How good are you at spotting a lie?

[Hadoblado]

And how do you know how good you are?

I've generally acted in such a way that it wasn't important for me to know whether people were lying. It never felt like that important a skill - but recently it's somewhat of an hobby level obsession.

We've covered it a fair bit in a unit at university: psychology and the law. Apparently people tend to wildly overestimate their ability to spot a lie. Even people that have a professional investment in it (such as police) tend to not do better than 60%, though some uber-specialised professionals are up around 70%. IIRC the average is around 55%.

One of the obstacles to improvement is that it's pretty rare to get 100% bonified proof that it's a lie or a truth, and people tend to fill the blanks with what they'd prefer to believe.

A lot of the heuristics people commonly believe to be true (to the point that they're used in police interrogation manuals) have either not been shown to have any relationship to lying, or have been shown to have no relationship with lying. One that somewhat shocked me was signs that a person is anxious has no weight in whether a person is lying.
There is also a fairly heavy experience bias. People that deal with liars a lot (prison inmates, police) tend to assume people are lying (and vice versa).

So I've been playing a lot of games that require you to spot lies. I've been playing werewolf at the local nerdstore (waaay different to mafia), I've been playing coup (simple but great game) with friends. I've been watching 'would I lie to you' (celebrity panel show) which has been very interesting.

I think it appeals to me because it turns every conversation into a potential puzzle.

Anyway:
1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?
2) how good of a liar are you?
3) do you know any good games (or other) that help train this skill?
4) are there any particular things you look for?

 

[redbaron]

1) Probably just slightly above average. I actually think I'm better at figuring out when someone ISN'T lying and just backtrack from there. There's a few situations I can think of where someone's been accused of lying or something and I've defended them and it's turned out they were in the clear after all.

2) I have no idea.

3) I believe it might be a person-specific thing to spot lies, and I don't know if there's a way to just flatly "train" the skill.

4) Outside factors that should match up but maybe don't. If someone says they're stuck in traffic and running late, I'd probably think about where they're coming from, if there's likely to be traffic at this time, are there roadworks at the moment or something like that. I don't know that anyone could detect a lie just on the basis of 'I'm stuck in traffic' but you certainly could if you could find out there was actually no traffic on their route. Not the typical thing I'd investigate but a good example.

In my experience it's rare for someone to just outright lie. They're more likely to bend the truth or something. When issues have come up at work in the past and I check cameras, rarely is someone outright doing the wrong thing. It's more like they're being irresponsible and cause a problem and their story sort of matches but it diminishes their involvement in it.

I guess I just take everything with a grain of salt and assume the truth is somewhere between.

 

[The Gopher]

Your stats are correct for trained police such as detectives but general police are actually at 47%. Probably as you say... all the false negatives.

1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?

Well, it depends, if I have no reason to believe someone is lying or will not be negatively effected if they are I don't generally pick up on lies.

2) how good of a liar are you?

I was in the closet for years. I am, fucking, phenomenal at keeping a story together but not particularly good at general lying. I do sometimes make obvious lies so people think I'm bad at lying which allows me to get away with stuff when I really have to. That said I still suck at direct lying. Particularly in like werewolf, generally in social situations you can lie all you want because people aren't expecting it/you can push the conversation away from things that would reveal a lie. However when staring down the barrel of a gun I'm pretty bad. I would say I'm much better at spotting lies, and much better at turning conversation into something that avoids me directly lying. I lie by leaving things out more.

Might be part of the christian upbringing subconsciously saying no don't lie... but you can avoid the truth.

3) do you know any good games (or other) that help train this skill?

Doing what you do is a good start. Poker obviously.


4) are there any particular things you look for?

Deviation from baseline. If someone always reacts a certain way then reacts differently why? If there's a good reason it probably isn't a lie but it's something to look into and question. I used to win dixit games simply by looking at the persons face when they put each card down.

 

[Deleted member 1424]

1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?

If general lie detection was my vocation, I'd be shit at it. Ultimately it depends on the person. I'm not likely to catch a lie by someone I don't know. Although I'm even less likely to actually care about whatever irrelevant, boring thing they're lying about. I especially suck at reading dudes, but it almost never matters fortunately. It's usually something along the lines of a guy unwantedly hitting on me and either lying about being taken or something in his past and I find out the truth later and I am basically 'lol, what a tool.' I don't base my decisions or world view on people I don't know, so there's little reason for me to care about the common deceptions of the faceless masses. Though there was one case of a married man twice my age at a past job that I would have the occasional friendly discussion with and I thought it was innocent. Then everyone else at my work told me that when I wasn't around that he was very vocally in love/lust with me. That was humiliating and completely out of the realm of my expectations for the man. He acted fatherly with me and I bought it. It stands out as one of the few times I was completely caught off guard by a deception and had reason to care about it.

My lie detection tends to be tailor made to the individual or group. So my success rate with people I know well is much higher. I often catch small lies, which I'll let be 99% of the time. Usually such lies are benign or told to save face. I always know when something big is being concealed, even if I don't know the specifics. In those cases, if I feel magnanimous to the particular person, I can usually prod gently, let them know that they can tell me the type of lie I suspect in confidence and non-judgement. I can usually get them to confide in me and I'll try to help with their problem. Sometimes, I'll bemusedly just take note of it and let it play out on it's own, as in the case of my sister's affair. Ultimately, you can never really know how many lies are undetected, but it does seem that I get taken by surprise a lot less than most people in my social sphere, though that might just be a product of general cynicism and confirmation bias.

2) how good of a liar are you?

I've never been directly caught in a lie that I know of, though in some cases I've revealed the lie after a significant period (atheism/gynephilia). I don't lie often and most people think of me as an honest if guarded person. I'm more likely to lie by omission, straight refuse to answer or state something in a leading or oblique manner; so that probably mitigates that achievement. I do sometimes get a kick out of letting other people imaginations run wild, so as a sort of a bemused revenge for my traumatic atheist coming out, I let my mother go through countless theories for years regarding my sexuality before answering definitively a year ago. She thought I might be trans among other things for awhile. It was pretty funny. I also let her think I was afraid to 'come out' to her for a shorter while, when I never was. Which is pretty fucked up I admit, but it's hard to feel guilty when I remember the hell she and my father put me through when I became an atheist as a teenager. It was partly that I was trying to to teach her a lesson in tolerance of maligned minorities so I alluded I could be part of many of them. It was also part personal amusement and all pettiness. Now she has gay friends that she doesn't mind being 'mistaken for gay' with and even non-Christian friends; which was definitely not the case ten years ago. I think my brother and I forced her to re-evaluate her worldview because she loved us, but we were strange.

Over my life there have been a few huge lies that were, frankly, alarmingly successful. I've never copped to them and fortunately they are irrelevant to anyone now and I don't think they harmed anyone. I hate being in a position where lying is necessary, so I avoid it, but you're lying to yourself if you think it doesn't happen. At that point intent, execution, and positive end result for all parties is what matters.

I will also tell outrageous lies for humor sometimes, but they're not meant to be believed so I don't think they really count. Although I did legitimately convince a lady that I was a witch once. I will also lie on occasion to get people I don't know to piss off.

sidenote:
I've never lied to a police officer, but several have thought I was. Is there a trick to getting people like them to believe the truth? I can't help but get nervous because of prior experiences. Most of them buy the nervous = liar stereotype, which has never made sense to me.

goddamn, I wrote a lot. wtf

 

[washti]

1) I'm moderetly skilled with my fathers lies, but bastard learned wraping his BS with things I dont like to listen about - boring long-winded religious crap, so I dismiss him. He win when I dont want to pay attention. I cannot bite him here. Best lie is omision anyway.

With strangers I'm ok with intonation change, some said is female thing. I have some success here. Males generally have less emotive speach and behaviour patterns so its more difficult to spot. Sphinx like talk - vague statements, avoidance of details, redirection from subject of convo to object/person in surroundings, sudden compliments. But yeah many times its just in my head so I would say I'm not that good - some people behave like that regardless.

How I know that I spot a lie - well simply I plan my action with assumption that given infomation wasnt true and result proves me right.

2) Bad. I'm too nervous. What I find worked for me in past was playin/being moron so people dont treat me serious. Then they dont know whats for real and whats smoke.

3) No. Err Mafia?

4)Repetition of movement:
- averting eyes or whole head
- nose touching
- hands going and coming behind back
- small smile tiks
- swaying body
- clapping hands in prayer gesture
- licking lips
- rytmicly exposing jaw in "nodding motion"
- fixed stare - like person see thru you

Change in voice and intonation:
- sudden higher pitch
- moments of quaitere voice
- moments of slower pace - lingering phrase
- missing words or funny misspellings
- mechanical laughter

I guess you mean this factors to be not related to lying but showing in police manuals?
I kind of believe in them tho and look for them when dealing with people. Depending on person combination will differ of course.

 

[TheManBeyond]

3) No. Err Mafia?

4)Repetition of movement:
- averting eyes or whole head
- nose touching
- hands going and coming behind back
- small smile tiks
- swaying body
- clapping hands in prayer gesture
- licking lips
- rytmicly exposing jaw in "nodding motion"
- fixed stare - like person see thru you

Change in voice and intonation:
- sudden higher pitch
- moments of quaitere voice
- moments of slower pace - lingering phrase
- missing words or funny misspellings
- mechanical laughter

half of them sound like social anxiety
clapping hands? who does that
my pitch changes all the time
missing words all the time too
could you post an example of mechanical laughter?

i think most of the time i'm good at lying, like to girls, saying things like "i love you" hahaha or, "yeah i'm at home watching some movie"
but let aside the romantic lifestyle, if i want to get something, or i really need something i would rather just make much more emphasis on some aspects that are true and push aside as much as i can what balances them.
i also have experienced how people doubt about my artistic qualities many times, like "u sing with autotune" (if i sing nicely), you are not a singer (when i sound kind of out of tune), or you have a "different voice tone", or "you just turn down the opacity" and shit like that, but i cannot do much about it, just keep producing and keep them hateful about "my lies". sometimes they'll find spots where to take my proof down (like when my band played in that radio show and i sang half of the song a bit out of tune because i was extremely scared almost shaking of fear)) and sometimes it turns out nicely and i will make it clear for them.
the thing is: when people don't want to believe, they won't believe.
i think being a procrastinator, little focused on details is hard to digest by most of people. so everything you do is a big lie.
i heard once: "you know when old people start behaving like giving a fuck because they are going to die soon; that's what happened to david lynch in the last twin peaks season." xD, kind of the same thing.

and well about spotting liers, damn, i just don't care, if they lie good for them, i'm most of the time paranoid about people but i just simply can't focus on if they are lying or not.

 

[Jennywocky]

Anyway:​

1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?​

"Thinking" helps to process stuff but I've seen smart people pay more attention to their own thought process than observing how a person is behaving and putting themselves in the person's shoes. So I got better, the more I relied on my instincts + observations. But instincts here means "big picture" perceptions. Like, step back and look at a scenario. What makes the most sense? For example, someone can feel fervently believable in a situation, but when you step back and look at everything, their veracity might drop precipitously. I remember when a friend's husband was acting weird but no one wanted to think he was a liar, and for me it was like, "I'm 95% sure he's cheating on her" based on his story which made no sense in the big scheme of things. I was right, she found out later to her chagrin. I also was raised by a dad who was an alcoholic and lied incessantly, so I learned to take stories with a grain of truth and try to "feel out" whether there was any large-scale coherence to someone's claims.​

​

The thing is, I typically just use it to steer my responses, not necessarily try to "out" someone for lying or making a direct confrontation about it. I am regularly in scenarios where I have to suss out whether someone's lying, and I tend to err in their favor; my initial guesses are pretty spot-on, but I have been wrong on occasion and so like to keep collecting data to support or refute a claim.​

2) how good of a liar are you?​

Well, I hate lying in general, which doesn't help -- I'd rather be honest. Having to hide/screen out information goes against my style and bugs me on some level; however, the world has taught me that you can't be an open book for everything and that you need various levels of disclosure.​

So aside from not wanting to lie and not wanting to think much while lying in case I get anxious, I'm pretty good at detaching and saying things that seems reasonable and align to a large degree with the truth, which makes it harder to find the lie. I'm not a bald-faced liar, but I can lie subtly and with a straight casual face. Like I said, I was raised/taught by the best. I also favor "lying through omission" -- I casually divert conversation and/or don't tell the whole truth, versus all-out lie.​

Again, I don't really like to, though.​

for the other questions, naw, I don't feel like delineating cues. Everyone gets hung up on that and thinks they know when someone is lying, and there's no point in arguing about it, everyone's got their pet methods.​

I would simply say:​

1. You're comparing truthful behavior to lying behavior, not the behavior out of any context. Someone might be normally anxious. So if they are anxious, it doesn't mean they are lying. You're looking for deviations from norm.​

2. Take a step back. Look at big-picture coherence. Is their story the most reasonable explanation? (faint echoes of Littlefinger's "game" here -- "worst case scenario", but I'm talking about "reasonable" versus "ludicrous").​

3. Ask them questions without hinting you are trying to discern their veracity. the more they have to lie (or truth tell), the more you have to work with.​

4. The more you know about their personality as well as what they want out of a given situation, the better as well.​

 

[Minuend]

1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?
4) are there any particular things you look for?
I don't think I look that much for lies. I look for personality and tendency to deceive and manipulate, and when I consider someone might be prone to, I don't trust them on things that matter. Whether someone lies about trivial things like what they did last week or whatever- I don't really care. If someone I think is capable, due to personal satisfaction, interest, fun, own issues etc to deceive, I wouldn't trust them if they told me someone was talking behind my back, or the boss gave some sort of instruction that doesn't make sense. Oh, that reminds me I did actually fact check something an unreliable co worker told me on a few occasions because I knew she was a personality type who would lie to get her way. She had been lying.

I do think my more potential blind spot lies in being unable to recognize deceitful nature, rather than miss lies. I find the latter less important. If you know a person to be manipulative, you will automatically process most things it says as potential lies. And even though it doesn't matter s/he lies about small things, you might still process what it talks about as bragging, wanting to be perceived a certain way etc. It contributes to your overall understanding of that person.
If you miss how a person can be an ass, you're more likely to be taken in on its scheme, than if you miss a lie or two.

I do think I give an impression of trusting people more than I do, and believe them more than I do. Which is partly because I tend to go along with someone says as long as I don't see a purpose to do otherwise.

2) how good of a liar are you?
I have no idea. I'd think I was a poor one, but I do think I tend to overestimate how perceptive people are. I don't really need to lie that often. And even if I do, few would be confrontative about it, unless it was something that mattered. Even then, a lot of people tend to shy away from conflict.

3) do you know any good games (or other) that help train this skill?
N/A

3) I believe it might be a person-specific thing to spot lies, and I don't know if there's a way to just flatly "train" the skill.

Probably. I don't think it's useful to train yourself by looking at external clues, but I do think it's possible to become better by diving into the mind of the other. But there's probably a hard cap for how good you can become even with training, just like there's pretty much a limit to how good of a football player you can be or how much information your brain can process.

 

[Deleted member 1424]

1) how good at spotting lies are you? How do you know this?
4) are there any particular things you look for?
I don't think I look that much for lies. I look for personality and tendency to deceive and manipulate, and when I consider someone might be prone to, I don't trust them on things that matter. Whether someone lies about trivial things like what they did last week or whatever- I don't really care. If someone I think is capable, due to personal satisfaction, interest, fun, own issues etc to deceive, I wouldn't trust them if they told me someone was talking behind my back, or the boss gave some sort of instruction that doesn't make sense. Oh, that reminds me I did actually fact check something an unreliable co worker told me on a few occasions because I knew she was a personality type who would lie to get her way. She had been lying.

I do think my more potential blind spot lies in being unable to recognize deceitful nature, rather than miss lies. I find the latter less important. If you know a person to be manipulative, you will automatically process most things it says as potential lies. And even though it doesn't matter s/he lies about small things, you might still process what it talks about as bragging, wanting to be perceived a certain way etc. It contributes to your overall understanding of that person.
If you miss how a person can be an ass, you're more likely to be taken in on its scheme, than if you miss a lie or two.

Being able to parse a deceitful person's psychology is much more useful than trying to detect a singular lie. Malicious deceit is often much more than one occurrence and subtle. You need to know the agenda of the person; you need to know how they think and what motivates them. If you truly understand a person's goal/perspective there's little they can they can do to successfully lie to you. For example most people are ego-centric, so a lot of lies/deceit are just designed to portray themselves in accordance to how they see themselves rather than how they actually are.

Lies with a very specific narrow goal to a person who doesn't understand how the liar might be motivated to lie in such a manner will be more successful. You'll go farther picking apart someone's nature than looking for bodily tics. For example, say person A lies to be person B to protect person C, because A and C are friends. If person B doesn't understand the relationship that exists between A and C, they won't detect the lie or even that A has a motivation to lie.

I tend to get very suspicious of people who seem to be trying to 'sell' a very particular image of themselves, especially if I don't know why they crave that image and other people are gleefully reciting whatever virtues they've been told that the subject has, by that subject. Especially egregious when there's no real, equal friendship between them and the subject (damn fanboys.) Been a handful of people that ping me really hard in this way on the forum. The 'cult of personality' types. They know who they are. I'm on to you.

 

[TheManBeyond]

Im alzo into u
So call me maybe.
Actually my IQ didnt let me understand that last paragraph completely.
I mean. U say example: I am selling my image of selftaught artist and musician. Or smth and that makes me a lier.
Or Sinny with her aliens. Or animekitty with God. Or pizzabeak with drugs. Or other stuff.
Maybe I didn't get it. But I mean. That's the only thing I know about and can bring interesting stuff to the table. For me its negative when u try to brainwash people with ur stuff. Like pizzabeak preaching about drugs.
Its like marketing.
Now I'm more into that kind of stuff than ever. I have been 3 years+ in this forum and I haven't been all the time showing off how much I know about that stuff.
Or u mean simply Carl Jung fans are retarded? I don't read about lots of things outside the music and arts field. Carl Jung is one or those things I have read more about.
If I know about it why shouldn't I use it to socialize with other people who also know about it?
It all comes down to: I know these are bad people because I say so and I don't like it.
In my view.
But maybe I didn't understand anything you said.

Is this post getting me closer to a ban?

 

[washti]

*cough* Architect *runs away very fast unlike real gangsta-ass nigga*
*cough* nanoooook*scremas from distance*

 

[TransientMoment]

Going along with what Adaire said: You have to know the truth to know a lie. You can't just find it based on cues. The only generally reliable cue is that someone lying usually takes a fraction of a second longer to respond than someone not lying because they have to invent some kind of truth rather than pulling something straight from memory, but even this isn't fully reliable if you don't know whether the person lies on average or is generally honest. Hence, as Jennywocky said, she's always evaluating. And in her favor, I find that being honest with yourself helps you detect lies because you're focused more on the truth rather than playing a mental game of balancing statements based on "do I want to think that about this person/about me/about that". Not lying to others makes you less prone to lie to yourself, however uncomfortable that may be. Not lying to yourself allows for self-discovery. Self-discovery helps socially because you'll be aware of those uncomfortable things you (and therefore perhaps other people) might want to lie about and how, so whenever you hear such lies, you'll already have an idea they might be lying, even before they finish. Notably, however, unless you have the truth, there's no way of actually definitively declaring whether or not something is a lie. But you can probably guess alot about someone's activity based on their personality and past history.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

Honestly, I mainly pick up lies by holes in a person's logic. When the story doesn't add up.

I also tend to go by the "it doesn't much matter" approach. I tend not to take others' words for things except half-heartedly (unless a statement requires reflection).

Sure, my subconscious is going to pick up on whether someone is lying, but I guess everyone is like that. If I get more in contact with my unconscious processes though, I should be able to turn it into a real skill.

 

[Hadoblado]

A few things I've picked up on/learned:

If someone is taking up more space than is normal while under heavy fire, this over-compensation can represent attempts to control tells. The same is true for non-expressiveness, particularly of the hands. The size things has come up twice at werewolf, where someone who had every reason in the world to be worried then stretched out, crossed their legs, and put their hands behind their head. They're trying to convey with body language that they're in control, not realising that someone who was telling the truth would not have a sense of control because they're being falsely accused. With lack of gesticulation, this is something with empirical support. The way I think of it is the liar is inhibiting everything that they think might give them away, but the choice of which behaviours to inhibit is a purely intuitive one and can go too far. In contrast, the truth teller will usually have a belief that the truth is on their side and that they therefore should not be hiding things, thus they can be quite animated (does not work if they feel hopeless).

A big one that comes up in interrogation is trying to stress the working memory of the suspect. It takes more cognitive resources to fabricate a lie and keep it straight than it does to tell the truth, so in theory, there's a point at which a suspect will be able to keep a true story straight but not a fabricated one. Unfortunately, people's working memory varies between individuals, so it's not a simple matter. People will often make mistakes in recounting the truth as well... Nevertheless, most people don't deviate from the norm by too much, so most liars can be put under the pump by having them count backwards in 3s between installments of their story.

A similar concept is the way that particular types of encoded memories can optimally be retrieved. For episodic memories like that which you would have for something that happened to you, you tend to have an inherent sense of the order of events. If you get someone to tell their story backwards, that's a relatively simple exercise. But getting someone to reverse the order of a fabricated story while keeping it straight is a lot different.

People 'listing' is something I actively look for now (though for different reasons than you would in mafia). Listing is a way of chunking information semantically such that it's easier to remember and keep straight. A person who has experienced something generally won't need to list it semantically, since they've got a memory of the thing that happened.

But while I think all or most of these work to some extent, there is no 100% way to spot a lie otherwise crime would be solved. Everything is statistical so you kind of need to take a holistic picture into account. For me, I've got a pretty dirt-poor working memory and tend to encode even the things I experience somewhat semantically, so I'm in hot water if people think I'm lying and they use this stuff. A lot of it's pretty impractical for everyday lies too...