. When people are stressed and anxious, their body reacts in characteristic ways. While inexperienced liars may flush or break into a sweat, the changes are more likely to be subtle. The liar may act unconcerned, but his body is betraying him by an increase in the heart rate, in blood pressure, and in the speed and depth of breathing. These are the tiny changes that the polygraph picks up. Unless he’s a sociopath. Sociopaths can flat-line a polygraph. 2. Truth is simple: Lies are complicated. When you tell the truth, all you have to do is remember what happened. All the brain has to do is to activate the temporal lobe where the memory is stored, send it to the language center to turn into words, and then speak it. Nothing to it. When someone lies, he has to create a new reality. He has to write a script and make sure that the story doesn’t conflict with what happened before, or with what the questioner already knows. Although the liar often has time to rehearse, he’ll still have to improvise material on the spur of the moment. On top of this, the words have to be synchronized with the emotional sound track. And his stance and gestures have to fit with the correct emotions. Unlike telling the truth, the work of lying tends to overload the brain’s processing capacity, and characteristic errors show up. 3. Truth is spontaneous: Lies are rehearsed. The muscle movements of the face that express emotion are activated spontaneously and unconsciously when we talk. They can also be activated deliberately. If we want to, we can raise our eyebrows to simulate surprise and it will look pretty much like the real thing. Pretty much—but not exactly. The neurological circuit that controls spontaneous emotion is different from the circuit that allows us to move our facial muscles at will. In spontaneous emotional expression, all the features involved move as an ensemble. When someone’s faking it, they don’t. We’ll be publishing a series of ten Liar Tip-Offs that illustrate in a practical way how you can use these three principles, with a new Tip-Off coming each month. There’s no magic formula that will give you x-ray vision into the heart of the deceiver. But just as lying is a skill that can be learned, so is lie-detecting. Right now, liars have the advantage. You need every edge we can give you.
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