How to expose a liar: a dozen tips from science

Lies are tricky. They serve no real survival purpose and usually make things worse instead of better. Luckily science has studied the phenomenon deeply and, apart from understanding where lies come from, it has determined ways to spot one. But first, lets learn a little about them.

Janina Steinmetz and Ann-Christin Posten have dedicated an article to lies, published in the psychology journal InMind. They distinguish between 'white lies' and 'black lies.'

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White lies are supposedly told with a noble purpose, for example in order to not offend people or avoid disappointing them. Black lies, on the other hand, originate from the desire to obtain a benefit for oneself, usually at the expense of the person you're lying to.

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In light of this classification, it would seem almost obvious to consider white lies as a small, easily forgivable sin while black lies are the worst. However, as the two authors of the article, professors at the universities of Utrecht and Cologne, state, they are not sure if that's the case.

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Answering yes to a friend who asks us if we like their new haircut, even if it's not true, might seem like a little offense - maybe even a favor. But is it?

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In another case, when people give the answers to questionnaires that they think are the most socially acceptable answers - instead of what they really feel - white lies can hurt the purpose of an inquiry and give a wrong idea about the statistics of people's opinions.

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If you are stressed and feel cornered, it's easier for you to lie without fully evaluating what the consequences of your behavior might be. This is confirmed by Professor Shaul Shalvi, psychologist and lecturer in Behavioral Ethics at the University of Amsterdam.

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"When people act quickly, they try to do everything possible to secure a profit, even if it leads them to lie," Shalvi says. "Having more time available instead makes people more reflective and better evaluate the consequences of a lie."

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The consequences of black lies are much more evident than those of white lies. Obviously, the lier takes those consequences into account; otherwise, they wouldn't tell such a damaging untruth.

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According to the two scholars in the journal InMind, lying and deceiving are psychologically expensive, even for the liar himself. As they say, "the costs of a lie are closely linked to what people think of themselves."

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For example, if we are people who consider honesty an important value, telling a lie will have a high psychological cost for us. In addition, if we tell the lie to a person we care about, the cost may feel even greater.

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And what happens if we lie to ourselves? Well, the situation becomes dramatic, because we could even go so far as to overestimate our abilities, with all the consequences that this entails.

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This is confirmed by an experiment conducted on 76 students by Harvard Business School researcher Zoe Chance. Students were allowed to cheat on a math test. When they did so, they would start to believe so much in their own lie of having known the answers, that they were convinced they would also pass even more difficult tests. Which, in reality, they did not.

So far, we have considered reasons people may have to tell a lie. But what happens on the other side of the conversation? How can we recognize a liar when they are telling us falsehoods? Here, too, science comes to our aid, dispelling some myths and giving us indications that could be useful in catching a liar.

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If you think you can unmask a liar simply by looking them in the eyes, we are sorry to disappoint you: in reality, this is not the case. So no situations like the ones in the series 'Lie to me' are possible.

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Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire conducted an experiment, analyzing and comparing the behavior of honest people and liars. His conclusion is that it would be absolutely impossible to recognize a liar by the rapid movement of the pupils - even though we traditionally think we can.

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According to psychologists, there's no truth serum. Not even Sodium Pentothal, commonly known as a truth serum, would enable us to distinguish the truth from a lie. Under the effect of the serum, a person loses the mental filters he normally has and becomes very talkative. This means he will give an infinity of information, but it cannot be said with certainty that there won't be any lies among that information.

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In reality, there is no type of device that, connected to our body, can give absolute certainty about our sincerity. Even the polygraph cannot be relied on 100%. That is why its test results are admitted as evidence in American criminal cases.

The polygraph, in fact, simply measures our levels of stress and anxiety when we are subjected to a question. Many scientists are convinced that it can be easily fooled by people with nerves of steel. Meanwhile, others, under the pressure of the test, may show irregularities that aren't a result of lying.

To know if a person is lying, one could use a test designed by researchers at the University of Granada in Spain, which uses thermography: the results, they assure, would have an accuracy level of 80%.

According to the Spanish research, to measure the so-called 'Pinocchio effect' and unmask a liar, we need to consider two areas of the face: the forehead and, as the famous wooden puppet taught us... the nose!

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The lead researcher, Emilio Gómez Milán, clarifies: "When we lie, the temperature of the tip of the nose drops between 0.6 and 1.2 ºC (33 - 53,6 °F), while that of the forehead increases between 0.6 and 1.5 ºC (33 - 59 °F). The greater the difference in temperature between the two areas of the face, the more likely that person is lying."

This research, as well as the results of a polygraph, may be useful in a lab or a police investigation, but for the average person in daily life, they won't be feasible. We simply cannot go around with a thermometer and measure people's foreheads and noses when they tell us a story!

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In fact, nearly all scholars agree that it is very difficult to establish with absolute certainty whether someone is telling us a lie or the truth. Yet, we shouldn't just give up. And some tricks may help us along.

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Here are some concrete guides that can help you in the arduous task of unmasking a liar. The first is summarized by psychologist Aldert Vrij from the University of Portsmouth in his book 'Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities.'

According to Vrij, one simply needs to go through the following steps to start recognizing a liar.

1. Having a suspicion
2. Ask the person trick questions
3. Refrain from disclosing important information
4. Be informed and well documented
5. Ask the liar to repeat a part of his story
6. Listen and observe carefully
7. Compare the behavior of the liar in different environments

Seems easy and practical, right?

David J. Lieberman, Ph.D., FBI consultant and author of the new book Mindreader: 'The New Science of Deciphering What People Really Think, What They Really Want, and Who They Really Are,' has similar ideas on how to tell when someone is lying. But he warns: there are no one-trick ponies or magical tells.

"As a general guideline, a truthful response is short and direct," said Dr. Lieberman in an interview on the 'Write About Now Podcast' collected by Entrepreneur. Liars talk too much. If you ask a direct question and the person responds with excuses or explanations instead of short and simple answers, they might be lying.

"A liar is interested in selling you something," Dr. Lieberman said. "They need you to believe them, which means they typically oversell well past the point when a truthful person would have stopped. There is a tendency to overexplain," he explained.

Lying takes much more energy than telling the truth, so Dr. Lieberman points out they usually feel relieved when the conversation ends. "Put yourself in the mindset of an honest person that was wrongfully accused of something. You are upset and bothered, maybe resentful—but you're not relieved," he said.

"When somebody's feigning an emotion, it doesn't encompass the entire face," Dr. Lieberman said. When a liar smiles, they don't do it with their hole face.

Imagine being wrongfully accused and interrogated, you would probably be freaking out. According to Dr. Lieberman, calm can be interpreted as a sign of lying: liars pretend to be calm so no one will spot their lies.

Most people struggle to tell a linear and well-detailed story. They drift and continue after the main event. According to Dr. Lieberman, this could be helpful when sporting a liar: "A person who is making up a story, after they get to the main event, they're gonna be done. They're not going to continue because, in their mind, that's what they have to sell you," he said.

Dr. Lieberman also trains agents to be wary of pronouns: liars tend to use impersonal ones more often. "Pronouns can reveal whether someone is trying to distance or altogether separate himself from his words," he wrote in 'Mindreader,' as collected by Entrepreneur.

The signs of lying have also fascinated Professor Vrij, and he published another study on the subject: 'The Effects of a Secondary Task on True and False Opinion Statements.' What does that mean?

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According to this latest study, published in the International Journal of Psychology and Behavior Analysis, if you want to recognize a liar you have to be cunning and distract him from the fact that you are trying to catch him in a lie. How do you do this? Well, by making sure the person is focusing on other, secondary tasks.

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The mental effort involved in carrying out the secondary task, coupled with that required by the construction of a lie, is unbearable for the average person's brain. "Liars will be more concerned with the [secondary] task than with reminding themselves to keep lying," the researcher explains.

When doing a task on the side, liars were often unable to respond immediately. In some cases, their answers were implausible or unclear. The researchers add that, the harder the secondary task, the harder it is to lie. Make the suspected cheater drive down a mountain road while talking to them, and you'll see that it's much harder for them to lie.

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If you are the liar, shame on you! Be aware that you may be caught, even if the risk is low. And while a few small lies, like the ones about your age and height on dating sites, may be forgiven - as University of Michigan scholar Nicole Ellison suggests - it's not guaranteed at all that you'll get a second date after your match finds out the truth.

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