Those Lyin' Eyes: On the Art and Science of Lying Well

The receptionist behind the counter wasn't pleased to see me. "Can I help you?" she said, making an effort to avoid my eyes.

"I'm here to see Dr. Eales. We have a meeting."

Her hands skittered across the desk as if she was trying to locate a paper that had suddenly gone missing. She kept her eyes lowered. "I'm sorry, but Dr. Eales is ... " She hesitated but kept the hands moving. "Dr. Eales has been called away. If you'd care to leave your number ... "

I checked my watch. I was already five minutes late for our meeting. "No thanks," I said, and I pushed through the swinging door beside her, past the astonished faces of the clerical staff, and continued down the hall until I arrived at the door labelled "Director." I gave two sharp knocks and let myself in.

"Dr. Eales, I presume," I said to the man seated behind the desk.

That scene is from my latest mystery, Cold Dark Matter, and in it my fictional detective, Morgan O'Brien, confronts a receptionist who is lying through her teeth. How does Morgan know? She observes the woman's general air of discomfort, her averted gaze, the hesitant speech and her skittering hands. All these behaviours tell Morgan that the information she's receiving from the receptionist is false - Morgan is being deceived - so she ignores the woman and barges into the director's office to find him, sure enough, seated behind his desk.

As a mystery writer, lies are an important part of my life. Mysteries are built upon lies. Morgan, my sleuth, lies easily and all the time, although she does have the occasional twinge of guilt. And while Morgan lies to everyone around her, they all lie back.

They lie about who they are, where they were the night of the murder and what they had for dinner the evening before. Some lie to hide heinous crimes but others lie with equal vigour to cover up minor transgressions. While the more hardened among them deceive as a matter of course, many, like the basically honest secretary above, lie with reluctance, and their discomfort leaks through in their behaviour.

At least that's what I imagine, but what do I really know about lying? Sure, I've told a few in my day, and maybe I did pad that résumé here and there, but what do I know about the nuanced behaviour of deceit? Do liars really avert their gaze? Do they glance at the floor and shuffle their feet? And what about hesitant speech? Is that an unequivocal clue to deception? Since I spend my days describing liars I decided it was time to discover the truth.

The Truth About Lies

When little George Washington said that he could not tell a lie, his statement was a few shades short of the truth. The fact is, we all lie.

According to research carried out by social psychologist Bella DePaulo at the University of California, people lie on average twice a day, and we deceive around 30 people a week. Dating couples lie in almost one-third of their interactions, but college students take the prize. When speaking with their mothers, they lie in at least one-half of those conversations.

As for that padded résumé, I'm not alone: a whopping 80 per cent of the population "extends the truth" on their curriculum vitae. Even the Worldcom profit-inflating fiasco is far from an isolated case. In one business study, almost one-third of middle managers admitted to providing fraudulent information for internal reports.

Fortunately, most of our lies are benign and they're often told for good reason. When a husband looks at his wife and replies with an enthusiastic smile, "Of course those red leather pants don't make you look fat," he's trying to protect her feelings, and that little white lie is way cheaper than divorce.

After these minor social lies we lie most about ourselves, what the scientists refer to as "self-presentational" lies. We add those extra accomplishments to the curriculum vitae, tell that new acquaintance about the time we scaled Mount Everest, or claim to have qualifications we didn't quite obtain. We tell lies, in short, to become the people we want to be without doing the work to get there.

Some of these lies are innocuous, but others can be deadly. Consider, for example, the case of "doctor" Dennis Roark. He padded his résumé with a medical degree from Chicago's Rush University, a degree he'd never obtained, and in 1995 was accepted to the University of Western Ontario's residency program in heart surgery. Fortunately, seven months later he failed a performance review, but after assisting in how many operations?

After these ego lies, we fib most frequently about our actions, plans and whereabouts. These higher-stakes lies cover everything from an unfaithful spouse trying to explain all those late nights at the office, to a murderer scrambling to construct an alibi for the night of the crime.

In short, lying is an integral part of our social behaviour and, according to McGill University psychologist Victoria Talwar, it's something we pick up young.

From the Mouths of Babes

Talwar studies the development of lying in children and it's a field, she says, rife with misconception. The mythology runs all the way from the "emperor's new clothes" variety, where children are believed to be incapable of telling a lie, right through to the refusal of courts to consider eye-witness testimony of children based on the assumption that they can't tell the truth. Talwar has spent many years studying deception in children.

Not only do children lie, she says, but they begin at about four years of age, and lying is a normal, in fact critical, part of their development.

When people lie, says Talwar, they are trying to create a false belief in another person, but to attempt this, the liar must understand that the other person has beliefs, knowledge and opinions that are different from theirs and thus can be manipulated. You need, stresses Talwar, a "theory of mind" that differentiates "my mind" from "your mind," something that requires a high level of intellectual development.

" For instance (in the lab) we tell a child a story about a girl named Sally who hides a chocolate in a box so she can eat it later. We then tell the child that Sally leaves the room and someone else comes in, takes the chocolate out of the box, puts it in the refrigerator, then leaves. Sally returns. We ask the child where Sally will look for the chocolate when she comes back into the room."

A child of three answers "in the refrigerator" because the child knows that the chocolate is in the refrigerator and assumes that Sally, therefore, must have the same information. The child has no "theory of mind." By four or five, though, a child will tell the experimenter that Sally will look in the box, understanding that Sally is missing information, so now has a false belief about where that chocolate is hidden.

Although there are no clear stages in the development of lying - children don't, for example, lie about certain things at specific ages - they get more wily with age.

"A young child might steal a cookie from the cookie jar," says Talwar. "If you ask them if they took a cookie they'll shake their head and say no, but they'll have crumbs all over themselves making it obvious they took the cookie. An older child will do better. They'll realize they have evidence and will wipe off the cookie crumbs to cover their trail."

Once kids make the connection between material evidence and getting away with the crime, their lies become extremely difficult to detect. Your only hope of cracking the case, says Talwar, is gentle verbal interrogation. Children, particularly younger children, don't have the mental facility to fabricate a lie, then keep track of all the information they need to maintain it, a difficult task even for adults with a lot more practice at lying.

To Catch A Thief

While it's not surprising that doting parents might miss a few fibs in their little angels, we are all, it turns out, equally inept at detecting deception. In the early 1970s psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, at the University of California, developed the "nurse experiment," a procedure designed to test peoples' ability to spot lies. The researchers began by filming individual interviews with student nurses. Each nurse was watching a film (unseen by the eventual viewer of the clip) and discussing what they saw with an off-camera interviewer. Each nurse described a tranquil, happy nature documentary. The hitch was that half were lying. This group of nurses was really watching a gruesome surgical film of a burn patient undergoing painful treatment, but they'd been instructed to lie. To make their job even more stressful, the "dishonest" nurses were told that their career depended upon their ability to pull off the deceit. If they couldn't hide their feelings then they were in the wrong profession.

Over the next decades Ekman, along with several colleagues, including Maureen O'Sullivan at the University of San Francisco, called in a variety of test subjects, from college students to law enforcement professionals, and tested their ability to spot the lying nurses. The results were a surprise. Even customs agents and police officers couldn't spot the lying nurses more than 50 per cent of the time. In other words, their accuracy was no better than chance. They might as well have flipped a coin.

As the research progressed, however, some interesting anomalies emerged. Secret service agents, for example, scored significantly higher than other groups, picking out the deceivers six times out of 10. Even more intriguing, the studies identified an extremely rare group of people who could nail a fibber 80 to 90 per cent of the time, more accurate than a polygraph. What, the researchers wondered, were these human lie detectors seeing that the rest of us miss?

In 2003, DePaulo carried out the most exhaustive analysis ever undertaken of cues to deception, hoping to identify that elusive Pinocchio's nose. She and her team analysed almost 200 research papers involving 158 possible cues to deception, hoping to find one or several that were consistent across all the studies. Would shifty gaze, shuffling feet, awkward pauses, carry over across all the research?

Of the 158 possible cues, very few were consistent, and of those that were, they could only be described as "weak effects." To put it another way, there was no simple red flag for lying. While DePaulo noted that liars did seem less forthcoming than truth tellers, appeared more tense, and made specific speech errors, most notably the repetition of words and phrases, both the type and the strength of the cues depended on the lie. Gaze, the shifty eyes so characteristic of guilt in movies and books, is a good example. For small lies, where the consequences of getting caught were insignificant, liars maintained eye contact. No shifty eyes. But in high-stakes lies, where discovery might mean humiliation, job loss, or the end of a marriage, people made less eye contact when telling the lie.

Speech patterns were also affected by the stakes, but in an unpredicted direction. When liars were telling white lies their speech was disturbed by small glitches, like my secretary in the opening lines. But up the ante and the opposite occurs. In high-stakes deception the speech flaws disappear and the lies flow more smoothly than the truth.

So how much of this can be applied to your spouse, the job applicant sitting across your desk or a character in one of my books? Not much, according to researchers like O'Sullivan and DePaulo. Lying, it turns out, is highly individual. What signals a lie in one person might be a cue to truthfulness in another.

Says O'Sullivan emphatically: "There is no Pinocchio's nose."

Pinocchio's Diary

Perhaps there is no Pinocchio's nose, but what about his diary? In the mid 1990s, psychologist James Pennebaker at the University of Texas wondered if word usage in written texts might be a marker for lies. He brought people into his lab and asked them to write several pages detailing their thoughts and feelings on an emotionally fraught issue, such as capital punishment or abortion. He asked half to tell the truth and the other half to lie, taking the opposite view of what they really felt. The writing samples were then run through a computer program called LIWC for Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The program compared each word in the writing sample to a file of more than 2,000 words divided into 72 categories. It then spat out the number of words in each category.

"Sure enough," says Pennebaker, "we discovered that there were some consistent words and groups of words that predicted who was lying and who was telling the truth."

People telling the truth, he says, used the first-person singular - I or me - more often than liars. A truthful person would write, for example, "I went to the store last night." A liar was more likely to write "we went to the store," or simply "went to the store," as if they were distancing themselves from their lies.

Pennebaker also found that, when writing the truth, people used more exclusionary words – conjunctions like "except," "but," "exclude" and "without" – that allowed the truth tellers to build complex stories not only about what they did, but about what they didn't do. For example, if asked to write about what they had for dinner the night before, a liar might simply say chicken. A truth teller would likely write something more complex such as: I planned to have steak for dinner except someone had eaten the steak so I decided to cook chicken instead.

This difference in word usage, explains Pennebaker, comes from the difficulty of creating viable lies. "It's easy to come up with a scenario of what I did," he says, "but hard to come up with a scenario of what I didn't do. It's too complex."

As for forcing your teen to write a weekly essay on What I Did on Saturday Night, forget it. "I have a teenage son, too," says Pennebaker. "If I ask my son to tell me what he did the night before he usually answers in the first-person singular, and if he doesn't, red flags go up. But that's as far as it goes. I can't ground him based on not using the first-person singular."

The Final Frontier

If there's one thing all the researchers agree on, it's that there is no sure-fire cue to deception and, according to Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn, even the brain seems to function differently depending on the type of lie and the person lying. Kosslyn uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at what happens in the brain when people lie, and the technique has already revealed some pathways used, not just for any lies, but for telling specific types of lies.

"We found that quite distinct neural systems were activated when you're lying based on a well memorized, coherent alternative story versus when you're making something up on the fly."

Some of the structures that are active when you're spewing out memorized lies are known to be involved in the retrieval of stored memory, but these systems are more active when you're lying than when you're telling the truth, so it's not just a case of drawing forth a memory. And, says Kosslyn, fabricating lies on the spot will light up another part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate, a structure involved in monitoring errors.

"Probably what's going on is you're trying to suppress the truth. It's not activated when you're using memorized lies."

People even use different parts of the brain when lying about themselves ("I didn't do it.") than when lying about someone else ("He didn't do it.") "The more we find out about this," states Kosslyn, "the harder the problem becomes."

So where does this leave me with my lying, cheating, murderous characters? And how is my lying, cheating investigator ever going to sort out the good from the bad? It's not going to be easy. First of all, no more shifty eyes, except in high-stakes lies with certain kinds of liars. Second, no more shuffling of feet, unless, of course, it's an individual quirk. The delayed and hesitant speech can stay, but only for insignificant fibs. The murderer's speech must flow like cream.

As for the rest of us trying to pick out real-life liars, I guess we'll just have to stumble along as the psychologists say we always have: believing that most of the people around us are basically honest. And even if they're not, maybe it’s best to just embrace those little lies. It makes life so much simpler than always hearing the truth. Now where did I put those red leather pants?

Quiz: Can You Spot the Liar?

University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker studies the way people write lies. Below are samples from two of his research subjects, one giving a truthful opinion, the other lying, about their attitudes to a controversial and emotionally-fraught topic: abortion. Can you spot the liar?

Subject 1: Life begins at the moment conception occurs. No human has the right to end a life whether it is of an adult or an unborn child. This child has as much right as any other person to live and grow and experience life. There are many options if you feel like you cannot raise a child. There are hundreds of couples who are unable to conceive and would love to give a baby a warm and loving home. It takes little to sacrifice nine months for a life. You must live with your mistakes and if you are mature enough to have sex you must be mature enough to have the child.

Subject 2: I am not pro abortion I am prochoice. Everyone has a choice to what is right for them, their mate and the fetus they are carrying. They may not be able to provide a good enough life for themselves let alone a baby. There are so many unfortunate kids now. Why add more to the list and ruin more lives. A child is not ready to have a child and although they made the decision to have sex they may not be ready to be a parent. This is not fair to the baby.

I personally would not want to be born when I am not wanted or when I cannot be cared for. Once again there are already so many kids out there who are not being given all they deserve. Mistakes happen and it should not be an innocent child who pays the price. And yes I agree that adoption is always an option but that can be easier said than done. The idea of giving up a part of you is very difficult. I've seen friends plan to give their baby away and when it's born they change their minds and the baby is left with less good of a home. It's hard to give something as precious as a part of yourself to a complete stranger. You might wonder what if for the rest of your life, so I say you should have the choice.

Copyright © Alexandra Brett 2005.
This article first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. It may be printed for your personal use. If you'd like to include it in a newsletter or make multiple copies for educational or other purposes please contact the author at alexbrett@alexbrett.com .