Pants on Fire

April 23, 2021 11:00 AM

The Truth about Lying. "Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned in the family’s sprawling Long Island home. Authorities didn’t believe his claims of innocence, and he spent 17 years in prison for the murders. Yet in another case, detectives thought that 16-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic seemed too distraught and too eager to help detectives after his high school classmate was found strangled. He, too, was judged to be lying and served nearly 16 years for the crime. One man was not upset enough. The other was too upset. How can such opposite feelings both be telltale clues of hidden guilt?"

Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception.

"...Apart from lower accuracy, Bond & DePaulo's (2006) meta-analysis revealed a second negative consequence of paying attention only to visual cues: Messages judged from visual cues result in a lie bias—the tendency to judge someone as a liar. Access to only visual information should encourage the use of nonverbal stereotypes because, when speech content is unavailable, observers have little other than their stereotypical beliefs to rely on (Bond & DePaulo 2006). Since nonverbal stereotypes relate to the behavior of liars rather than truth tellers (e.g., liars lack eye contact and fidget), a lie bias is the result. This could perhaps explain why US police investigators typically show a lie bias (Kassin et al. 2005, Meissner & Kassin 2002), whereas their UK counterparts do not (Mann et al. 2004, 2008). US officers are trained to pay attention to nonverbal behavior when attempting to detect deceit, whereas UK investigators are instructed to ignore nonverbal behavior (e.g., Vrij et al. 2017b)."

--
"researchers [have] largely abandoned the hunt for nonverbal cues to deception. But are there other ways to spot a liar? Today, psychologists investigating deception are more likely to focus on verbal cues, and particularly on ways to magnify the differences between what liars and truth-tellers say.

For example, interviewers can strategically withhold evidence longer, allowing a suspect to speak more freely, which can lead liars into contradictions. In one experiment, Hartwig taught this technique to 41 police trainees, who then correctly identified liars about 85 percent of the time, as compared to 55 percent for another 41 recruits who had not yet received the training. “We are talking significant improvements in accuracy rates,” says Hartwig.

Another interviewing technique taps spatial memory by asking suspects and witnesses to sketch a scene related to a crime or alibi. Because this enhances recall, truth-tellers may report more detail. In a simulated spy mission study published by Mann and her colleagues last year, 122 participants met an “agent” in the school cafeteria, exchanged a code, then received a package. Afterward, participants instructed to tell the truth about what happened gave 76 percent more detail about experiences at the location during a sketching interview than those asked to cover up the code-package exchange. "

posted by storybored (40 comments total)

Thank you, storybored. This is really important stuff.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:03 AM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Wasn't Amanda Knox in the same boat? Not upset enough?
posted by kschang at 11:32 AM on April 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Amanda did the splits and cartwheels in the police station. I'm guessing that's being not upset enough.
posted by all about eevee at 12:07 PM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is incredibly fascinating, thank you for posting it.

Tangential but somehow related in my mind:
Years ago, my campus had a cop do an AMA-type chat with students during "drunk driving awareness week."

It was surprisingly well-attended, and the students were listening carefully! Especially the girl who pointed out that at various times that session, he'd told stories where his reason for stopping someone late at night was:
+ Driving under the speed limit
+ Driving over the speed limit
+ Driving the speed limit exactly, i.e. "too carefully"

She was like, so you just pull people over if you feel like it, and he replied, basically, yes, if I feel there's something wrong with this picture.
posted by Caxton1476 at 12:15 PM on April 23, 2021 [64 favorites]

This is a great post, highlighting some really valuable information.

There's another important bit right after the (very useful) stuff quoted above about withholding evidence longer and using sketching:

In the US, though, such science-based reforms have yet to make significant inroads among police and other security officials. The US Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration, for example, still uses nonverbal deception clues to screen airport passengers for questioning. The agency’s secretive behavioral screening checklist instructs agents to look for supposed liars’ tells such as averted gaze — considered a sign of respect in some cultures — and prolonged stare, rapid blinking, complaining, whistling, exaggerated yawning, covering the mouth while speaking and excessive fidgeting or personal grooming. All have been thoroughly debunked by researchers.

...

As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they do not meet academic standards of scientific evidence.

...

But, says Mann, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time.

This seems like something worth bringing up to my federal and local legislators.

The essential thing to keep pointing out about faulty police work is this: if you put someone in jail, but it's the wrong person, the actual guilty person is still out there, able to kill or assault someone again. Ignoring the evidence about what works and what doesn't means criminals stay on the streets.

These are terrific articles, storybored. Thank you so much for sharing them with us.
posted by kristi at 12:20 PM on April 23, 2021 [30 favorites]

I would be suspicious of anyone doing a cartwheel anywhere for any reason besides (actually maybe still) at a cartwheel competition.

Related to this, there's a lot of research (I'm thinking of the book Range specifically, which I highly recommend) about how humans naturally filter things through their own experience and expertise. The more specialized you become, the more the tendency is to shove every scenario or thing through the same more and more rigid worldview. People who are highly specialized became worse at predicting outcomes than those with broader knowledge.

Also, as usual, I immediately think about how the non-neurotypical people are discriminated against or just put in the GUILTY camp.

My secret to lying is to fully construct the scene in your head and lock it in. Let it become the reality. Not that I lie that much. *casually does a cartwheel*
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 12:20 PM on April 23, 2021 [11 favorites]

The "gaze aversion = lying" tip really bugs me because I almost always avert my gaze when speaking intently (like if I'm talking about myself and my experience in an interview) because I'm thinking and I find looking at another person's face distracting. I worry not-a-small-amount that this would totally screw me over if I ever found myself being interrogated.
posted by Anonymous at 12:26 PM on April 23, 2021

Yeah, going by the "gaze aversion = lying" standard means that almost all autistic people come across as liars.
posted by Lexica at 12:33 PM on April 23, 2021 [28 favorites]

This explains the use of audio only recordings in Line of Duty now. Besides the dramatic buzz at the start of the interview.
posted by mrzarquon at 12:34 PM on April 23, 2021

It's almost like cops don't even try to really solve crimes or serve any useful purpose.
posted by bleep at 12:36 PM on April 23, 2021 [70 favorites]

I don't know, I think Amanda is just socially awkward and didn't know how to react, so, boom, cartwheels.
posted by all about eevee at 12:37 PM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

I am actually terrified of this happening to me somehow and have been for the longest time. The cops are like Freddy Krueger, terrifying me in my dreams and private moments. I'm looking at the table of things associated with lying and I do all of them and I never habitually say things that aren't true. Do I have any chance of not going to jail if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Who knows?
posted by bleep at 12:40 PM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

As I recall, Knox had been questioned for something like 18 hours straight at the time and said she was trying to stretch her muscles after being made to sit for that long.
posted by tavella at 12:44 PM on April 23, 2021 [18 favorites]

In a later study, also by Mann and Vrij, 52 Dutch police officers did no better than chance at distinguishing true and false statements given by family members who’d murdered their relatives but denied it in anguished displays during televised press conferences used in the study. Notably, officers who performed the worst were those who felt that the emotional displays were genuine.

Hey, anyone remember that Brett Kavanaugh hearing
posted by theodolite at 12:47 PM on April 23, 2021 [40 favorites]

Yeah, this is nightmare fuel for me. If I was confronted with serious accusations like this I'd probably just shut down from the stress and would probably be seen as having a very flat affect, not to mention the general problems with eye contact I have to begin with or a general sense and practice of stoicism about death.

On the other hand I briefly worked in a small police station doing some tech/data work where one of the detectives bragged a lot about how easy it was for him to tell when people were lying due to some training with FACS.

I made it a point to lie to him about small things as often as possible about small, silly things during workplace small talk. Like what I had for lunch or planned to have for lunch. Often while there was contrary evidence right there next to me in the room, like I'd say I was planning on going and buying takeout when there was a brown paper lunch bag right there on my desk.
posted by loquacious at 12:59 PM on April 23, 2021 [28 favorites]

All of this is why you don't talk to the police (YT). They only have an incentive to collect proof of guilt, and the "proof" can be almost anything.
posted by anhedonic at 1:14 PM on April 23, 2021 [28 favorites]

Hey, anyone remember that Brett Kavanaugh hearing

Oh, the emotion there was real. It's just that the supposed reason for it was false.
posted by praemunire at 1:33 PM on April 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

It's almost like cops don't even try to really solve crimes

There might be times when they don't care, or figure that even if he didn't do this crime, he did others, so it doesn't matter. But it seems more likely that they know they've already solved the case, and it's really satisfying to nail the bad guy, and they find a way to do that. (Not so satisfying to realize you got the wrong person, or that you might have gotten the wrong person and can't be sure, so have to let them go.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:39 PM on April 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

If they truly believe they're doing the right thing by railroading the first poor schlub they see every time it's no different from not trying or caring.
posted by bleep at 1:58 PM on April 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

I wanted to say some stuff about training on recognizing microexpressions and the like, then thought about the only cop I know personally and realized he uh, isn't gonna be able to reach that shelf.

And then I remembered Akilah Hughes' observation: If cops are so great why is the only cop you know personally also the dumbest person you went to high school with?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:38 PM on April 23, 2021 [30 favorites]

I can't think of any other job where just making bald faces guesses is acceptable.
posted by bleep at 2:39 PM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yeah, going by the "gaze aversion = lying" standard means that almost all autistic people come across as liars.

I mean, I became kind of a liar for a good chunk of my childhood because my autistic body language, verbal processing difficulties and executive dysfunction were all invariably seen as dishonesty, plus the way I experienced the world just didn't sound true to neurotypical adults, so I learnt to lie in order to be believed. I spent a lot of time unlearning that as an adult.
I've always just assumed that if I'm ever in the vicinity of a crime, I'm going away for it, tbh.

My general position on this has always been that everyone thinks they can tell when someone's lying, and no one actually can. And cops are even more prone to that, and less likely to have their conclusions questioned.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:13 PM on April 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

In America, deferring to science undermines the interrogator's authority and suggests they may have some accountability to the actual truth. For-profit prisons don't run on sunshine and rainbows!
posted by simra at 3:26 PM on April 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

As an attorney doing depositions under oath with relevant documents in front of you, you're sometimes in a better position that most people to know if someone is lying. While there are certain verbal structures that suggest evasiveness (trying to answer the question incompletely or literally but misleadingly truthfully to avoid perjury), honestly--you wouldn't know a bald-faced liar just from looking at them.
posted by praemunire at 3:26 PM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

This topic came up in my graduate psychology class (about religious cults, which do a lot of lying) and the research is definitely that people are bad at detecting lying. Or rather, they're mediocre at detecting lies but really bad at knowing why and how to detect lies, because doing it correctly is based on combining a complicated set of nonverbal social cues with an implicit understanding of the probability of different situations/motives. This meta-analysis goes over the research as of 2011. There's some interesting newer research on the possible evolution of lying as it's something we've evolved (both biologically and culturally) to both be better at doing, and better at detecting. There's kind of been an arms race for the last 100k years.

As someone with social anxiety and somewhere on the spectrum, I was pretty disheartened to see that most of the cues that are apparently useful for detecting real lies also show up for those of us with social anxiety/spectrum issues. A lot of it has to do with detecting the increase in cognitive load from maintaining a deception, which is very similar to social anxiety. I've been thinking about this for legal reasons and I personally think the best option is to explicitly tell the police, or the judge/jury, that you have social anxiety. They may not believe you, but it opens up the possibility of them attributing your weird behavior to the social anxiety instead of being a liar. I don't know how often this is tried in actual court though.
posted by JZig at 3:38 PM on April 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

I can't think of any other job where just making bald faces guesses is acceptable

Uh...any private enterprise?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:04 PM on April 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

If I were a cop, I would figure out who's lying by listening to what they say and deciding whether it makes sense. But I'm sure that deciding you have telepathic superpowers is an equally legitimate approach.
posted by Sterros at 5:01 PM on April 23, 2021

My dad, who did a fair amount of highly illegal stuff when young and served time for some of it, swore that the best thing when lying was to tell yourself it was the truth and commit to it as if it were.

He was also an attempted bigamist, but for all that I usually use his advice. After all, he could have served a lot more time than he did, and he did get caught because they had audio...
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:19 PM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:46 PM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

In America, deferring to science undermines the interrogator's authority

Well, science isn't doing too well in the legal system either, with fingerprints evidence, fire investigation "science" and shaken baby syndrome being some recent examples, not to mention complete failures with DNA evidence.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 7:31 PM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

The last time I talked to the police, it was a surprise. Someone's at the door! Who could it be? A local police department detective is who. He asks me if I had heard about someone trying to open my neighbor's basement apartment tenant's door the other night. And did I see or hear anything suspicious? I did not know about this, and I had not seen anything, and I told him so, and we parted amicably. Now this is exactly the kind of situation where talking to the police is dangerous, because sure, he wanted to know if I heard or saw anything, but he also wanted to get a look at me and put some mild pressure on my by asking me questions, because maybe the guy trying to break in was the older weirdo single dude next door. I don't take that personally - he kind of needs to ask that, it seems to me. But it's a precarious situation for me. He informs me of the crime next door. I am surprised and concerned. But suppose he thinks I'm not concerned enough? Or too concerned? Or just did not act, in some way informed only by his intuition, how an innocent neighbor would act.

So maybe I should not have talked to him. But that feels like an escalation of some kind, like he only asks if I heard or saw anything and I say I won't answer any questions and ask him to leave. It is pretty tempting to just decide it is OK this time, and this is what I did, more or less. If you really want to follow this never talk to the police concept, it might be a good idea to see if there is any training or something where you can roleplay situations and have some preparation for how you will decline to converse.
posted by thelonius at 7:35 PM on April 23, 2021 [23 favorites]

I think I remember an AskMe question about 'Is there any point to being diagnosed with autism after you are an adult.'

I'm seeing a reason in this. Having a ready reason for why one doesn't look another in the eyes, or why one seems to stare insensitively, could be pivotal.
posted by amtho at 9:47 PM on April 23, 2021

Along the same lines, the US' use of polygraphs, aka lie detectors, is also troubling. They're not much used anywhere else in the world.
posted by Harald74 at 10:04 PM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

As you say thelonius, there's lots of times where "never talk to the cops" actually means engaging in some extremely uncomfortable and borderline aggressive antisocial behaviour.

The only time I've ever been in a high-stakes-ish situation with the cops (I was stopped when I was walking late at night; the cops mistook me for another man who had physically assaulted a woman and fled) I somehow managed to keep my mouth shut and literally just stood there silently, didn't say or do anything while a bunch of squad cars pulled up and surrounded me, screaming cops demanding I show my ID (which I don't have to do in my part of the world), explain why I was walking (out of downtown at 11:30pm on a Friday night), where I was going (home), why I hurt that woman, etc. Evidently they got word that the actual suspect was elsewhere because they all hopped in their cars and left. No apologies obviously, just a bunch of suggestions to "behave" and "be careful."

I was lucky because none of the cops laid hands on me at any point, not sure what my adrenaline would've done if that had happened. And also because their overtly aggressive behaviour made it way easier for me to switch into antagonism mode and remind myself not to talk or give them any information. But I'm really not sure what I'd do in a situation like yours, where the natural social inclination is to be helpful, informative, and so on. It feels really wrong on a plain human small talk level to avoid that kind of thing, and yet I hate cops and always tell people to never talk to them.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 10:18 PM on April 23, 2021 [12 favorites]

Wasn't Amanda Knox in the same boat? Not upset enough?
posted by kschang

Lindy Chamberlain was accused of not showing enough emotion during her trial(s) for the (alleged) murder of her daughter, Azaria.

'A real mother would have...'

You get the idea.

As Chamberlain later pointed out, she couldn't win. If she was stoic and showed no emotion then she didn't care about her daughter and was guilty, if she did show emotion it was a manipulative act and she was guilty.

She, and her then husband as accessory after the fact, were ultimately completely exonerated, with the death certificate of Azaria eventually being changed to listing a dingo as the cause.

Well, science isn't doing too well in the legal system either, with fingerprints evidence, fire investigation "science" and shaken baby syndrome being some recent examples, not to mention complete failures with DNA evidence.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro

Chamberlain was originally convicted largely on the then dodgy DNA science, when rust on the floor of the family car was misinterpreted as dried blood.
posted by Pouteria at 10:40 PM on April 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

Remember the TV show starring Time Roth, LIE TO ME? "About Cal Lightman, the world's leading deception expert who studies facial expressions and involuntary body language to expose the truth behind the lies." I remember watching it and thinking it was simultaneously entertaining and complete bollocks. Once again, as with hospital shows and cop shows, America gives the world total bullshit dressed up as thoughtful drama.
posted by pjsky at 6:29 AM on April 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

I also remember Lie To Me, except I largely remember three things: the conceit of the show was that Lightman's team was specially constructed because most cops were bad at "spotting lies"; there was some effort on the part of the writers to separate "this person's emotional reaction doesn't match what they're saying" and "they're lying and therefore they did it"; and at some point there was a polygraph test, which I vaguely remember thinking disqualified the show from any kind of nuanced take on the science of deception.
posted by Merus at 8:20 AM on April 24, 2021

As I recall from Lie to Me the polygraph was not used as a lie detector but as a way to create stress in the subject. The whole point of FACS was not to read deception in the face but to match emotional micro-expressions to what someone might actually be saying. But why expect a tool to be used as designed and delimited? I mean police in the US have has such a good record of using their tools as directed, don't they?
posted by Ignorantsavage at 7:10 PM on April 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

I really don't understand how people can go through life and not discover or realize that human reactions in stressful situations are extraordinarily variable and not reliable in terms of determining anything about a person other than they are in a stressful situation and are reacting.
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:47 PM on April 24, 2021 [10 favorites]

She was like, so you just pull people over if you feel like it, and he replied, basically, yes, if I feel there's something wrong with this picture.

This ruleset can be expressed more simply as "personal predjudice".
posted by benzenedream at 12:17 AM on April 29, 2021