Take the first finger of your dominant hand, and draw a capital Q on your forehead. Did you draw it in a way so you could read it if you had eyes on the inside of your forehead? That is, if you’re right-handed, with the tail of the Q on the right side of your forehead? If so, you’re probably rubbish at lying.
Apparently – and there are studies to prove it – this test provides a rough measure of a concept known as “self-monitoring”. High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by someone facing them, while low self-monitors tend to draw it in a way in which it could be read by themselves.
High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them, and are good at manipulating the truth so other people see them in the best possible light. Low self-monitors are guided more by their inner feelings and values. They’re less aware of their impact on those around them, tend to lie less and are no good at it when they do.
Apparently we’ve evolved to lie, at least to a certain extent. Children start lying as early as age two, and learn the art of false flattery by five. The average adult is lied to on any given day from 10 to 200 times. According to research, we tell an average of three porkies during a routine 10-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance, and some people will lie 12 times within that time span.
Generally these will be white lies, anything less than the most literal expression of truth – telling people you’re pleased to see them when you aren’t, that the dinner was delicious when it wasn’t, that your beloved’s bum doesn’t look big in those pants. That is, the kind of low-level fib without which we wouldn’t have any friends. Anyway, quite often and deep down we know when someone is telling us a white lie. We wouldn’t ask what our bum looked like in those pants if we weren’t incredibly willing to be complicit in our own betrayal.
Philosophers, religious people, writers and social psychologists have long grappled with the meaning and implications of lying, but it’s complicated. Is lying inherently bad, given that sometimes it is an act of diplomacy or even courage, rather than an act of evil? Why do we lie so much when we value truth so highly? Is there any difference between lying and “bullshitting”, which often involves people (real estate agents, advertisers, politicians) who’ve actually lost sight of the truth? Can you really lie to yourself? When, most crucially, does a white lie tip over into the area of the offensive and hurtful lie-lie?
The general consensus is there isn’t any clear consensus. But partly it depends on the intent: an acceptable lie is one designed to avoid offence, while the lie-lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive, in order to control another person’s actions or thoughts. But it’s a slippery slope from the diplomatic to the less-authentic self.
Here’s another fundamentally flawed aspect of our psychology – we’ve evolved to lie, but we’re also naturally inclined to believe what other people tell us. Many of us are convinced we can figure out when we shouldn’t believe what others are telling us; that liars look up and to the left, for instance, or jiggle their leg, scratch their nose or blink too often, that their voice goes up or down and their pupils dilate. But if we believed that, then we’d be wrong.
Researchers have spent hundreds of hours comparing films of liars and truth-tellers, but the empirical evidence that liars exhibit certain physical behaviours isn’t there. The fabricator is just as likely to look you straight in the eye as off to the left, and to keep their legs perfectly still as to jiggle them.
Most of us have only a 50/50 chance of spotting a liar, which is no better than tossing a coin.
But where there’s a will to believe, there’s always a way. The most commonly used lie detector test is still the polygraph, which measures heart rate and blood pressure, respiration and skin conductivity, while asking people a series of questions, usually Relevant Questions (Did you shoot your wife?) and Control Questions (Have you ever betrayed anyone who trusted you?).
But the polygraph has long been controversial in scientific circles as there are few good studies that validate it as being any good at detecting deception. One of the key problems is the physiological reactions that the tests measure are not unique to deception; the heart of an honest person might beat faster when speaking truthfully (especially if they’re being interrogated with wires attached to them) while that of a practised liar may not.
This hasn’t stopped the US federal government, and state and local law-enforcement agencies, from using them, presumably because people in these agencies are more willing to believe what they’re told (that they work) rather than objectively assess the scientific evidence. It’s possibly instructive that you can now also download a number of lie-detecting apps to your phone that track the likes of eye movement and facial tics, although they are marketed more as party games than as truth-seeking devices worth taking seriously.
However, if many of our ideas about lie-spotting are the stuff of folklore, there are a few linguistic clues worth paying attention to. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” As we now know, he did. And according to US-based professional lie detector Pamela Myer, Bill Clinton’s most infamous lie displayed several hallmarks of the dissembler, such as the use of overstatement and formality (“I did not” instead of “I didn’t”) and the use of distancing techniques (“that woman” instead of Monica).
I discovered this while watching a TED talk by Myer, “How to Spot a Liar”, that’s been viewed by almost 11 million people. It has probably attracted quite a lot of liars, who want to keep up-to-date with the research on lying, and how to get away with it – but 11 million viewers? That suggests to me that to an awful lot of people, the truth still matters.
Words by: Margo White
Photos by: Getty Images
