How can we learn how to spot deception?

It is a sad truth that lying is incredibly pervasive in our interactions with fellow humans. While people lie for a multitude of reasons, we are also quite bad at lie detection, creating a pretty bleak predicament for those of us who value honesty. In a recent article for NBC News, journalist Brianna Steinhilber has compiled an excellent and accessible list of helpful tips to make you a better lie detector.

As we have discussed in a previous blog, people lie all the time, primarily out of self-interest. Steinhilber manages to compile some troubling statistics showing just how frequent this really is. One 2012 study found that the average American lies about 11 times per week, while another claimed that a majority of people lie at least every 10 minutes!

One of the problems with this prevalence is that, according to a 2016 study, the more we lie about small things, the more accustomed our brain becomes to deception in general, fostering lying behavior in the future. This is perhaps unsurprising. As Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto explains, deception is deeply rooted in human behavior and development.

This might be manageable, if we could tell when people were lie. Unfortunately, we can’t, for the most part. One large meta-study by Dr. Charles Bond and Dr. Bella DePaulo in 2006 found that we can generally detect deception with a 54 percent success rate.

But that doesn’t mean that we are doomed to ignorance about other people’s lies! Steinhilber has helpfully compiled a list of five tips for strengthening your lie detection skills:

First, pay close attention to their baseline behavior. This is easiest with people you interact with most, such as coworkers, family members, and friends. From this baseline, you can notice when they practice anomalous behavior that indicates deception.

Second, watch their eyes. While maintaining or avoiding eye contact is not a reliable indicator of deception, the eyes are a great way to compare behavior against the baseline. Is the person blinking more than usual? Do they normally make eye contact but now don’t? These are the sort of indicators that an examination of the eyes can give you.

Third, look for their microexpressions, a favorite topic here at Humintell. Our faces can give us away in many minor ways, as muscles in the face twitch briefly to reveal one’s actual emotions. These can be quite difficult to notice, but reading microexpressions is a skill that can be learned and trained.

Fourth, analyze their smile. A fake smile, a good indicator of deception, looks quite different from a genuine one. In fake smiles, liars tend to press their lips more tightly together. Similarly, genuine smiles reach to the eyes and the rest of the face, while fake smiles tend to stop at the mouth.

Finally, Steinhilber recommends looking for signs of stress or discomfort. While lying, many people will fidget, shift around in their seat, or even yawn. Understanding how a given person acts when they are stressed can help us learn when that person is lying.

While it is certainly helpful to keep these tips in mind, nothing can compare with professional training in lie detection or in mastering the art of reading microexpressions.

Eyes are an incredibly important part of emotional recognition, but what role do they have in allowing us to detect deception?

While conventional opinion tends to hold that failure to maintain eye contact is a tell-tale sign of deception, this is actually just a pervasive myth. However, because eyes are so important in reading emotions, they can also help us assess another’s truthfulness, or lack thereof.

Our fixation on the importance of eyes has justification. As followers of this blog will know, recent research indicates that we display emotions most clearly in our eyes.

While this intuitive emphasis on eyes led to the notion that observing eye contact is a reliable method of lie detection, this is simply not true. As a previous blog explained, multiple studies have found no relationship between deception and the avoidance of eye contact, despite the fact that, across cultures, this myth continues to be widely held.

As Dr. Wendy Patrick explains, eye contact or its avoidance may be due to differing personalities or cultural backgrounds that determine one’s tendency to make eye contact. Just as she explained in last week’s blog, it is necessary to analyze a given individual’s level of eye contact against their personal baseline.

However, eye contact is still a helpful tool in correctly identifying deception. For example, one 2012 study found significant pupil changes in lying participants. In this study, researchers asked participants to steal small sums of money, while leaving other participants crime-free.

Then, each participant was asked to answer a series of questions about the theft, without letting the test examiner know if they were guilty. While they were filling out these questionnaires, cameras tracked pupil size, finding an increase in pupil diameter amongst the guilty parties. Upon concluding the study, the authors pointed out that such an increase was consistent with previous studies in deception.

Similarly, from the perspective of those detecting deception, a separate 2016 study found that focusing on eyes provided a very effective tool for lie detection. In this study, participants attempted to detect lies from both individuals with their faces covered by a hijab, leaving only the eyes revealed, and those without any form of veil.

Surprisingly, participants were more accurate in detecting deception amongst those with hijabs. This conclusion indicated that a focus on the eye alone significantly aided lie detection, as participants were forced to focus on the eyes, rather than being distracted by other facial features.

While focusing on the eyes may be an important tool for detecting deception, it is often hard for us to know exactly what gives away a lie. We certainly cannot measure pupil size with a ruler!

This requires specialized training, such as Humintell’s evaluating truthfulness workshop

Parents and really anyone who works with kids can attest to many children’s tendency to lie.

While these might take the form of minor fibs of who hit whom, and that sort of common deception, it is not just our anecdotal impression that children are often dishonest. As Dr. Wendy Patrick explains, there is a significant amount of evidence showing that children are quite likely to practice deception. The upside to this is that childhood behavior serves as a great case study for understanding human deception practices.

For instance, Dr. Patrick cites a 2011 study which found that, while younger children lie frequently, dishonesty decreases as they grow towards middle adolescence. The authors speculated that this may be due to increased moral awareness or from a better understanding of the possible consequences of being caught.

Another similar 2016 study concluded that children do not just lie randomly but will select various forms of deception based on perceived social advantage. This conclusion led the authors to suggest that as children age, they begin to use more socially acceptable methods of deception, like white lies.

Perhaps most interesting is that this 2016 study also found that children with greater social skills tended to lie more. This is definitely in line with earlier research that explored a correlation between popularity and deception amongst teenagers.

In a 1999 study, for example, Dr. Robert Feldman interviewed a group of 11 to 16 year olds. While older children might lie less frequently, he found that they are better at it, both controlling nonverbal behavior and better verbalizing their fibs. He also found that more socially competent or popular children were better at lying.

Dr. Feldman concluded “convincing lying is actually associated with good social skills. It takes social skills to be able to control your words as well as what you say non-verbally.”

But how does all of this impact our relationships with children? Does monitoring childhood behavior make us better lie detectors?

Dr. Patrick contends that, while we may develop better skills at catching our kids in lies, these skills may be limited to those individuals, and our children develop correspondingly better abilities for telling us lies.

When we get good at detecting lies in certain children, it is not necessarily because we have unlocked universal skills of lie detection, but because we are better at comparing their mannerisms against possible divergent behavior. For example, a child that always makes eye contact gives themselves away when they fail to meet our gaze, but another child may simply be too shy to maintain similar levels of eye contact.

Moreover, while we can practice lie detection by analyzing divergent behavior, our children also monitor our behavior for similar deviations. In their case, they track signs of distrust or suspicion, learning what nonverbal behavior is leading to their possible detection and adjusting behavior in response.

While our social interactions may be poor guides for effective lie detection, there are universal behaviors and expressions that give away deception.

For more information, check out these Humintell training programs here and here.