Detecting Lies

One of the points that's come up in the debate about whether Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed or not is the question of how well we can or can't tell whether he or Dr. Ford are lying based on their temperaments.

The short answer is no, we can't. Picking apart verifiable facts is an excellent way to catch liars at it; looking for tells in their behavior largely isn't. This article lays out several reasons for that, ranging from the fact that what people look for is quite subjective to the fact that we don't have any good way to check whether our past judgments have been accurate or not. Even those people whose jobs rely on detecting lies aren't always good at being able to tell who's lying without being able to check other facts.

That conclusion goes against what most people believe about lying and spotting liars, at least as far as I know. If nothing else, a lot of the stories we tell ourselves are filled with the wise investigators and clever gamblers who can see right through their fellow people. Even if I'd be willing to agree that some of those people might exist, most of us aren't like that, and I suspect people who are that perceptive are rarer than we'd all prefer.

The conclusion does not, however, go against my personal experience - because I've been caught out by a liar or two in my life, and reflecting on those moments definitely does make me think about how difficult it was to spot them at it. It was incredibly tricky to figure out even after I had reasons to be suspicious and was watching the people in question as carefully as I knew how. And in the end, it still wasn't any kind of insight into what they looked or acted like when they were lying that got them caught - it was the facts about what they were doing versus what they were saying that got me to realize I was still being lied to. So I have no problem agreeing with the various studies that suggest catching liars on temperament alone is an extremely hard thing to do.