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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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One of my guilty pleasures is the long-running TV show NCIS, a drama focused on the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The hero is a former marine, now Special Agent Jethro Gibbs, a disciplined detective with an uncanny ability to observe and question criminal suspects. Gibbs doesn’t say much or display a lot of emotion in the interrogation room—indeed, his cool demeanor is his trademark—yet he is a keen lie spotter.
Psychological scientists are fascinated by real-life versions of the fictional Gibbs. Detecting lies and liars is essential to effective policing and prosecution of criminals, but it is maddeningly difficult. Most of us can correctly spot barely more than half of all lies and truths through listening and observation—meaning we are wrong almost as often as we are right. And half a century of research has done little to polish this unimpressive track record.
But scientists are still working to improve on that, and among them is social psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England. Vrij has been using a key insight from his field to improve interrogation methods: the human mind, despite its impressive abilities, has limited capacity for how much thinking it can handle at any one time. So piling on demands for additional, simultaneous thought—or cognitive “load”—compromises normal information processing. Because lying is more cognitively demanding than telling the truth, these compromised abilities should be revealed in detectable behavioral clues.
Why is lying more demanding? Imagine for a few minutes that you’re guilty of a murder, and Gibbs is cross-examining you. To start, you need to invent a story, and you also have to monitor that tale constantly so it is plausible and consistent with the known facts. That task takes a lot of mental effort that innocent truth tellers do not have to spend. You also need to actively remember the details of the story you’ve fabricated so that you don’t contradict yourself at any point. Remembering a fiction is much more demanding than remembering something that actually occurred. Because you’re worried about your credibility, you’re most likely trying to control your demeanor, and “looking honest” also saps mental energy. And you’re not just monitoring yourself; you’re also scanning Gibbs’s face for signs that he might be seeing through your lie. That’s not all. Like an actor, you have the mental demands of staying in character. And finally, you have to suppress the truth so that you don’t let some damning fact slip out—another drain on your mind’s limited supply of fuel. In short, the truth is automatic and effortless, and lying is the opposite of that. It is intentional, deliberate and exhausting.
Testing the Limits of Lying
So how could Gibbs and other detectives exploit the differing mental experiences of liars and truth tellers? Here are a few strategies that Vrij and his colleagues have been testing in the laboratory, which they describe in a recent issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
One intriguing strategy is to demand that suspects tell their stories in reverse. Narrating backward increases cognitive load because it runs counter to the natural forward sequencing of events. Because liars already have depleted cognitive resources, they should find this unfamiliar mental exercise more taxing than truth tellers do—which should increase the likelihood that they will somehow betray themselves. And in fact, that is just what happens in the lab: Vrij ran an experiment in which half the liars and truth tellers were instructed to recall their stories in reverse order. When observers later looked at videotapes of the complete interviews, they correctly spotted only 42 percent of the lies people told when recounting their stories without fabrication—below average, which means they were hard to spot—but a remarkable 60 percent when the liars were compromised by the reverse storytelling.
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14 Comments
Add CommentDetecting all liars is impossible, some people can simply get away with lying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertain people, like politicians, have a pathological "need" to lie.
Vril's conclusion that gaze direction correlates with veracity resembles one of the therapeutic models of the discredited pseudo-field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, "eye accessing"; looking in the opposite direction from your dominant hand indicates truthfulness, in the same indicates lying, looking directly at the questioner but with defocused gaze means lying, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, eye accessing was one of the few components of that field that was never falsified outright; it seems to me the "original" correlations should be seen as groping, oversimplified versions of what Vril is quantizing.
Vril's work unquestionably goes hand-in-hand with such verified tools as actual Neurolinguistics, the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and old-school "body language".
I'd suggest Vril consult some actual "wizards" such as successful professional poker players.
I hope somebody uses his findings to write an app we can use to analyze political interviews and debates...
You mean that one day scientists will develop a real lie detector? Not one of those fake ones that are accepted by no courts in the civilised world?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(Oops, sorry America).
This is a good idea that has been used by interrogators. It is nice to see that someone is analytically breaking it down and testing methods. The pen to pencil idea is a very good one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would wager that this kind of technique would work on most liars.
Now when lis are mixed with truths, it becomes more difficult to use this technique. For instance, you have someone who was actually at the crime seen and you are trying to determine if they were the shooter. Since they were there, they can basically tell "the truth" but leave out some parts or slightly change the story so that they are not the ones with the gun. Or maybe they are just not lieing? This is the same problem in politics. Plus politicians give only a minimal amount of information and alot of fluff, reducuing their chances of "proof of motivation" on various issues. This is why people like quick, direct, to-the-point responses and speaches by politicians (or anyone). They seem more believeable and possibly are more truthful.
I've always had the hunch that that kind of procedures or devices, equally as psychotherapy, work only in normal people, psychopats, sociopaths, borderline and anti-social personalities can tell you lies without noticeable changes in anything, or make you believe they are hiding something that in fact is the lie, while you perceive it as a hidden truth. Police usually wins over delinquents just because they have more means and more experience, criminals are not necesarily less smart than policeman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould we require politicians to recite backwards the stories of how they voted on specific issues? I'd bet that they would become very good at doing so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting but eye contact between a woman and a man who is not related to the woman is considered as "not good" in certain cultures.The minds of these women are conditioned in such a way that when they are asked to look into the eyes of a man they are not familiar with, they feel very uncomfortable and their minds go haywire! Then how do you say accurately whether the woman is truly lying or her conditioned mind is playing havoc here? These studies don't take cultural conditioning of minds into account! Then how can they be true for all the people in the world?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe situation Dr KrishnaKumariChalla depicts can be found in Europe even today, when in a conversation, men are advised not to have eye contact with other men, but looking towards something outside or in a different place in the face, while having eye contact with women is considered more acceptable. May be this social rule comes from the times when looking into the eys had the meaning of some kind of sexual possession, or an attempt to start it, men can't accept this from other men, but women can somehow tolerate it, considering it's some kind of recognition of their beauty that is not going beyond the contemplative side. All this things remain deep in our minds, and are the backbone of how we adjust to living in society, accepting symbols and conventions instead of actual goods, thus improving the society state of peace. Erase this "collective unconscious", "affective hue", or whatever you want calling it, and the world around becomes empty, lacking meaning and unbearable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe brain’s error detection mechanism registers when something appears wrong. This innate capacity located in the medial frontal cortex detects what neuroscientists call “errors”: the differences between expectation and perceived actuality. This portion of the brain plays a central role in detecting mistakes as well as responding to them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider the emotional expense of a lie: The surface story is the constructed lie. The subliminal story is the recognition of the lie by the error detection mechanism. Then your brain has to deal with the dissonance. Triple work.
I describe the similar process of lies and debt at http://tinyurl.com/3s2qejb
You can deceive others – even your own mind. But your brain always knows.
David Krueger MD
Executive Mentor Coach
www.MentorPath.com
If we can monitor the brains energy utilization and distribution, we could possibly increase lie detection accuracy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe world desperately needs a reliable lie-detection methodology. Amanda Knox is either 100% guilty or 100% innocent. As was Troy Davis, executed recently in Georgia despite many claiming his innocence. They are not half-way between innocent and guilty in some quantum state. We need a method to get a reliable yes or no answer to a simple question. Maybe this approach offers hope. You could imagine bringing it to a degree where nobody, no matter how well trained in lying, could keep an untrue story straight, or you could imagine our understanding of the brain getting sufficiently accurate that we can figure out when they’re lying and telling the truth by look at a live PET scan – the potential for this would be greatly enhanced by forcing the subject to stress his/her brain to its maximum capacity. What we do know is that having 12 non-experts listen to multiple witnesses with different motivations and try to judge who is telling the truth is NOT a reliable method. Almost anything would be better, with the possible exception of the current lie-detector tests L And also a LOT cheaper, and a lot less painful for everyone involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie guilty or not, just keep quite. You do not have to talk or answer questions. It is you fifth amendment right, even if you tell the truth they will try to twist it for their purpuses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie, guilty or not just keep quite. It is your fifth amendment right. Even if you are telling the truth they will try to change it to fit their purpuses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie, guilty or not just keep quite. It is your fifth amendment right. Even if you are telling the truth they will try to change it to fit their purpuses.
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