FACT: People Suck At Detecting Lies
Surely your Spidey senses have tingled when someone said something you didn’t believe. You know, like when someone won’t look you in the eye, or they’re tapping their foot nervously and you’re absolutely certain they’re feeding you a line of B.S.? After all, there are tell-tale signs that let you know when someone’s lying, right? Right, guys?
Well, the truth is that Buffett the Manatee—who has an amazing 11-4 record on predicting Super Bowl winners — is probably more likely to be correct than you, when deciding whether or not someone’s telling a fib.
Pixabay
This is gonna be the Vikings’ year. We got it from a reliable source.
And that’s because, statistically, people have an accuracy rate of only 54% when judging the veracity of truth/lie statements, which is just slightly better than a coin flip. As it turns out, we’re not as Jack Byrnes as we thought.
But why? Is it because most lies are of the “tiny, white” variety? I mean, do I really want to know if I look fat in my jeans? Do we only detect big lies, or the ones that seem important to us? Could you spot a million-dollar bluff in a poker game? Science says “no” to these questions; well, maybe not to the jeans question, but “no” to the rest of them.
And that 54% rate is pretty damned consistent. In the study Accuracy of Deception Judgments, authors Charles F. Bond, Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo found that very 54% rate for detecting deception to be consistent across all studies and contexts. Now, the obvious question here is, why it’s 54% and not, say, 50%. If we were merely guessing, it’d be 50/50, but we’re stuck on that 54 number. The reality is that as bad as we are at spotting lies, there are people who are even worse at telling lies. Some studies have revealed that there is a small percentage of liars whose lies are easily detected by most people. Which is ... comforting, I guess?
Pixabay
Granted, some have more obvious tells than others.
Timothy R. Levine, in the study Truth-Default Theory and the Psychology of Lying and Deception Detection, explains the problem with how people think they’re supposed to detect lies, and shares what’s wrong with that approach. When we rely on non-verbal cues from others, as presented in the TV show Lie to Me, we might as well flip a coin at that point. There are no universal “tells” or human behaviors that tip off a lie. For every person who rubs their nose while lying, there is another who rubs their nose when they’re nervous because someone thinks they are. As a matter of fact, the way you interact with someone can cause them to become inconsistent and act suspicious.
As sexy as the idea is, there are no secret methods to determine if someone is lying— at least, not yet. However, science is revealing a better path to deception detection accuracy. There are emerging studies, such as New and Improved Accuracy Findings in Deception Detection Research, which show how traditional research gets us to that magic 54%, share how understanding of the subject is changing, and provide ways to improve our accuracy. Which sounds great, but don’t get any ideas that anybody’s going to try to publish a guidebook on being some badass lie detector and ... oh for God’s sake.
Well, whatever. All I know for sure is that you don’t even need to lie to me, because I already know that I look damned good in these jeans.
