Instant Genius - The best ways to spot a liar

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

How can we tell if someone we’re speaking to is being economical with the truth? Oftentimes, we’re told that the primary telltale signs lie in the use of body language – maybe someone is avoiding eye contact, touching their face a lot, or fidgeting and squirming. But there’s also a whole world of clues to look out for in the type of language that someone uses when they’re telling us lies. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Kirsty King, a lecturer in communication based at University College London, to talk about her latest book, The Language of Lies – How to Uncover the Liar in Your Life. She tells us that when people try to hide the truth, they tend to use language that distances themselves from the act they’re talking about or the people involved in it, how when we’re relating a false account of an event we tend to omit words that describe how we actually felt during it, and how even the way liars structure their sentences can be a signal that they are trying to deceive us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit nameaudio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus.

How can we tell if someone we're speaking to is being economical with the truth? Oftentimes, we're told that the primary telltale signs lie in the use of body language. Maybe someone's avoiding eye contact, touching their face a lot, or fidgeting and squirming. But there's also a whole world of clues to look out for in the type of language that someone uses when they're telling us lies. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Kirstie King, a lecturer in communication based at University College London

to talk about her latest book, The Language of Lies, How to Uncover the Liar in Your Life. She tells us that when people try to hide the truth, they tend to use language that distances themselves from the act they're talking about or the people involved in it. How, when we're relating a false account of an event, we tend to omit words that describe how we actually felt during it and how even the way liars structure their sentences can be a signal they're trying to deceive us. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Jason. Nice to be here. So today we're talking about your

book, The Language of Lies, How to Uncover the Liar in your life. So I think a lot of the time when we hear about sort of techniques or methods of spotting liars, we hear about things like body language, sort of people touching their faces, you know, looking in a certain direction, not making eye contact, etc. But you're approaching this as a linguist. Interested in clues hidden within the actual use of language. So that's really fascinating. So let's start with the first question. Broadly speaking, you say lies can be split into two categories, lies of the mission and lies of commission. So what's the difference there? Okay, so when people lie, the lies of commission would be when they would be imparting false

information, for example. So making something up will be a lie of commission. And then the generally accepted other area of lying would be leaving out information, which is lies of a mission. So it's not giving a full account of something. And so there's also a third area of lying, and that's also lying by telling the truth. And within linguistics, we would sort of, when we think about communication and how we communicate, we would have something called conversational maxims. And these conversational maxims actually can be represented in the way that people tell certain kinds of lies. So, for example, they might, might be using a maxim of quality, and the maxim of quality is about making sure that you give

enough information. The quality of the information has to be truthful, and therefore a lie of commission would be imparting false information. And then you would have something called a maximum of quantity, and the maximum of quantity would be about making sure that you don't leave out information as well. And then there's two other maxims. These maxims were, proposed by Grice, so sometimes they're called Grisian maxims and a maxim of relation. And so the maxim of relation is about not answering the question. So making sure that you answer a question and then the maxim of manner would be about making sure that your answers are not vague.

So there's sort of a hierarchy of lying as well that sort of the ways that people can lie actually correspond to these conversational maxims in linguistics. So let's have a look at some of the finer details that we can find that typically occur when people tell lies. And the first one you discuss is lexical lies. So these involve the words that are being used in what someone says. So I think before we get into this in proper detail, we should maybe give everyone a bit of a refresh on basic grammar. So we're talking about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. So we've probably learned at school, but we might be a bit rusty.

So first off, can we just make it clear what each of those types of words are? Sure. So the nouns would be names of something. So that would be boy, girl, or it would be table, chair. It's anything that we use to name a person, an object, an item, a concept, an idea, and so on. So that's the noun category. The verbal category would be words which actually describe some kind of action. So like run, jump, skip. Adverbs actually give you information about how the verb. was carried out, so something like quickly, slowly. And then we have adjectives, which are descriptive words. So these are really important when we're analysing language. So our descriptive words actually give us the kind of the information about what something is and how it can be

described. So that would probably be the most basic way of reminding listeners about what these central categories of lexical words would be. Great. So let's see. have a look in some more detail then about some of the, I suppose you call them tells we can look out for to determine when someone's lying. So you mentioned their nouns and names. So names is a big one. So our names surely must be sort of one of the most emotionally charged and protected words that we use. And they can reveal a lot about how we're trying to communicate. One thing to look out for you say is this notion of distancing. Yeah, that's right. So distance. We When we have something like a negative effective state, someone or something,

what happens is that this is encoded in the language that we use in order to refer to them. So what might happen is that we start to change the nouns or we start to change our language in the way that we refer to others or these things. So one of the examples that I think we're all familiar with is when we're annoyed with somebody or, for example, a dog or it's chewed something. up and we might refer to our dog as that dog. So we use this kind of separation language towards it. So this can be encoded in something called a distal demonstrative, which is the word that. We would separate ourselves from people. But also it's encoded in a way that we refer to others.

So when we're very close to people, we pull them towards us. When we feel affection towards people, we would use maybe their nicknames, pet names, their first names and so on. But when we want to actually create distance between ourselves and somebody else because we hold some kind of negative opinion or we have some negative feeling towards them, then what we might do is we might actually refer to them using distancing nouns or names which are not close. So that's where you would get, maybe the formal use of language actually incorporates distance. So when we refer to people by their titles and their surnames, but also when we start to remove our kinship, association towards somebody. So they're no longer my daughter or my son, they become your son,

your daughter. You know, if the child has done something bad, we might then throw that over to the partner, they belong to you. But we're kind of making this separation. And so this negative effective state actually starts to be revealed in our language. So it's a really interesting area to look at, particularly when people are lying. So I have an example I could give you. It's quite a famous case. It happened in the States recently, and it was a murder, and it was a man called Chris Watts, who's been convicted of murdering his family. And when he's first interviewed by the Denver, I think it's Denver News journalist, and he gives his first interview with them. He never refers to his family. It's my wife. He doesn't say, yeah, I think he only uses my children once or my kids, he says, but

usually he's referring to his wife as her or she, and he refers to the kids. And then he says something that's really interesting as well. He doesn't refer to them as a group, like my family, the belonging, the possession of them as his family. But he says, I just want everybody to come home. So he refers to them as everybody. And he uses something called a generalising leveller. And this generalising leveller kind of gives us no information about who these people are, who they belong to, what the relationship is between them as well. And so there's a great amount of distance between him and his family. And so this is encoded in this account that he gives of not knowing where they've disappeared to. And so this would be very interesting for us as a linguist to

investigate this use of distancing language. So why do people, if they're telling a lie, want to distance themselves in this way from, you know, using people's specific names. It's a way that people are actually trying to emotionally regulate themselves. So because Lyas experience a heightened emotional arousal, which is the fear of being detected or sometimes the satisfaction with not being detected, what they're trying to do is they're trying to sort of separate themselves, especially if it's something like a high-stakes crime where somebody has committed something atrocious like a murder,

it's a way of regulating their emotional reactions. So to remove themselves by not using the names and so on of people that it's a way of this negative, effective state that they can regulate themselves with this. So sometimes you find it that people will say there are some accounts where people have, they just can't bring themselves to say the name of the person within some account. And that could also be when they're confessing to a crime as well.

So in the news recently there was one instance that I pulled out. And it's a man who murdered his girlfriend and he rings the police. He confesses to the crime. And he says, you're not going to believe this. And I think I accidentally killed someone. And then he goes on to say that I did not mean to kill this person. But this is his girlfriend. So he doesn't refer to her as saying, I accidentally killed my girlfriend or use her

name, he refers to us this indistinct other, and that's the part of sort of emotional regulation. So we try to get away from the things which are causing us problems. We create safety through creating space, and so using distancing language is one of the ways that we would do this. And another thing that you talk about in the difference between when somebody is telling the truth or a lie is the use of sensory language. So I found this really fascinating. You know, can you run us through that?

Yeah, so sensory to descriptive or sensory perceptual language is really, really key to investigating the possibility that somebody is lying or not. So we have to remember that these are the indications that we should follow perhaps. And there wouldn't be definitive indications, but they give us the direction in where we should be looking. So sensory perceptual details are really crucial in any occasion. where maybe an individual is imparting false information. So people, well, when we live through a traumatic or a dramatic event, we relate our experience using sensory details, but fabricated events are often lacking in the use of this descriptive language.

So this kind of descriptive language is really interesting. It's things to do with sight, sound, hearing, taste, smell, but it's also to do with how we are in the world as well. so interior section and proprioception as well. So are heart beating, feeling that, or feeling dizzy. So any of these types of words which describe sensory details, when we don't find them within somebody's account, they kind of raise the alarm.

So I have an example from, this was Ryan Locti. So a few years ago, he's an Olympic US swimmer, and he claimed that he was robbed in Brazil. In his account of being robbed, He says the following, so I'm going to give you verbating what he said. He says, we got pulled over in the taxi and these guys came out with a badge, a police badge, no lights, no nothing, just a police badge. And they pulled us over. They pulled out their guns. They told the other swimmers to get down on the ground. They got down on the ground. I refused. I was like, we didn't do anything wrong. So I'm not getting down on

the ground. And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead, and he said, get down. And I put my hands up. I was like, whatever, he took our money, he took my wallet, he left my cell phone, he left my credentials. And that's the end of his account. Now, his account is absolutely absent in any sensory perceptual details. We don't get an idea about how he was feeling. We don't get any sight or sound. We just get this very kind of banal account of what happened. And there's also something really interesting about this as well, is that these lack of sensory perceptual details,

they're indicative of the speaker is actually finding it hard to give the experience of what happened because it didn't happen. And so therefore it just becomes very basic verbs are used. So in the account we get pulled over, came out, pulled out their guns, told us. It just becomes very, very simplistic as well. So the lack of sensory perceptual details is very interesting when we're looking at the accounts of people who maybe have experienced something quite dramatic, where we would expect that there's

lots of descriptive content in their accounts. And this is because they're not working from memory, they're working from invention and therefore by giving more details to this, they're worried that those details, they would have to remember what those details were. And therefore it's something that makes it very difficult for them because they must suppress the truth. They invent the lie, they monitor how the lie is being assessed by whoever they're speaking to. And they also have to monitor their own behaviour and remember what they've said as well. So by adding any descriptive or sensory details,

into that also makes the act of lying quite difficult. You know, it's quite hard to be a liar. So another thing kind of related to this that you talk about in the use of words is the difference between concrete and abstract words. So first off, what do we mean by that? And, you know, how can we spot it? So concrete words and abstract words are, again, this kind of gives us a variation in sensory perceptual words.

or descriptive words. So rather than looking at these as a whole, what this would show is a concrete word is something which is, as the name suggests, it's something which is very much physical. So we, you know, something like a house, a table, a chair, these sorts of concrete words. And then we move into more abstract words. So abstract words would be things like idea or wonderful or hate. These would be. more abstract. We can't really, we need more information to find out when there's, you know, somebody hating, when did that start? Is it enduring? Does it have a finishing point? They're much more abstract in the way that we can understand them. Whereas when we, when we say to somebody

that a chair, where we understand these kind of concrete nouns. So there's a variation between the types of words that we use, which is really interesting because we find that liars will be more likely to use more concrete language than they would abstract language in any of their accounts. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35. a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

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So we've looked at some of the use of specific types of words there, but there are also clues in the actual sentence structure of people when they're telling a line, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. So with sentence structure. So for example, whether sentences are in the active or the passive form, and this is a really interesting area of looking into determining whether somebody is lying or not. So an active sentence. So in English, just to give you a really quick understanding, an active sentence in English, it typically has a subject followed by the verb, which is then followed by the object.

So if we said something like the man dropped to the baby, so the man is the subject, dropped is the verb, and the baby is the object. So the object is what happens, from the verb, what happens to the object. And the person performing the action of the verb is in the subject position. And we find in any analysis of language that there's more of a predominance of sentences being in the passive voice. the passive voice in English is when we actually remove the subject from the sentence. So instead of having the man dropped to the baby, we would have the baby was dropped. So we don't know who dropped the baby, but we just have the action of being performed upon the baby. So this is a really interesting area in linguistic analysis of determining truthful or untruthful account.

because we see that there's more of a predominance of sentences within the passive form. And that's usually so if people want to reduce their agency. So that's like to reduce any responsibility in something. So for a child, for example, kicks a football through the window and they say the window was broken. But they're removing their agency or their responsibility by not using the active form, which is I kick the ball through the window. We also find that when the agent or the subject is omitted,

and therefore a passive sentence construction is being used. It also, removing the identity is a way that somebody who's culpable in something can actually reduce their responsibility or they can remove their agency in it. So, for example, there are some examples of things like a woman has been stabbed. So therefore, we don't know who's done that, but the person calling, who's actually a husband who's stabbed his wife, uses the passive form of this. So that's a really interesting way, removing the agent. So somebody that's lying would more likely be wanting to hide their own culpability or engagement or responsibility

in some kind of action. So when passive constructions are used, we're more likely to attribute significantly less responsibility to the offender and associatively less harm to the victim. So we find this a lot with maybe violent criminals use the passive voice construction as a way of misrepresenting their actions, avoiding responsibility. It's also used as a way of blaming the victim or concealing any of their activities as well. In some accounts, as a rapist who uses sentences like, all our clothes at one point were taken off. They just hide their role in removing the victim's clothes.

So we see that this is also a form of distancing language as well, removing the agency. removing the subject in the sentence grammar. How about another layer of this then? And it's something that you call parav verbal indicators. So that's a new term for me personally. So what does that mean? How does that apply to this idea? Yeah, so paraviral indicators are really interesting as well.

So in linguistics, we can refer to them as paravirbal or paralinguistic. And these are features of language, which we use to talk, which don't, they're not the words that we use, but it's everything that carries those words. So it can be things like the volume of our voices, it could be the tone, it's our accent, the pitch, how long it takes for us to speak, any pauses or silences that we use, things like space fillers, which would be ums and ours, and any speech errors as well, self-correction. So these would come under the paraviral information. And so a lot of the times, time we filter out this information. We're attuned to it, so certain areas such as accent and pitch and

volume, but we tune out a lot of paraviral information as well. But what we find in any investigation into deceptive language use is that the paraviral actually carries lots and lots of information that's very indicative and very insightful and can guide us into examining whether somebody is being deceptive or fabricating. So this is a really interesting area also. Yeah, so you mentioned there a couple of things. So let's have a look at pitch. So how does pitch vary, you know, when we're, when we're telling a lie as opposed to giving an honest account of what happened? So pitch is a really interesting area of information that communicates lots of information. And so sometimes it can be more reliable than the words that are said. So an example would be we all know that we can pick up

on people's pitch very easily. So people might say, oh, don't use that tone with me, or they might say what's wrong and somebody says nothing. And it's obvious that something is wrong because the information is actually encoded in the pitch that somebody is conveying. Sometimes it's really hard for us to not convey that pitch. It gives us a really good indication of perhaps the effective stay or the emotional kind of arousal that we might have with something. And what we find when we're looking at indications of deceit is that there is this increase in the pitch. So we come across a heightened increase in speaker's pitch. So it goes higher.

And so this is considered to be a stress response. So lying is actually, it heightens our stress response. and therefore there's an increase in pitch. And that increase in pitch, we have to listen quite closely for it. It's there, but it's not going to be a massive elevation in pitch, but it is actually there. Now, the reason why the stress increases our pitch is because of our vagus nerve, and that receives information from our brain, heart, our lungs, digestive system. And so that's part of our sympathetic nervous system.

So again, it's a vital flight response. So what that means is we're trying to get away from the thing which is causing us problems. So when we're lying, we want to, this sympathetic nervous system kicks in. And it sends signals to our vocal faults, which are open and close. And it takes information from the larynx to the brain, which controls our voice pitch. And so as we know that lying induces stress and that initiates our sympathetic nervous system, what happens then is that the vocal cords will start to do.

tense. So like most muscles in our body, our vocal cords are muscular and they start to tense up. And when they tense, they increase the vibration rate. And by increasing the vibration rate, that will actually elevate our pitch as well. And so that's alongside breathing and heart rate as well. So it's really interesting how pitch this paraviral indicator gives indications that there's some kind of sympathetic nervous system response in what's somebody is saying, such as a stressful situation being questioned about something that you're lying about. So how about volume then?

You mentioned volume there. You know, what sort of tells can we see there when someone's lying in the volume of this speech? Yeah, so volume is quite interesting because there's sometimes variance with volume. So when I've been investigating sort of violent crimes, when I've been looking at interviews with the police with the violent criminal. What happens is that when they're asked if they were involved in the crime, what happens is that they generally start to reduce the volume of their voice. So they start to lower it. They start to come across as more like, no, they're much more gentle in the way that they talk. So there's this drop in the volume.

And I've kind of proposed that this is because of it's an association with something which is. somebody who's done something quite aggressive or something quite violent. And therefore they're taking this meek approach. And the meek approach comes out through the volume level dropping, which is different from how they're normally speaking. So that's where, and so it's this difference in the volume drop. And so sometimes you will also get speakers who are, who go on the attack. So if they're asked about something, they might increase their volume in order to almost,

almost like beat the other person down. So they shout out. It's that variation in somebody's normal volume level that should make us a bit more aware. And obviously we have to keep in mind the context as well. So wherever we are, you know, we will do this naturally. We change the volumes of our voices dependent upon where we are. We could be in a church and we're going to speak very quietly, hopefully. Or we could be in a pub or a bar and we're going to elevate the volume of our voices. So we have to make sure that we know about the contextual setting. We have to be aware of a person's normal speaking volume as well. Some people have very loud voices normally.

Some people have very quiet voices. But we've just got to be aware of that variance when a certain part of somebody's narrative, actually, there might be a drop or an elevation in their volume. And that's something that would give us an insight or an indication to follow. Yeah. So also earlier you mentioned these filler words, sort of m, R, etc. And pauses. And you talk specifically about unfilled pauses when someone isn't telling the truth.

I thought that was really interesting. Could you explain that for us? Yeah, unfilled pauses are really interesting and whereabouts they occur when somebody is talking. So an unfilled pause is the length of silence. So for example, if I give you a bit of silence there, it sounds odd. Yeah, sometimes we might have a bit of silence before a fill a word, like, which kind of shows that we're thinking about something. But when we get these unfilled pauses in places where they shouldn't really occur, usually in the middle of a sentence, and there's a type of unfilled pause that's really quite indicative as well.

And that's something called response latency, which I can talk about in a moment. But these unfilled pauses show that the speaker is at something called a semantic planning point. And so they're rapidly assessing that the cognitive load of them being, needing to select the correct word before they carry on, gives an indication of that with these unfilled pauses, especially when they occur in the middle of a sentence, like before a lexical item that we wouldn't really expect it to occur before. So those are the ones that would give us a good indication that perhaps we should investigate that a little bit more or it keeps us on our toes.

We need to be alert to those occurrences of unfilled pauses. And then that brings me to another unfilled pause, which is something called response latency. And response latency is how long it takes our conversational partner to respond to say a question. and because we do this very quickly when we are in conversation with each other, we know when to take our turn and this is very, very rapid so it can be like between 100 and 300 milliseconds that we take our turn in a conversation. But if there's a real length of time before the other person starts to speak, then this is quite an interesting area to investigate because it shows again that the speaker

is having to process. They're having to actually suppress the truth again, invent the lie, know how to respond. And so that's taking up quite a lot of time for them. And so there's this delay in their response to any question. So let's flip it from the person who's lying to the person who's being lied to. So, you know, how should we approach a given situation when we think, oh, I think this person, there's a high likelihood that this person's lying to me. And you describe something called overloading a liar. So can you explain that for us? Okay, so if we think about the cognitive load, overloading a liar,

when speakers lie, their internal thoughts and emotions can be revealed in their language. And so remembering that the liar has a lot of work to do, and this takes up an awful lot of cognitive space. So cognitive load is the amount of mental resources that a speaker has. and that's used in working memory. So working memory is the cognitive system that temporarily stores information. So when we're talking about overloading a liar,

we're talking about doing things which make the cognitive load harder for them. So that could be things like asking questions which aren't in a chronological order, for example. So usually when speakers are telling us something, giving us an account, and it might be a fabricated account, or a truthful account, it would usually start at the beginning, have a middle and have an end.

But if we actually start to question somebody that we suspect of lying at the end of the story, and then we question them at something that happened at the beginning, and then we move back to the end, then to the middle. So we have no chronological ordering sequence in our questioning, then that actually overloads the speaker, so that then we start to see mistakes are probably going to, become more apparent that they can't keep all of this information going because they have it in a sequential form. And if we disrupt the sequential form of that in our questioning,

then we start to see that there's going to be much more indications or mistakes in their lies. So that's one way that we can use some strategic questioning as well. Another way, actually, Jason, that we can do this. So we're overloading. the cognitive system of a liar, but we're also asking them specific questions that they might not expect. So one of these might be temporal or spatial questions which relate to time or space. So we could ask them how far away they were from something or someone, or we could ask them specific times or dates and so on. And we find that this kind of information, this temporal and spatial information similar to sensory perceptual details is usually missing from someone who's fabricating

because these are specific details that obviously they cause the speaker more mental resources to remember and so that they might avoid using them. So asking temporal or spatial questions is also another strategic use of questioning that can be done if we suspect that we're being lied to. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Kirstie Kink. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Language of Lies, How to Uncover the Liar in Your Life.

If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

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