Liar, Liar

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You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Dara, I noticed you didn't make it on time today.

I couldn't make it in.

I couldn't make it in because there were some big kids around the ticket machine

in the train station.

And I got the man and the man came.

And the man tried to stop him, but he had to stop the train because the big kids stopped every day.

He's still scared of the big kids.

I'm really big.

The big kids are really big.

You're also quite big, Dara.

It doesn't matter.

And then the man said the train can't go now because

look,

he said that it wasn't done it was done it wasn't my fault he said very important he said it's not your fault but the train has to be delayed now right are you lying to me I'm I'm not lying to you there was a lot of events there was somebody hit a balloon and the balloon popped and people got scared in the train

of weird detail going on here I just I don't believe a single word that you're saying I slept in

my dog ate my alarm clock yes the dog was one of the big kids who couldn't let me do anything yeah I lied I lied because

because why not you're right why be truthful in this situation your co-worker.

Sure.

The thing is, is that I think you've got some tells going on there.

Do you?

Your eyes went all funny and you stopped using sentences.

Yeah, that happened on what I lied to you as well.

A show I invented, actually.

It was for Lee Mac, and then I came up with the format for it.

No, you did not.

No, I didn't.

See, that's the lie.

And where are my tells now?

Turns out.

You use sentences and it threw me.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fiving is what we're covering on this show.

Not specifically just tells, but broader than that.

Do we have a question?

We do, and it's coming from Delphine.

Have you listened to this?

My name is Delphine and I was wondering why do we lie and are we the only species that lies?

I'm always astonished when people lie to me and it's obvious they're lying and there are like thousands of proof they're lying and still they still do it looking you right in the eyes.

I'm an architect and when you're an architect you got builders telling you big lies.

You know I sometimes envy these people because I'm not able to do that I got a very bad memory and I think if you can't remember who to who you lied and what lied you said you get already lost

well firstly saying that architects don't lie is itself a lie

but yes it is it is a very common thing and it's also a very enjoyable thing at times

to you partial to little lies

you know particularly to your kids for example oh i like it yeah i enjoy that every enjoys that it's only when they go and repeat them and then you hear from another parent going, Apparently, you're a spy.

I say I'm not a spy now, but I was during the Second World War.

I told my little girls when they're about two or three that when they lie, a light shines out of their eyes that only their parents can see.

Now, I've got to be honest with you, Dara, this is one of the biggest strokes of genius I've ever had because from that moment on, whenever they wanted to lie, their amazing tell were that they would cast out their own eyes.

Very cute.

Yeah, it's quite sweet.

Well, here to help us separate fact from fiction today, we have Richard Wiseman, who is professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Harkshire.

And Richard has done quite a few major studies on why we are so bad at lie detection.

And we're also joined by Dr.

Sophie van der Zee from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, a psychologist who studies deception.

And Sophie, we'll get into why we lie in a minute.

But are humans the only species who do it?

No, we're not.

We are in great company because most animals lie as well.

Give me an example of how a non-verbal animal would lie.

Yeah, so some of them lie through their looks.

This is also called mimicry.

But we also know that animals can lie not just the way they look, but also the way they behave.

And most of it has to do with survival.

So either how to get food, how to create offspring, or how to make sure you don't die.

And my favorite one is a red-bellied squirrel, because when the male just had a lot of fun with a female squirrel, basically to make sure that his genes spread out, he wants to, of course, make sure that he's the only one whose genes can spread out, so that there's not another male squirrel trying to intervene, basically.

So, what he then does is after the deed, he calls an alarm and he says, oh, no, predators are coming.

So, everyone is fleeing the scene, and no one else is going to impregnate his female squirrel.

This is a commonly observed behavior in what type of squirrel is it again?

A red-belly squirrel.

A red-belly squirrel.

But yet, people haven't got wise.

Did I say people?

Oh, they're squirrels.

Haven't got wise to this, you know, basically crying wolf.

So the squirrel cries wolf.

Yeah, it does.

And not just, so this is one example after having sex, but there's also a lot of examples of specific birds that do the same thing when they see food that they don't want to share with others.

So they basically cry wolf, make sure everyone disappears, and then they secretly take the food and take off themselves as well.

So common enough then for them to deceive their own family, their own species as well.

Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting because for example a lot of monkeys and apes they are meant to really like live in groups and be cooperative but actually if you look very closely at their behavior there's quite a lot of egocentric behavior involving lying as well against their own group.

As the kind of societal structure of the animal in question gets a bit more complicated does lying appear more and more?

I'm not sure whether it appears more and more, but we see it across all species.

But are we humans the absolute masters of it?

it?

Yeah, we are.

We definitely are.

And what's interesting, I think, is that we're better at lying than we are at detecting lies.

And this is also, I think, has some issues.

It's clearly better than squirrels.

We've sussed that plank.

Every time.

Yeah, I'd like to, I mean, it's a low bar to set, but I'd like to think that we are clearing that one.

But yeah, yeah, we're better at doing it than we are detecting it.

Yeah.

And one of the interesting things is that with lying, the more you practice, the better you get.

But we don't see that effect with lie detection.

That's very interesting.

Okay, because you'd presume that would also be an evolutionary advantage to spot when you're being fooled.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that.

But I can clearly see the benefits of deception, right?

If you pretend to be a bit smarter, a bit

stronger than you actually are, you are higher on the social ladder in your group.

You increase the chances of mating and thereby spreading your genes.

But the problem with deception detection is that it's very hard and we're often wrong, basically.

And if you look back at humans the way we used to live as hunters and gatherers in small groups together, then there are actually not that many benefits to either like calling someone a liar and or trying to figure out if someone is deceiving you.

Because it's so costly, right?

If someone accuses you of lying and you are dependent on a small group of people, they may cast you out, which probably means you're not going to survive.

Look, it's very easy to point examples where a lying will give you an advantage, an obvious advantage over somebody else.

But it's also quite interesting, I suppose, those situations where people lie not to gain advantage, but almost as like a social cohesion.

They lie because it keeps the group happy.

I mean, this is the oil of social machinery, as Proust once said, that that is a large part of the lying that we do as humans.

Yeah, I think if you look at the types of lies that people tell, there's a couple of different types, but the majority of lies in everyday life are social lies taught to not upset the other person, to make someone feel good about themselves, to strengthen their relationship, to avoid conflict is also a very important one, to make sure the other person doesn't worry.

That's one that we found very strongly in our research.

There's even been some modeling work in computer science where they looked at how would societies look without lying and they found that there were fewer interactions and less positive interactions.

Richard, we dwell on the deception part of the negative at all, but

it's a fantastically useful, sophisticated device lie.

Oh, it's amazing.

I mean, we should distinguish between benign lies, which we all want to hear and want to believe.

So, if you're walking down the street and you see somebody you haven't seen for a decade and they go, oh my goodness, lovely to see you,

that's what you want to believe at that moment.

You don't want them to say, there's a reason why I haven't been in touch for ten years.

So, it kind of bonds us together, and then it can shade over into the exploitative lies, the lies that, you know, we think, well, you're telling me a lie because it's for your own advantage, not mine.

There's been lots of surveys on lying.

One of the ones we carried out many years ago showed that about 25% of people, so about a quarter, have told a significant lie in the last 24 hours.

So it's out there big time.

In that same survey, we had 6% of people that claimed never to have told a lie, which I assume is the 6% that can't even tell the truth on an anonymous survey about lying.

So, yeah,

it's an everyday behaviour.

We do it very naturally, most of us do.

Hold on, though.

Would you say 25% of people have software?

Okay, so hang on, there's five of us here.

Yes.

No, sorry.

Definitely one of the things that's not.

Definitely one of us.

Definitely.

Who is it?

Hands off to you.

I've had a very honest 24 hours.

I have had a very honest 24 hours.

I think.

Constantly lying.

I mean, everything I've told you about in my past 24 hours is wrong.

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Can I ask about the difference between young people and old people?

Sophie, has that been observed that people lie more as children and then grow out of it?

Yes, we've been studying lying behavior in both children, adults and elderly people.

And what we found is that children reported lying more often than adults and definitely than elderly people.

So what you basically see is an inverted U-shape.

So as children grow older, they basically report lying more and more.

And this sort of goes up to adolescents and then it goes down again.

And at least in our research, the 65 plus people reported almost telling no lies.

I like that though, because it's like, you know what?

This is who I am.

Take no lies.

Oh, okay, fine.

Yes.

We're saying, yeah they're finally gonna be honest with you

there's a reason I've not spoken to you for 10 years exactly and I can smell it from here yeah I mean it's some fascinating work with children at the age they start the first stage they start to lie so you bring the kid into the lab you tell them that you're going to set up their favourite toy behind them and you say okay now you're not to peek at the toy and then you leave the room and most kids will have a quick peek at the toy and turn back again then you come back into the room and say did you peek at the toy now you know that they did, and the question is, what percentage lie?

And when you do that study with three-year-olds, you get around about 40% of kids lying.

You go up to five-year-olds, and I kid you not, it's 100%.

They all lie.

So people are learning to lie pretty quickly in life.

And it's something that we then master throughout the rest of our adult lives.

So I find it a fascinating behaviour.

Do they lie about lying as well?

Do you have any, maybe not children, but do we have evidence of how much people lie about lying?

Well, that becomes the issue within doing the research into lying, because if you really identify a group of hardcore liars, you can't believe a word they're saying.

So

it's a very tricky area.

Take it from me.

Can I bring it to a different thing if we're talking about kids, though, which is just their imagination.

Presumably, we want kids to have a rich imagination.

We want them to have a kind of a...

playful universe that they're in, all of which is lies, obviously.

But we create fiction, we tell stories.

That's another another part of and of course, we tell kids lies as well.

Yes, and about all sorts of, I won't spoil any of the big parts

in case anyone's listening that doesn't realized, but we tell kids lies and then in the same sentence tell them not to lie.

So it's very complicated.

But I think what you're getting at there is right.

We are storytelling animals.

In order to do that, you need to invent a fiction of some sort.

The downside of that is you realize that skill can then be used to manipulate other people's sense of reality.

And so all these things are finely balanced.

And without lying, without deception, without storytelling, without imagination, life wouldn't be very interesting at all.

I mean, if some people lie more than others, I also think some people are definitely better at it than others.

And I think this is the perfect point to bring in Paul Gorton, who was one of the contestants on the TV series The Traitors.

Now, for anyone who hasn't seen it, it's sort of like a televised version of werewolves.

But basically, what happened is some players are called traitors and they have to kill off the others who are called faithfuls.

And in short, short, this game involves a lot of deception.

And there was one particularly deceptive.

Well, good at deception, shall we say, because when you went on the show, you were like, I want to be a traitor.

I want to do the lying.

I want to do the deception.

Were you kind of trying to manipulate the production team to get them to pick you as a traitor?

I kind of felt like every time I did an audition, I was in character.

So from a very early stage, I thought American Psycho.

I thought this is a guy that is very affable, likable, intelligent during the day, but he was killing people at night.

And I thought, well, you know, the Traitors is a game show version of that.

And I've got, you know, Brett's book.

Like, literally, this is the book that I was reading on the way up to Scotland.

Famously aspirational character.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Maybe not.

But, but, well, definitely if you want to go into The Traitors, he is, if you want to be a traitor.

Okay, so, so, I mean, there were some very lovely, sweet people in that show.

Did you find it difficult to lie to them well i like to think i'm quite nice and sweet but when you're put into that position you have the capability as every human does to kind of do the things that i did and maybe even go even further so what's hilarious is when you're in the castle and you meet everyone and everyone's lovely it's great but then when you come out and watch it back everyone sat with claudia and said i want to be a traitor i could be really good so even the most nice and lovely people still pitched themselves that they could be you know liars and manipulators and all that type of stuff so okay i i hear you saying that you're a nice guy in uh in normal life are you an honest guy like do you i mean do you tell little lies well my profession for the past 20 years has been sales so maybe it's not so much as lying but it's always kind of showing the features and benefits that will propel you forward So maybe it's hiding the truth rather than outright telling a lie.

But then the big thing in the traitors, and kind of maybe in day-to-day life and maybe the corporate world, is there was a lot of steering, there was a lot of manipulation, there was a lot of moving the conversation away from you.

So instead of outright telling a lie, for example, this wasn't me and this is why, you would immediately just say, but that person did that over there, didn't they?

I don't know.

I think confidence and likability kind of comes into play.

That almost the more liked you are, the easier it is to get away with a lie.

Wasn't there a moment when you cried at the table?

I think body language lying, like when dogs play dead for argument's sake, I did that a lot.

And I would do body ticks, I would do kind of almost like grunts kind of at the table when someone was speaking to show that I was displeased with what they were saying to see if I could plant seeds throughout the table.

So even when I wasn't speaking, I was trying to still gain favor around the room.

But yeah, one of the episodes, in fact, I think in two of the episodes, I cried because I was genuinely upset and missed home.

But because I was crying, my brain, again, this maybe is the Patrick Bateman side of it, it was going, Maybe you can kind of use this to your advantage.

And I did do that.

Again, I thought I'll take it to the nth degree.

And I was crying outside of one of the guys that thought I was a traitor.

And I said to him in that moment, I promise I'm a faithful.

And he said, I believe you now.

And that got him off my back.

So I've seen that as a pat on the back.

Job well done.

But I did also think,

yeah, the public might not like that.

That scene.

Tell me what I'm enjoying most from this conversation is the faces of of the two psychologists as they were listening to us, listening to you speak.

Richard, Paul was obviously pretending to be a psychopath, essentially, specifically Patrick Bateman.

Yeah, he was pretending to be a psychopath.

Is lying more common in certain character traits in certain character traits?

Well yeah we should say here that's a sanctioned lie.

That's part of the show to lie.

Where in everyday life that's not the case.

Most lying isn't sanctioned.

And there's definitely individual differences.

So people who are socially oriented, people who are what's called high self-monitors, that is, they're very conscious of what signals they're giving off all the time, they're good liars.

When you get the other end of the spectrum, the introverts, people who are more concerned about others than themselves, are not so good.

They're the people that are more obvious when they're lying.

So yeah, big, big differences, as you get with pretty much any psychological trait.

I'm intrigued by the notion of people not being able to track lies, as if when you lie, you have less of an internal logic to it than reality to a certain extent.

It is less grounded in your head, so therefore it's more difficult for you to remember what lies you've told.

Absolutely.

So you haven't got reality to draw upon.

What you've got is the memory of the lie that you're trying to construct.

And it's really difficult.

I mean, social interaction is actually pretty taxing on the brain, and you add on these falsehoods as well, and it becomes difficult.

So a lot of the signals that you see associated with lying are actually, as I say, associated with cognitive difficulty.

And the problem is, we don't think about it like that.

What we think about is lying will make us feel physiologically anxious.

That's where the whole idea of the lie detecting machine comes from.

Actually that model doesn't hold up very well.

If you're someone who's used to lying, if you've told the lie many times before, you're not particularly anxious about it, but you still require a lot of brain power in order to produce that lie.

Because lie detectors, I mean the sort of traditional machines that you wire yourself up to, they don't work, right?

Yeah, and a lot of psychologists are not convinced by them.

So they come from the sort of 1920s, this idea that when you lie, you become physiologically anxious.

And so you would look at someone's heart rate, skin conductance, and so on.

And there's been a huge amount of research into them, and they are all based on the idea that liars will be anxious.

But it turns out that actually that's not the case.

They say, if it's rehearsed, if you don't feel at all worried about lying in general, you don't show any of those signals.

Instead, when you shift your perception onto the words that people are saying, how they're saying them, the right sorts of body language, actually, lie detection becomes a little bit easier.

Some of the best signals are actually in the voice.

It's how we say certain words and the words we choose.

And when you put people's attention onto those vocal and verbal signals, they become better lie detectors.

So I did a study a few years ago where we looked at lying on television versus radio versus newspapers.

So I interviewed Sir Robin Day all those years ago twice about his favourite film.

Once he told me a pack of lies, the other time it was all the truth.

We put those out on television, asked people to vote, and it was about 50-50.

So that's people are not very good at detecting lies.

In newspapers, it went up to about 64% accuracy, but on radio, it went up to about 75%.

So if you're a politician and you want to lie, then get on television and stay away from the radio.

So that's because you're shifting people's attention onto these signals, which are actually better tells, if you like.

The fact that liars tend to use shorter sentences.

There's bigger what's called response latency, which is the gap between the end of the question, the beginning of the answer, as they think through what they're going to say.

There's more ums, there's more R's there.

They tend to emotionally self-distance.

They don't use the words me, my, I, and so on.

All those things are more reliable.

They're still a long way away from 100%, but more reliable than the visual signals.

Are you saying then to tell if somebody else is lying, you should cover your own eyes?

That's a good question.

That's what you should be doing.

That's clearly a better version of what your children are doing anyway.

Can we try it?

Well, I have a little lying test here, if I would like to give that a go.

I don't wish you wanted to be a liar or a truth-they're not.

I'll go and I'll do some lying.

Okay, all right.

I'll give you this.

It's an envelope.

And truth-telling.

I mean, sorry, what?

Yes, well, we'll give it a go.

Hold on a second.

Inside the envelope is a piece of paper.

You're going to open the piece of paper and there's a picture.

Below the picture, either says the word lie or truth.

If it says lie, you have to convince us you're looking at a completely different picture.

If it says truth, you have to describe that picture as accurately as possible.

And away you go.

Tell us what you're looking at.

So it looks quite a lot like old MacDonald had a farm.

There is a pig with a pig style in the background.

There are some trees, some shrubbery,

and a trough for its food.

I think you're telling the truth because I think it's

full of, you know, banal detail.

That would have been difficult to come up with the stage.

I think you would have gone more unusual if it was a lie.

Either of you two want to guess.

I think that was a lie.

Go on.

Do you have children?

Yeah, it's absolutely a lie.

Yeah,

I think that is a stored story in your brain.

And I also think it's quite difficult to see mud.

Did you say you could see mud?

Because there's no colour on the sheet, is there?

Hush now.

I'm quite honest.

Okay,

shall I show you?

Do you want to pick up on anything?

No, no, no, no.

You did very well there, I think.

So it was a lie, indeed.

Wow.

And it's actually a picture of a dog with a kennel.

You know what?

I have to say, Paul is on to something because this does remind me of a picture of a book that my children have, which is on McDonald Humphrey.

And I was like, I'll just change the dog for a pig and then describe it.

I'm rethinking now.

Nothing I've ever said was truthful.

I'm also very impressed that we got Paul the Arch,

like Master of Untruth, from The Dreams On, and he thought through that.

Well done, Paul.

Congratulations.

Very good.

Yeah.

If we're doing that in a psychological scenario experiment, then honestly, I would swear it would be about 50-50.

Half the people will think you're lying, the other half will think you're telling the truth.

You did a very, very good job there.

So it's very, very difficult to tell because it's what we do all the time.

Sophie, there are some jobs that are sort of, shall we say, traditionally associated with not being that truthful.

So estate agents, builders, maybe politicians, maybe some politicians in particular.

Do you want to tell us about that?

Richard just told us a bit about how language can change when we lie.

And the Washington Post found out that after four years of presidency in 2021, President Trump had told over 30,000 false or misleading claims.

The problem is that if something is factually incorrect, it doesn't necessarily mean that someone is lying because you can also just be wrong.

You might be misinformed.

You might just say things without really knowing.

And that is different.

And I think it is because the intention is different.

You don't have an intention to deceive.

So we want to know from a deception detection point of view, knowing that people use slightly different words when they're lying than when they're telling the truth, can we say something about the chance that he's either wrong a lot

or he is deliberately deceiving a lot?

We took three months of his tweets and analyzed his word use and only the types of words that he used.

So is it a first or a third person pronouns, for example?

Is it a verb or a noun?

And we compared the factually correct and the factually incorrect tweets.

And if he was just wrong, you wouldn't expect any differences.

But if he was lying, you would expect differences and specific differences.

We saw that Trump, when he was stating factually incorrect things,

he used more words, more third-person words, so he was distancing himself, more words indicating cognitive processing, showing that he was probably more cognitively loaded, more negations, more comparison words.

So a lot of words that we know are associated with deception.

And then we thought, okay, so how well, given we created this personalized deception detection model, it was the first one ever in the world.

And we thought, can we predict for new incoming tweets whether it is factually correct or incorrect as a screening tool, for example?

And we could correctly identify 74%, so three out of four tweets, as they were going to be classified as either factually correct or incorrect, just based on the words that he used.

Well, that kind of does come back to what you were saying earlier, Richard, about how if you have a baseline that's kind of tuned to an individual person, it's like deviations from that baseline.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, that's the perfect example of it.

And you're looking for all the sorts of markers that we were talking about before.

I mean, there is the old gagger, how can you tell when a politician's lying because their lips move?

So there's always that signal as well.

And that's how one would go about lie detection in the real world.

You form some kind of baseline and then you look for certain types of movements away from that.

But there are some situations where we sort of like being deceived, isn't there?

I mean, I have definitely said more than once, just lie to me next time.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely key to it.

I mean, my background is as a magician.

Of course.

So, you know, you go to a magic show and it'd be disappointing if you weren't deceived.

It'd also be

quite a poor magic show, to be honest.

And that's a sanctioned lie.

We go along as a magician, you're just lying to people left, right, and centre.

So under those circumstances, I don't feel guilty about it.

But outside of that context, yeah, you'd have all the kind of worried thoughts you have normally associated with lying.

You know how some magicians claim that they can tell if other people are lying?

Well, it's a very deceptive old field, isn't it, Magic?

What's interesting is that if you give people an explanation for what they're seeing, they'll buy into the explanation, which stops them digging into places where you might not want them to dig.

Very informative sentence, that wasn't it.

Yeah, was it though?

Or was he lying?

I know we started this conversation with the the animals and their camouflage or plumage or behavioural things.

We really have taken it to a whole level though, as a species.

You know, the fact that we can distinguish between sanctioned and unsanctioned, positive and negative lyings, and we can build an entire television show based around somebody entirely lying and being or people being lied to and how delighted they were to be lied to.

And then we'll elect people.

We've very much embraced it, I think, more than the animal community.

Every possible level.

Absolutely.

Okay, well, all that remains is to thank our guests.

So, Professor Sophie Van van der Zay, Professor Richard Wiseman and the very treacherous Paul Gorton.

Thank you very much.

I don't think I'll ever lie again.

No, just did one.

Just did one there.

That was one right there.

Self-referential.

That's why I got tangled in a web of logic.

You don't know.

Maybe I'm lying now, or maybe I'm not.

What a twist, what an end.

We'll never know.

Maybe the whole show is a lie.

Richard Wiseman didn't say say a single truthful thing.

Everything, we just made it all up.

We made the whole thing up.

It wasn't even pulled from the traitors.

It was someone doing an impression.

Yeah.

Oh, we're going to get away with this.

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Hi, Greg.

Hi, Greg.

Hi, Greg.

Greg Foote here with a new series of Sliced Bread, the show where I scrutinise your suggestions of wonder products that promise to make you happier, healthier, or greener.

The Wonder Product is Insulation Hacks.

Would you consider looking into health scales?

Sometimes we go in unexpected directions.

As part of this episode, I conducted a sniff test.

But how good really are these wonder products?

It's more than the best thing to sliced bread.

It's a live saver.

It's not something I would invest in.

I'd certainly say you have to take it with a big pinch of salt.

The new series of sliced bread with me, Greg Foote, on Radio 4 is available now on BBC Sounds.

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