Instant Genius - The science of lying, with Professor Richard Wiseman

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Think you can tell when someone’s being dishonest with you? Think again. Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and host of the new podcast On Your Mind, busts the common myths around lie-detecting and reveals how you can identify if someone’s really telling the truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today I'm talking to psychologist Richard Weissbaum about the science of lying. Richard is currently the professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and he spent his career studying human behaviour. He's published hundreds of studies and books on the psychology of magic, deception, luck, self-development and more. Richard joins us today because he's actually launching his own podcast called On Your Mind. It's a show that aims to answer all your questions about psychology, from what makes some people seem so happy, to do Lucky Charms work, to why do some people seem to have so many questions.

To kick things off, here's Richard explaining what drew him to study deception in the first place. Well, probably the same factor that got me interested in psychology, which was I used to work as a magician. I've been into magic since about eight years old. And of course, magicians are superb psychologists. They have to understand where audiences place their attention, what they remember about a performance. You've got to shape that memory and so on. And some of the time, as shock horror, magicians are not telling you the truth. They're lying. And they call themselves the honest deceivers because they're doing it to entertain you, not for more exploitative reasons. But still, as a magician, you do get used to lying.

So that was my kind of entry into both psychology and psychology of lying. So having run experiments and studied this for a very long time, are you excellent at telling when someone's telling you a lie? Perhaps the students brought you a late paper and they're dog sick. Are you able to spot when someone's telling the truth? I'm not especially good at it. And I think that's part of doing this research, is that we all like to think. we're really good lie detectors. But when you carry out this research, you are putting that to the

test all the time. And that's when you realize that, oh my goodness, I'm not perhaps the great lie detector I thought I was. And that's because in those studies, you're getting feedback. You know, someone's telling you something and then you're going, hold on a second, was that a lie or the truth? When everyday life, that doesn't happen. So we go around convincing ourselves with great lie detectors. You know, if you say to your partner, oh, actually, we've had this lovely relationship for 25 years, they're unlikely to turn around to go, actually, I've been having an affair for most of that. You know, so you don't get the feedback as to whether you're correct or not. And so we, most of us convince ourselves with great lie detectors and most of us are not. In popular culture,

particularly, and the sort of general, conventional wisdom is that there are ways to spot it. a liar. And as you've sort of just hinted there, it's not always that simple. But one of my favorite ones that I think about often is that you're speaking and you're looking up and you're looking towards the top right, that that is a good sort of tell that you are lying. Is that the case? Well, we've looked into that. It is one of the most popular myths out there. And so I know people that work for various organizations involved in HR. It's involved in hiring and firing. And they'll say, oh, we're interviewing this candidate. And their eyes shot up to the left. So I knew they weren't telling us the truth.

I didn't offer them the job or whatever it was. So it's scary to think that people have got those ideas in their heads and they're really influencing the decision. I do it a lot. Well, there we are. Not fire people, but I look around. Oh, see what you mean. Right. Okay.

I thought you're with you now. I do it as well. And in fact, part of that is that we're trying to cut down on often faces coming into our heads because faces take up a lot of processing power. and if you're trying to remember something or think about something, often you'll look away but it's absolutely seen across the world as a sign of deception. Is it the case? Well, what we did was to take some students, we asked them to go into an office to pick up a wallet that was on the desk and either put it into the desk drawer or put it into their own pocket. Then they'd come out and they'd all try and convince us that they put it into the office drawer. So some of them were lying,

some of them were telling the truth. And we looked at their eye movements in those interviews, there's no indication at all that the eye movements relate to where they're lying. So we then thought, hold on a second, we're doing this in a lab environment, it's quite low stakes, or it's a sanctioned piece of deception, we told them to do one thing or another. What about the real world? And so we got hold of these tapes where often if there's a high profile missing person's case, the police will ask members of the family to make a public plea. And a small number of instances, those people were involved in abducting or harming the person. And so we know, in retrospect, they were lying at certain parts of that

public appeal. So we could look at those. We looked at eye movements. Again, absolutely nothing. There isn't any evidence as far as I'm aware that eye movements tell you anything about lying. Yet people have that idea in their head. They're looking for up to the left, up to the right, and that's influencing their decisions. It's a good example of why we need psychology. That's great. That helps me shed that insecurity that people think I'm, well, they probably still will think I'm shifty, but at least I now have the evidence to prove them wrong. But so, so that, you know, that makes me wonder, are, are there any tells that can help us identify when someone is telling us a lie? Obviously, there are, you know, poker tables that this might be useful at, but also,

So criminal cases and investigations, you can see how that might be a useful thing to be able to do. Yeah, there are. And my work dates back to the early 90s and in fact involves the BBC. So at the time, it was National Science Week, one week of the year we put across to National Science Week. And Tomorrow's World was the big live science show. And the BBC wanted to put a big experiment on the show. So they sent out this email to academics. And I was working on lying at the time. time and I remember this email coming in and I just spent maybe five minutes replying and those five minutes really changed my life. So I just thought, oh, here's an experiment. We could get politicians from the major political parties. There were three parties at that point. And we could get on

TV. They could lie and tell the truth. The public could then phone in and vote which was the lie and we'd find out which party has got the best liars. That was my fun idea. Sent it off. Two weeks later, get a phone call, you're the chosen one. This is the experiment we're going to do. So I was very excited. And we contacted lots and lots of politicians, said, will you come on the show and lie and tell the truth? And they all said, no, we're not going to do that. So I thought that was the end of that idea, until the BBC got in contact with Sir Robin Day, who is this big political interviewer of his time, hugely famous, and he agreed to do it. So I went along, I interviewed Sir Robert. Robin Day twice, each time by his favorite film. Once he lied to me, once he told the truth,

we put them out live on tomorrow's world. I think it was the first science phone in. We didn't know whether we're going to get three or four calls. We ended up with about 30,000 calls. And what we saw was that the public did the same on television as they do in the lab experiments, which is they were roughly 50-50, i.e. as a group, they couldn't tell when Sir Robin Day was lying. So that tells you something. It tells you the, once you've got these visual cues, these auditory cues, you're not a very good lie detector. The other two parts of the experiment was that we ran the transcript only in the Daily Telegraph, as with the help of Roger Heifield, a very good friend of mine, journalist, and now working at the Science Museum.

So he put the transcripts into the telegraph. We also put the audio out on Radio 1. And each time we said to the public, can you vote? And there, once we stripped away the visual cues, you suddenly saw this big increase in people's lie detecting ability. So I think, yeah, so I think the newspaper, I'm going to get these percentages slightly wrong, but they came in at about 60%. Radio came in at about 70%. So what it's telling you is that the visual cues, because there is a very highly controllable channel, as psychologists would say, whether we gesture, whether we smile, even where we look, that's under our control. to controlling that. When you get to the words we say and how we say them, it's not really something

we think about very much. And that's where the good cues sit. And so once you direct people's attention to that, then actually you become a better lie detector. So in terms of, you know, guests appearing on radio or podcasts, actually, you know, if you're a politician and want to lie, get yourself on television and away from podcasts and radio. That's fascinating. Yeah. I don't know why. You know, my instinct would have been, to see them would have been helped me to decide if someone was lying. But, yeah. That's right.

And it's another myth we have. We need as much information as possible. Well, it turns out a lot of that information is quite unreliable. So it's an amazing experiment to do. It's also where I met Simon Singh. I went on to write firm as Last Theorem, Science Journalist. He was working on that show. So I met Simon.

It's since become a very good friend. And so it became this sort of life-changing event for me because after that every year they'd come back to me and asked me for new ideas and I did many of them on Tomorrow's World. And it all started with that five-minute quick reply of an email that it was just off the top of my head. So funny how these things work out. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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Well, these people are doing this. The question is, can they do what they're claiming to be able to do? That is, can they detect lies? It's one thing to look at a video and go, oh, look, the person has just scratched their nose. That's an indication of lying. They think, well, can you do it? If I were to show you pairs of videos, the person's lying and tell them the truth, can you do it? Now, some people can, but most people absolutely can't. So I don't know why we're listening to these people that can't do the thing that they claim to be able to do. The other thing is that what you tend to look for in lie detection work is a deviation away from the person's norm, as it were, the way they usually behave. And so some people just scratch their noses a lot,

or some people, like you were saying, tend to look away from other people. So that's, it's, no use to look at one piece of action and go, hey, look, the person looked away from it. Or maybe they do that all the time. Maybe that's just their general style. So what you tend to do in lie detection work is establish a baseline and then you're looking for certain signals away from that baseline. And those signals tend to be verbal. You're looking for them more hesitations. You're looking for bigger distancing between the end of the question and the beginning of the answer as they think through the lie. You're looking for dropping away of detail. You're looking for a dropping of me, my, I, those sorts of words. Because lying is cognitively difficult. You have to think through what's

the person know, what's going to fit in with my story, what have I said already, and all those things tax the person's mind and you see some of the signals associated with cognitive difficulty, which tend to be verbal signals. But it's always a deviation away from baseline. That brings me quite nicely to my next question. Again, it's another Hollywood thing, but it does get pulled out in American court cases, which is the lie detector. What's our current thinking about their reliability?

Do they work and can people sort of fool them? Well, they work in the sense of, they're very sophisticated pieces of equipment that tell you how physiologically active the person is. So they'll tell you how much they're sweating, very fine, great measure of that, their heart rates, breathing, and so on. So in that sense, they work. The question is, is that reliably linked to lying? And that's quite a contentious topic. And again, it will depend on the situation. Some truth tellers, not surprisingly,

if you start putting all these monitors on them and you've got a big machine with lots of lights, they become a little bit nervous. Equally, some truth tellers who have told the story many times or don't feel guilty about lying, are not going to show those signals. So, from my own perspective, is that they are not especially reliable. Again, they might give you some insight, but they certainly shouldn't be the sort of thing where we go, hey, look, they've failed the lie detector. That's 100% evidence they're lying, or they've passed it, so 100% there's truth-telling. So this debate has gone on for years about lie detectors.

Mostly they're not admissible evidence in court, and I'm quite comfortable about that. So what they are not is this kind of amazing magic bullet. And also, they're not very practical in everyday life if you're talking to somebody. And then they say, oh, you know, I had a great time with you last time I saw you. You can't say, hold on a second. Let me just stop you there because I need to attach you to this lie detector machine to find out what you really thought about last time you met up with me. So I'm not particularly impressed by them and they're not particularly practical. And you mentioned there you can kind of sort of get more practiced at being a kind of calm liar, I suppose, if you're trying to fall. I suppose fall is a slightly contentious

word even when we're debating whether they are really telling if you're lying. But the point I'm getting at is some people can actually practice lying and become better at it and, you know, hide all those things that we've just, we've just been talking about that can kind of maybe hint that you might be not telling the truth. Yeah, so if you think about it psychologically, there's the sort of arousal theory, the idea that when we lie to somebody, we feel guilty, and therefore that you start to sweat and move around and do all the sorts of things that people who are physiologically active do. Well, okay, so first of all, do we feel guilty? Well, if you told this lie quite a few times, or you don't really care very much about lying, or you're lying. for some greater good, or you're lying to make the other person feel good, and we should remember

that lots of lies are in that category. Exploitative lies are only a very small part of lying. Most of the time, lying bonds us together. You meet somebody in the street and say, hey, it's great to see you. Maybe you don't feel that way. You know, society would fall apart if you met somebody and went, oh, I can't stand you. You know, it's just, so lying bonds us together as much as pushes us apart. And so, yeah, if you don't feel stressed when you lie, you're not going to show any of those signals. Equally, from a cognitive perspective, lying is cognitively difficult. If you've told that story many, many times and you're a well-rehearsed liar, well, you're not going to have those cognitive signals. In fact, you may even end up

believing the lie yourself because you've told it so many times. So those sorts of things means that those signals are not going to emerge with those types of people in those types of situations. And this is, I guess, where psychology becomes very helpful in that what starts off as a very simple question, you start to realize lying, like a lot of behaviours, is quite complicated and quite nuanced. And so that brings me to my next question, which is, because you mentioned sort of going up to people in the street, and I often wonder this, you know, a lot of, we've had a lot of sort of tumultuous politics that have had pollsters going around up and down the country, going, which are you going to vote on this subject or this, what do you think of this politician?

Do you like the leader or the competition? And I do kind of wonder if this extends across a lot of these marketing surveys. Do we understand whether people actually tell the truth when a random person comes up to an industry and says, what do you think about X, Y, Z? Well, we do. And as a psychologist, I'm always deeply skeptical about how people say or they'll respond or behave versus how they actually do. So years and years ago, we did a study on a television show. We took over a supermarket and we, whenever people paid with 10 pounds, we gave them change for 20. And the first question was, how honest were people? And the answer was, everyone took the money. Never said a thing. So then we said, oh, to the cashier, can you count the money back into the hand? Just to absolutely make it clear, 10's 20, that they really have got. Did that, no one owned up.

Then we said, can you ask, can you say to the person, sorry, did you give me 10 or 20 pounds? Under those circumstances, most people, not everyone, most people said I gave you 20. So there's a lot of dishonesty out there in that particular context. What made it fun was when they left the supermarket out in the street was apparently a, researcher, market researcher, and they said, can I ask you some questions? Yes, of course you can, various questions about various things. And one of the questions was, if you've been given too much change in a shop, would you own up to it? And we had all this footage of people going, I absolutely would, yes. And we know they're just taken the money about 10 minutes before.

So, you know, whenever we talk to somebody, we're self-presenting. We're telling that other person what we want them to think about us. And it's the same when it comes to polls or to market research or whatever. And so if there are certain political candidates who are not, it's not, it wouldn't be good to be seen to support them, I'm sure you go, oh, no, I'm not going to vote for them. And secret, you're thinking absolutely will. And so often you've seen these pollsters be wrong. The person I thought was fascinating about this was Stanley Milgram, psychologist, who did the famous shock experiment if people want to read about it. It's actually not my favorite Milgram experiment. He's the one he's most famous for. But he did some other stuff with wallet

dropping, an envelope dropping, where he'd take envelopes that were addressed to one political party or another, and he might take 200 of them. He'd go into a certain area of town and drop them, and they were stamped addressed envelopes. And the question was, was that a better measure of people's political beliefs because you'd pick up an envelope and if it was addressed to a political party you supported his idea was you go and drop it into a letterbox. Where if it's addressed to one you didn't support, you put it into the rubbish bin. And there, what he found out was that was a much more reliable way of finding out how that area would vote because it's behavior, it's unobtrusive behavior versus asking people where suddenly all that self-presentation

comes into play. And so as a psychologist, I'm always pushing students to look at how people behave versus how they'll say they'll behave because they'll tell you any old thing in order to make themselves good. Yeah, maybe that's how we should do. I mean, that would mean an awful lot of wallets, but, you know, the next political decision we have to vote on, we could employ a slightly different method. Well, yeah, I mean, anything that's about behavior would be good. I actually, I've done some of those wallet dropping studies, not on the scale that Milgram did, but they are quite difficult to do. So I looked at the best thing to put into your wallet in order or purse in order to get it increased the likelihood of getting it returned. And so we've dropped wallets with pictures

of babies, mature couples, charity cards, all sorts of things in. And the answer was a picture of a baby. If you put a picture of a baby in there, it increases the chances of getting your wallet returned. But they're quite fun studies to do because you drop your wallet. It's quite hard to drop your wallet because you walk away within seconds, someone's tapping on the shoulder and go, you just drop your wallet. And you go, look, put it back. This is science. And it's so it's, it's a tricky one to do, but fun, you know, you get out there in the real world. I've often thought that about briefcase drops in movies. They make it look so easy. But I feel like if I just let my briefcase, there'd be about three people around me going, excuse me,

excuse me, actually you did it on the tube or something like that. No, that's right. I think you'd run into a few other issues there on the tube. But, yeah, no, any of these things, in the real world are surprisingly hard to do. But they're fun. I'm social psychologists, so he used to get out there and do that kind of stuff. My favorite, my first ever psychology experiment was at Houston Station. I just stood there. And when one person got off a train and were met by, say, their partner, and they embraced, and the two of them were clearly very happy, I used to go up to them and say, excuse me, would you mind taking part in a psychology experiment? Can you tell me how long it's been since I just said, excuse me. And I'd have a stop washing my pocket so I knew the actual time.

And what we found was that their estimation of the time, because they were happy, was it was much, much shorter because their good mood shortened time. And that was my first ever psychology experiment. It was many, many years ago. And, you know, as someone who studied psychology, that is the big crux. You see all these lab surveys and students basically go into a room and fill in the questionnaire and then something's published and you look at them think, well, is that really how we, when it comes down to brass satch, do you behave like that? Yeah, it's a huge problem and more and more psychology is moving online because they're quite straightforward studies to do. And so it's actually now quite rare to read about a study where

someone's gone out into the real world and actually done something involving behavior. When you look back, I did a book called Quicology, second book I did years ago. And that was all about unobtrusive behaviour, you know, actually measure. And it was quite easy then to find those studies much, much harder now. Even with COVID, you would think, you know, figuring out how people actually behave in certain measures, there could have been opportunities in those two years of lockdowns to maybe see, you know, how do people respond to these. Yeah. I mean, sometimes they look at sort of mass numbers. And so you'll look at a number of people with vaccine uptake or something like that. But in terms of really getting out there and looking one-on-one, it's a rarer thing to do. It's a pity,

because that's often where the fun is. I'm definitely going to change my, I have my dog as my phone home screen, but it's going to be my niece now, just in case. That's a very important change, yes. We did have a puppy, and that did quite well, not real puppy in the wallet, obviously. That'd be hard to get through ethics, but a picture of a puppy and did fairly well. So you'll be okay with the dog. But yeah, a baby is always good. So I haven't gotten in kids, but I've got a picture of a baby in my wallet. I've actually no idea who the baby. I can't even remember now where I've got that picture from. So yeah, I've been carrying that around for years. Yeah, someone goes and looks it up and this, like, this is the first result on Google images, what the first. That's a strange man.

Just a couple last questions then. And one, it says a little bit about the sort of my age and the stage of life on that I'm at, that I have a lot of friends wondering about whether they should lie or not to their children. And it's quite interesting because there's one in a book I read recently, there's a really fun example of a dad taking his kid to Disney World. And as you get to the entrance, they say, you know, kids under three go free. And if you're over three, it's £150, is your child over three? And then he says,

well, he's almost three, full well knowing he's about three months older than three. So he's a sort of parcel truth. Yes. Yeah, no, he's just shaved him. But yeah, knowing he's telling a sort of partial truth. And his son sort of goes, when he gets through, thankfully, he's good enough to know that I wait till we're through the gate.

He says, what's, you told a lie, Dad? What was that about? So you sort of hinted it earlier that lies can be quite useful. And is it a bit silly to be worrying about whether we lie to our kids? And is there anything to say that that's teaching them a bad behavior to, you know, do as I say, not as I do? Yes, I think it's all nuanced, isn't it? What's great about that is because they're going to Disneyland. And so once you get in there, you're just lying to the kid about everything.

It's like, let's go and see Mickey Mouse. It's a wonderful castle. So I think it does put it into focus, is that what we want is kids to lie some of the time. You know, when it's their birthday and someone's come over and give them the present, it's terrible if the kid takes off the wrapping paper and go, this is the worst present I've ever had. I didn't want this.

Well, I made it quite clear. This is the last thing I wanted. We don't want that. But so we want them to lie under those circumstances, but other times we want them to tell us the truth. And that's because lying isn't, like most bits of complex behaviour, it's not one thing, it's many things, it depends on the situation. So what we have to tell kids is the truth in that sense, which is that sometimes it's

a right to lie and sometimes it isn't. And it depends very much on the situation. For example, are you lying to make somebody feel good, in which case it's probably you're right to tell that that lie. Are you lying for your own benefit? And if the person found out you were lying, they'd be furious. What, in which case, actually, it's probably not all right to lie there. So I don't think we should get too head up about it. It's a problem that's been around for a long time, and we've survived up until this point. I just think it's a question of being honest about what lying is. And as I say, sometimes it's okay and sometimes it's not okay.

So Rich, you've got this new podcast. I'd love to know. I'd actually thought for a very long time, having read quite a few of your books that, you know, how come Richard hasn't got a podcast yet? I think it would be a brilliant thing. So what drew you to it and what can listeners expect when they head over? Yeah, it's called Richard Wiseman's On Your Mind. And it's my good self and science journalist Marley Chesterton. And each week we talk about a different topic. So it might be the lying or ghosts, might be happiness, motivation, persuasion, anything where there's kind of take-home messages. And I think what drew me to it is after, I think I've done sort of 14 or 15 books. And it's nice to take all of that information and put it in podcast-y form and just to sit there and chat about it. And because podcasts at the minute, very popular. So yeah, very excited, nice thing to do, mainly for me. Unfortunately, Marnie has to spend time with me so it's not quite so much fun. for her. But she does it very well. And it's just been lovely. And we're on a quest originally to answer a thousand questions about the human mind. And then we did the first episode and realized we only got

through two questions. And so we've set the bar pretty high. And as most things in life, I think the easiest solution is to bring that bar down. So I haven't told the team yet, but I think we're going be on a quest to answer 70 questions, tops, in the podcast, rather than the initial thousand. So, yeah, it's been lots of fun. And you've got, you've got people asking questions that they send them in. You've got, I heard Rob Reinder, celebrity, Rob Ryder on there. Can people fire in their questions about the mind and the brain? Absolutely. And we do need their questions. We've now realised we need quite a lot of them. So on Twitter, they can send in their their questions and sometimes it's audio, sometimes we just read them out. We ask questions

to each other. Sometimes they're celeb questions. We have Josh Stone, a wonderful singer, coming up with a question a bit later on. So yes, we need questions because it was my idea, like an idiot, to answer a thousand of them. And we are in desperate need of questions for the podcast. So any questions you've got about the human mind, let us know. That was Professor Richard Wiseman there, discussing the science of lying. If you'd like to hear more from Richard, check out his new podcast on your mind, which is available on your preferred podcast platform. Thank you for listening.

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