The Burden of Lying

DaltheJigsaw

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.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-burden-of-lying

Ada_B

Telling the truth is a darn sight more relaxing than having to remember the lies we've told and keeping our stories straight

person

We're much better at using our words and facial expressions to hide a lie than the rest of our body. There are many physical ques that a person has to their emotional state. If you know these and they don't match up with the words coming out of someones mouth that's the start of being able to detect a lie.

One example is sometimes when a person falsly answers a question in the affirmative but in reality the answer is negative they'll say yes but shake their head no. The first time I saw this in an interview after reading about it I was amazed at how obvious it was. It was some interview about the financial crisis and the guys answer was one of those fairly obvious statements that cover up what really happened but has plausible deniability, he was shaking his head no the whole time he was talking, it was kind of funny actually.