Deception

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Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Robin Entz.

Speaker 6 And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it.
Hello, and welcome to You and Yours.

Speaker 1 I'm Jacques Cousteau.

Speaker 6 And I'm Valerie Singleton.

Speaker 1 Today, we're going to ask whether physics is merely a fable to fabricate the ponderings of God's mind, and why the most rapidly growing language in the world is sheepdog trial whistling.

Speaker 1 And is it true that Brian Cox keeps seeing Niels Bohr's face in a piece of toast?

Speaker 6 For those who haven't realised yet, this week's theme on the infinite monkey cage is deception.

Speaker 1 Yes, despite his brilliant impression, Brian is not Valerie Singleton.

Speaker 7 Yet.

Speaker 1 Do the voice again.

Speaker 6 Hello, I'm Valerie Singleton.

Speaker 1 It's uncanny. Absolutely uncanny.
So

Speaker 6 today we're asking, is deception a necessary part of the human condition? Is it possible to be wholly truthful and survive in our culture?

Speaker 6 Once we believe a lie, why is it so hard to be convinced we were misled? How can we spot the lies of charlatans, politicians and greengrocers?

Speaker 1 Not just greengrocers, grocers, butchers, fishmongers, winkle pickers.

Speaker 1 To help us out, we have a panel of 73 people, two of whom arrived at Roswell in 1947 and one of whom is a robot currently trying to get his Duke of Edinburgh Turing test badge.

Speaker 1 See if you can work out which one it is.

Speaker 1 So our panel is...

Speaker 9 I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and magician. And my best.

Speaker 8 No, I am.

Speaker 8 That's not a lie.

Speaker 8 That's sad, isn't it? No one's going to believe a word anymore. I know.

Speaker 10 That's it.

Speaker 1 It's weird because no one looks more like a magician than you.

Speaker 8 You really have. Exactly.

Speaker 1 An Alibongo, magicky face.

Speaker 8 Thank you.

Speaker 9 I'll take that as a compliment. But

Speaker 9 yeah, so that's... Yeah.
And my biggest lie, which is a lie, was convincing a six-year-old child, I was standing by him, and there's a wind turbine.

Speaker 9 And I convinced him that it was responsible for producing wind, and that

Speaker 9 if they stopped, there would be no more wind ever. And that's the lie I'm most proud of.

Speaker 11 My name is Sophie Scott, and I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. And my biggest lie was allowing people to believe that I was dating the bass player from the cure.

Speaker 7 I'm David Aronovich, columnist with The Times. My speciality is conspiracy theories.
I read a book about it called Voodoo Histories.

Speaker 7 It's not fair that I've been asked this question about lies because I'm older than any of you and I've had a considerably longer to lie.

Speaker 8 How old are you?

Speaker 7 I'm 43.

Speaker 6 What? You're going to laugh for saying that you're in your mid-40s.

Speaker 1 It's also the fact that the moment you're near Brian, everyone else who leaves here, you will all look considerably older as he sucks your youth out of you.

Speaker 8 I'm still gorgeous, but look at those, just clusters of human beings.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Richard Wiseman, the magician, let's start with you.

Speaker 1 So are all humans... I mean, are we natural liars? Are human beings natural liars?

Speaker 8 I think we are.

Speaker 9 We certainly do a lot of it. So in surveys, I mean, it depends what you count as lying.
If you count leaving out information, then we're doing it all of the time, pretty much.

Speaker 9 In terms of big lies, then it's around about one or two lies per day. We did some work a while ago with asking people, do you tell lies?

Speaker 9 We had 8% of people that claimed not to tell any lies ever in their lives. So that's the 8% that couldn't even bring themselves to tell the truth in a survey.

Speaker 8 Pathologically.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 we do a lot of it. We've always done a lot of it.
There are hundreds of lies being told every moment, and we're not very good at detecting them.

Speaker 9 So I think there is something in us that means we are natural-born liars.

Speaker 1 So how many, you're saying one or two big lies a day. So what kind of lies would they be?

Speaker 1 If we could just kind of class the, how many lies, I mean, this survey, it's a difficult survey to do, isn't it?

Speaker 9 How often do you lie in a day? It is because it comes down to what counts as a lie. So if you meet somebody and you can't stand them and you say, oh, hello, nice to see you, is that a lie?

Speaker 9 Should you have said, I can't stand you.

Speaker 9 And so people wouldn't really class that as a lie.

Speaker 9 Once it's into, you know, lying for your own good and you're withholding information that is clearly exploitative and so on, then you get to white lies.

Speaker 9 You know, when someone says, Does this, you know, whatever, dress suit me? And you go, well, yes, that's great. And you're thinking, my goodness, no.

Speaker 9 So it's a very difficult thing to do, but certainly we're doing a lot of it.

Speaker 1 And are you good at lying?

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 9 No, I'm really not. I'm not a very good liar.
I mean, magicians tend to be quite good, but I'm absolutely terrible at it. So if you hear it from me, it's the absolute truth.

Speaker 6 David, Richard said that we're not very good at spotting lies or deception, but as a columnist and a political journalist, you're surrounded by the professional deceivers, I would say.

Speaker 6 Does it make you more sensitive to picking up deception?

Speaker 7 It makes you interested in what people believe and what they want to believe, and in the nature of desiring to be deceived. But it also makes me interested.

Speaker 7 I mean, you're You're talking about politicians. The most successful politicians narrow the gap between what they believe to be true and the thing that they have to say.

Speaker 7 And if necessary, they change the thing that they believe so that they don't have to lie.

Speaker 7 So, for instance, Patty Ashdown once famously said about Tony Blair, who made some promise or other, which he couldn't then keep, he was asked, did Blair believe it?

Speaker 7 And he said, well, he believed it at the time he said it.

Speaker 6 So it's a technique, it's almost method acting in a way then, because they're not actors. And so in order to be absolutely convincing and believable, you change your belief

Speaker 6 rather than try and act.

Speaker 7 Well, yeah, I think that's a thing to do for a very successful one. But also, quite often, this lie is within, or what you might call lying or deception, is within the game.

Speaker 7 People know what is being done. People know that the thing can't be possibly be the way that it is said, but they won't have it said any other way.

Speaker 7 Take something that happened a few months ago, the Emily Thornbury tweet.

Speaker 7 You have to have a whole tissue of lies about what people's attitudes are to a guy who flies England flags outside, and everybody becomes incredibly

Speaker 7 hypocritical, they're actually deceptive about what they think. Ed Millibound says, I've never been so angry about anything in my life.

Speaker 8 Of course, he has.

Speaker 7 He's been far more angry about things, but at the moment when he said it, he had to make himself angry enough to justify the phrase because it was what he needed to do.

Speaker 6 Sophie, are we then good or not particularly good at spotting deception and lies? If they're outright lies rather than this more sophisticated form that David spoke about?

Speaker 11 Generally, we are poor at it, and I think that seems to be for a number of reasons. Partly because a lot of normal discourse relies on it.
As Richard said, we're not saying everything we want to say.

Speaker 11 When somebody asks how you are, you hardly ever tell them. And also because I think a lot of the so discourse is predicated on a sort of an assumption that people are telling the truth.

Speaker 11 You want to believe people are telling the truth.

Speaker 11 Every single person I've ever met who's encountered somebody burglarising their home, there's been a point when the burglar has just lied to their face. Like, I was looking for Alan.
Is Alan not here?

Speaker 11 But it's again, it's predicated on that notion that you will believe people. And there's some interesting work on actually what's happening when people lie, exactly like you've already picked up on.

Speaker 11 That if you believe it, very often your behavior won't be giving clues away because you are in the mood, you're in the spot, this seems like the truth to you.

Speaker 11 When you can pick up things associated with lying, is when there's an emotional cost. So I'm telling you something and I really want you to believe it.

Speaker 11 And what a psychologist called Paul Ekman has found is that people continuously leak little facial movements that betray the underlying emotional state that you can use in a situation where you suspect somebody's lying to pick up the emotional cost.

Speaker 11 You're still not picking up the lie, you're picking up the emotion that might be associated with that. So,

Speaker 6 but by emotional costs, do you mean a situation like I suppose if you're the captain of an aircraft and both all the engines have fallen off and you're saying, are you going to be okay?

Speaker 8 Yeah, this is absolutely fine. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 11 There's some cost to you, or

Speaker 11 no, I definitely that was she was just in my room to pick up a book or something, you know, something where you're desperately trying to, you really want the person to believe you, and for whatever reason, good or bad reasons, it matters to you that they believe the lie.

Speaker 11 And that's what causes the cost.

Speaker 7 So what's a poker face thing?

Speaker 11 Well, a poker face is exactly somebody trying to control all of this.

Speaker 11 So a poker face is somebody trying to not let anything through, either through trying to, you know, they're not even bothering with a masking emotion, they're just trying to keep their face completely straight.

Speaker 11 And it's it's more or less impossible to do. If the emotion is going on, bits of it will leak through.

Speaker 1 So the poker face doesn't, because that's what fascinates me with poker, that idea. Richard, have you ever played it?

Speaker 8 Are you a poker person?

Speaker 9 I'm not, I'm not a car player at all, no.

Speaker 1 But would you, because I wonder how much of the ideas of all of the techniques that different poker players have, that most of that is merely the addition of theatricality to actually a mixture of kind of nerve and luck.

Speaker 9 Well, I think what they're trying to do is control not only the facial expressions, but all of the non-verbals we give away or we think we give away when we lie.

Speaker 9 And we're trying to make that decision about other people all the time. And there's a lot of evidence that we make it primarily visually.

Speaker 9 So we're looking for people who move around and suddenly rub their hands together and look sort of strange facially. Actually, there's not very much evidence that those are very good signals.

Speaker 9 So, in fact, if you want to detect a lie, you're much better off listening to the voice, the words, the person's saying, rather than depending on those visual signals.

Speaker 6 You published a study on this about 10 years ago now, wasn't it? In Nature, a big experiment.

Speaker 9 Yes, this was a big thing we did originally with Tomorrow's World, actually, which was a BBC BBC science programme, where we had Sir Robin Day, and I interviewed him twice, once he told me the truth, and once he completely lied, each time about his favorite film.

Speaker 9 And then we played those on television and we asked people to try and spot the lie. I had many a thousand people phone up.

Speaker 6 And you played both of the

Speaker 9 truth and the lie and said, you know, which do you think is the lie? And people, as has been shown time and again in experiments, you give people two video clips like that.

Speaker 9 One's true, one's lie, which is the lie. They're at 50-50.
They're at chance. We think we're really good at it, we're not.

Speaker 9 As soon as we stripped away the visuals and played just the audio track on the radio, people were much better because suddenly you focus their attention on the words and how they're being said.

Speaker 9 Under those circumstances, we become much better lie detectors.

Speaker 6 It's not that the radio audience is more intelligent than the television audience and more perceptible.

Speaker 9 In this particular experiment, that could be the case, actually, although it was radio one.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 8 make of that what you will.

Speaker 8 That's fantastic.

Speaker 1 The idea of Robin Day on the Radio One Roadshow.

Speaker 9 So, in the lab, of course, you can randomize people into the two groups, and you get exactly the same effect. So, in terms of the verbal signals, you have people giving far less detail.

Speaker 9 They don't mention themselves so much. There's an emotional distance, you know, I, me, my, those sorts of words drop away.

Speaker 9 They tend to give a longer distance between the end of the question, beginning of the answer.

Speaker 9 All these things are really apparent when you listen to the soundtrack to the audio, not so apparent when you're overwhelmed by the visual signals.

Speaker 6 Does that mean you're in part disagreeing with what Sophie said about these visual signals, the facial expressions? You're saying that the voice and the way we speak is a more...

Speaker 6 No, so

Speaker 9 I'm saying the voice is really important. Most visual signals are distractions.

Speaker 9 What Sophie's talking about is the micro-expressions, which, yes, if you're trained and you know exactly what you're looking for, then that's great, but most people aren't trained in it.

Speaker 9 So they're going on, oh, does the person look nervous and so on?

Speaker 11 You can think of being able to decode micro-expressions as being like being able to do phonetics.

Speaker 11 So you could listen to my voice and say, Oh, I can tell that you grew up in Blackburn, but your mum's from Belgium. That kind of you know, forensic detail, most people can't do.

Speaker 11 It's like that, but for facial expression. So you have to, like, if you're trained to do phonetic decoding, it takes hours and hours and hours of training.

Speaker 6 Does this mean if we look back to the origins of deception, then, so the evolutionary origins of deception, we presumably can trace it back all the the way through.

Speaker 6 Are there other animals that exhibit deceptive behaviour?

Speaker 11 There are examples.

Speaker 11 I think sometimes, because you're reliant on human observers telling you about these, sometimes these are humans being a little bit romantic about animals, like look at that cheeky little sparrow, she wants to mate with that other sparrow, they've gone hiding.

Speaker 11 Oh, yes, they're up to something. So, you know, that's possible that it might just be some sparrows mating.
I mean, building deception into that.

Speaker 11 But there's a theory, quite an interesting theory, about primates that says part of what's driven the evolution of very large brains brains in primates is the sort of social processing you need to do to lie and to deceive.

Speaker 11 So if you look broadly across primates, you can see primates with smaller brains tend to deceive each other by kind of I wanted your water, I'm trying to think of a good way of doing it, I might sort of scream, you look why I'm screaming, then I nick your water.

Speaker 11 So it's it's kind of quite basic deception. But as you move up larger brains basically, you find more complex patterns of deception.

Speaker 11 And when you get to chimpanzees, it really starts to look pretty human, actually.

Speaker 6 So So, you're suggesting that to operate in large social groups, deception is a necessary behaviour.

Speaker 11 Well, potentially, particularly for the sort of large social groups that primates live in, which are very hierarchical.

Speaker 11 They're not, whatever Russell Brand tells you, they're not large cooperative groups of monkeys who are all sharing.

Speaker 7 Does that mean that the highest form of evolution we've achieved so far is Geoffrey Archer?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 9 It's also related to the question of what age do we start to lie as humans.

Speaker 9 And there's some lovely studies where you bring kids into the lab and you put them in a room and you say, Okay, we're setting up your favourite toy behind you, but don't look.

Speaker 9 And then you walk out of the room and say, Whatever you do, don't look at the toy.

Speaker 9 And then you watch them with closed-circuit TV. And after a couple of minutes, they'll look at the toy and then they'll go back again.
And then you come back into the room and ask the key question.

Speaker 9 You say, Did you look at the toy? So you find out whether or not they're prepared to lie. You do that with three-year-olds, so they've only just really mastered language.

Speaker 9 Already, 50% of them will lie about looking at the toy. You go up two years to five-year-olds, and I kid you not, this is the results.
There isn't a single five-year-old that will tell the truth.

Speaker 9 So you can look at your angelic children and think, my goodness, you know, but I sort of chuckle them in the mouth. But, you know, they are machines that have been programmed to lie and deceive.

Speaker 9 That is the truth of it. That's why that's what evolution has done to it.
That's why you must never trust your children under any circumstances at all.

Speaker 10 Good advice there from Radio 4. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Before we go into David's experiment, which we're going to go into in a moment, can we just you've got a system of finding out people's abilities within this area. Can we try this out on the audience?

Speaker 9 We can, we can try on the audience and listeners as well.

Speaker 9 If you extend the first finger of your dominant hand, whichever one you'd normally write with, and if you now, without thinking about it, trace a capital Q onto your forehead,

Speaker 9 and then just leave it right at the end there.

Speaker 9 And the key thing is where you put the tail of the Q.

Speaker 9 Can you find out how many.

Speaker 9 We can. Okay, so some of you will have put it over the right eye, your right eye.

Speaker 9 So hands up if you put it over your right eye, okay? Hands down. Hands up, you put it over your left eye.
Oh, well, not so many. Okay.

Speaker 8 That surprises me, but I'm very glad.

Speaker 9 So if you over your right eye, you're drawing the cue as if you yourself can see it. And so the argument is that you look at the world from your own perspective and you're a pretty honest person.

Speaker 9 Wait,

Speaker 9 You've probably worked out where this is going.

Speaker 9 If you did the cue with the tail of your left eye, then you're all thinking about the world as if someone else is looking at you. And so you tend to be a very skilled liar, dishonest,

Speaker 8 and immoral. So there we go.
There's

Speaker 8 a lot of

Speaker 8 have any impact on this?

Speaker 9 I've no idea.

Speaker 8 Anyway.

Speaker 1 You don't tell lies, do you? You were very honest. We did this test earlier on, and

Speaker 1 so you can still believe his programmes, however ridiculous they sound. So I'm still going to believe in quantum mechanics for the time being.

Speaker 6 It's only the 11th series,

Speaker 1 did you try that just then, Sophie? Did you know that test?

Speaker 11 I didn't know it, but I came out as a lawyer.

Speaker 8 Right, so.

Speaker 1 And that's the difference between physics and biology.

Speaker 8 And David, did you do it? I didn't say that.

Speaker 12 You will in the edit. It's the difference between physics and biology.

Speaker 8 That is.

Speaker 1 Ain't it lovely? Anyway, David, which one did you go?

Speaker 7 Right down the middle, over my nose.

Speaker 7 Anybody who saw me came to the gate.

Speaker 1 Well, you wrote a quick Q. So you wrote a Q.

Speaker 6 You didn't write a Q then, did you?

Speaker 8 It was my Q.

Speaker 8 It was a Greek letter. It wasn't good enough for you, but it was good enough for me.

Speaker 6 Times columnist, he wrote Greek.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so now we've been doing some deception on the audience.

Speaker 1 One of the great areas of professional sleight of hand is in the advertising industry, because we were told our producers said, don't say they're liars, they might sue.

Speaker 1 Like the whole advertising industry is going to gather together and declare their honesty.

Speaker 8 What a wonderful moment that will be.

Speaker 1 So, the question is: how do you lure people to your product? Now, David, you've just presented a documentary on Radio 4. For people who are listening now, they may have just heard it 20 minutes ago.

Speaker 1 Subliminal advertising. Now, what did you find?

Speaker 7 We made a documentary about subliminal advertising because it's one of these things that people are always talking about. It's always present.

Speaker 7 It's remarkable how long ago this was, if you like, kind of entered the culture, and yet how many people will still go on about subliminal advertising?

Speaker 7 They fundamentally believe that you can affect somebody's behavior by giving them cues that they can't see and understand, and that will get people to do something.

Speaker 7 It's something that we call in the kind of conspiracy theory circles agency panic. It's about whether or not somebody will take control of you in some kind of a way or another.

Speaker 7 And one of the biggest of these was subliminal advertising. The idea came from the 50s.

Speaker 7 The idea that you could be sent a message during the middle, let's say, of a film, and somehow or other you would then act upon this message.

Speaker 7 It's a bit like a kind of a Manchurian candidate, except applied to purchasing and so on. So we decided.

Speaker 7 Now, there's a guy called Wolfgang Strober, whom God protect of Utrecht University, who has actually, under laboratory conditions, managed to make some kind of impact, which he says is statistically relevant, statistically significant, which suggests that you can actually, by flashing a word at a certain number of milliseconds, you can get them to take a message from you and under certain circumstances, controlled circumstances, act upon that message.

Speaker 7 And so, what we have done with the audience here, the large section of them, is do precisely that thing earlier on before the programme began.

Speaker 1 So, you showed them a film which said, kill Brian Cox, and then you left a load of crossbows outside.

Speaker 8 As you know, find out the results by the end of the show.

Speaker 7 As you know, it's the Queen of Hearts, which, when it's shown in a game of solitaire, sparks the murder. That's the story of the Manchurian candidate.

Speaker 7 So, essentially, we showed the experimental group and the control group were shown.

Speaker 7 One was shown a film with the word Lipton stuck in it, Liptons stuck in it, several times.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you can now see it on the screen behind us where that was shown at an incredibly rapid pace.

Speaker 7 Now, some people can just about pick up their being shown something, but very, very few actually would actually be able to read that.

Speaker 7 And we'll see from the results whether any actually did, and so on.

Speaker 7 We gave people the ability to, we gave them crisps so they'd feel a bit thirsty because one thing that we already know is that unless people are already inclined towards the thing that you're doing, then in that case, they're very, very unlikely to work to act upon it.

Speaker 7 And we found out whether or not putting that word up there made people who'd been eating crisps and who were offered a choice of drinks chose that drink.

Speaker 8 And out now.

Speaker 6 Yes, so I have the results in front of me. For all participants, the number of test group participants who picked Lipton ice was

Speaker 6 24 out of 52.

Speaker 6 So that means that's 46%.

Speaker 6 So it appears that nothing happened.

Speaker 8 It was entirely right.

Speaker 6 The number of the control group participants who picked Lipton ice was 17 out of 46.

Speaker 6 It's 37%.

Speaker 6 Now, I think that there's no difference there because, I mean, the rule of thumb, isn't it? We talked Richard about the rule of thumb in these statistical tests is it's a so-called root n rule.

Speaker 6 So, if you've got 50 people, you'd expect the number to be something plus or minus about seven, for seven to about the square root of fifty.

Speaker 6 So, seventeen plus or minus seven or eight to be consistent with a random distribution, wouldn't it?

Speaker 9 I think that's right. I mean, psychologists would look at that and look at what's called the probability value associated with it and conclude there wasn't an effect.

Speaker 9 Or you might conclude there's a very small effect there, and if you had more and more people, you might get something interesting.

Speaker 9 But certainly, on the face of it, the experiments didn't show that we should be worried about subliminals.

Speaker 1 Which is a disaster, because I told the producer to get the iced tea on sale or return, but she didn't.

Speaker 1 So now we've got, yeah, I like the fact that the audience thought, what a lovely gesture they've given us, crisps.

Speaker 8 No,

Speaker 1 they were merely potato snacks of manipulation.

Speaker 6 There was a so-called refined result. So there was another test done in which we removed any participants who strongly liked or disliked Lipton ice.

Speaker 8 Oh, poor people.

Speaker 1 It feels like eugenics based on

Speaker 8 drinks.

Speaker 7 They were removed from the group. They weren't killed.

Speaker 8 Oh, oh, I'm sorry. That's what they've been removed.
Oh, phew.

Speaker 6 Or who noticed the words, actually. So anyone who noticed what the experiment was.
And then the number of test group participants who picked Lipton ice was 16 out of 30, so it's 53%, so no difference.

Speaker 6 And the number of the control group who picked Lipton was 17 out of 28, so it's 61%. So you see,

Speaker 7 which actually, although it's not statistically significant, went the wrong way.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 6 all you can say is it's not statistically significant. No, no, no.

Speaker 8 Of course you can't.

Speaker 7 But using the point that Richard made earlier that if you possibly extended the group out so it's huge enough and assuming that you got the same results, actually you were getting the opposite result of a subliminal effect.

Speaker 8 No, it's not statistically significant. But it's not fun.
But it's not statistically significant.

Speaker 9 If the effect were, if that negative effect were genuine, you'd actually sell more Liptons by not flashing it up on the screen.

Speaker 8 It's a company company in the air.

Speaker 9 They've been doing it for years.

Speaker 1 So David, what does that say about Strobe's experiment?

Speaker 7 Well it does suggest that for all the anxiety that there is about subliminal advertising and the idea of being sold things you don't even know about, you actually probably can't transfer subliminal advertising from the lab to the cinema.

Speaker 9 But it is curious because you go to the cinema, and on the way, you'll pass huge billboards advertising things.

Speaker 9 Before the film, you'll see adverts. During the film, you'll explicitly see product placement some of the time.
And for some reason, none of that worries us.

Speaker 6 It's the idea they might be putting up words in there that you

Speaker 1 that's what I'm really worried about.

Speaker 9 So, uh, so no, it didn't get an effect there.

Speaker 1 What's your favorite in terms of advertising? I mean, I've read a few of the different techniques that I want to, the ones the stuff about the left and right hemisphere, where the idea is that

Speaker 1 the left hemisphere we have language and perhaps more critical faculties, and the right hemisphere more about patterns and emotions.

Speaker 1 And I was told that the advertising industry went, Perhaps less writing in all the adverts, just have the music of Elgar and something pretty.

Speaker 1 And then the right hemisphere is this kind of stan Laurel go, ooh, and the left hemisphere is going, no, it's rubbish. Didn't you read the small print? Oh, Balls, he's brought it.
He bought it.

Speaker 1 You know, so that's what's your favorite kind of technique that

Speaker 1 has been in terms of the popular psychology or neuroscience used as possible manipulation?

Speaker 9 It's interesting. My favorite thing that isn't true, of course, is the myth of the 10% of the brain, which is such a brilliant idea that we've evolved not to use 90%

Speaker 9 of our brain. Genius.

Speaker 9 If you get people believing, they say you only use 10% of the brain, it's always a good reply to go, it seems that you do, but the rest of us.

Speaker 9 And in terms of advertising, it's pretty straightforward, actually. Most of the results just show that you put a very good-looking man or woman holding your product, and people buy it.

Speaker 10 I mean, that's the sad truth of how it works.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Julia Roberts. I smell lovely.
I'd like to smell like Julia Roberts. I'm sure I would agree.

Speaker 8 But anyway, that's right. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 I've been getting through a phase. So,

Speaker 8 sorry, Brian, Sophie, what did you make of the results?

Speaker 6 Were they a surprise to you?

Speaker 11 I mean, it's not a particularly big sample, but no, I mean, it's very consistent with a lot of the work on this, that exactly, as Richard said, we have a belief that it's a tremendously powerful way of getting ideas into our heads, but it's not.

Speaker 11 The effects are weak and they're very variable and they're very affected by exactly how you do it and what people are expecting to happen.

Speaker 1 David, you've written about conspiracy theories, voodoo histories, and

Speaker 1 are the conspiracy theories of those senses, you know, looking at that kind of idea of possible deception.

Speaker 1 Is that another way of us trying to define that something is in charge, there is some structure that exists to give us greater pattern in the world?

Speaker 1 You know, the things that have caused, whether it may well be 911, 911, whether it may well be an assassination, etc.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, it sometimes seems to me that quite a lot of our existence is a kind of battle against chaos.

Speaker 7 Even the kind of structures of hallucinations can sometimes be an attempt to make order in a it when your body's completely disordered, and so on. I think that the same is true of conspiracy theories.

Speaker 7 I mean, there are lots of other things playing as well: the desire to be the one who knows the truth when other people don't.

Speaker 7 Sometimes there's a kind of political animosity or an ideological animosity against the person you think is the conspiracy theorist, and so on, which makes you choose a particular conspiracy theory rather than another.

Speaker 7 But one of the things which is really interesting about it is the preference for a particular version of events that gives, if you like, a kind of higher-order explanation that binds things together and which removes essentially contingency and chaos.

Speaker 7 It says there isn't such a thing as accident, there isn't such a thing as somebody making a mistake or a cock-up. It was all planned, somebody has it all in order.

Speaker 7 And as somebody once said, if you imply that there is a kind of evil agency that's organizing everything bad, it does imply the possibility of a good agency that could organise it all for good somewhere out there.

Speaker 7 Maybe somewhere at the back of your head, that possibility exists.

Speaker 7 Whereas the rest of us, most of the rest of the time, particularly as we get older, recognize the power of chaos and accident and things just bloody well happening.

Speaker 1 In terms of when you've met conspiracy theories, are there any techniques that if you offer evidence, if you offer things which are grand, do you ever see people once it's the old Mark Twain quote, which is it's easier to lie to someone that is convinced them that they've been lied to.

Speaker 1 And so, once they have that belief,

Speaker 1 is there a way of dislodging it?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, it's very interesting that quite often people who are the least sceptical people on earth use the term skepticism to describe what it is.

Speaker 7 In fact, they're incredibly credulous about other alternative versions. It's just that they've decided to believe something else.

Speaker 7 If you've invested in something, and there's also the power of community as well, I mean, conspiracy theories like other people will form, if you like, effective communities with each other and give solidarity and substantiation to each other's point of view till it's very, very hard and fast.

Speaker 7 But take something like 9-11, which is the idea that George Bush made 9-11 happen and that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions. It is extraordinary.

Speaker 7 If you go through one by one and demolish in a controlled way those theories

Speaker 7 in front of people, they will come up with another one. It's like hydro heads.

Speaker 7 So, for instance, if you believe that the two planes went into the two towers in order simultaneously with controlled demolitions, which brought the towers down, because apparently just the planes going in wouldn't have been sufficient for Bush to go and invade the Middle East.

Speaker 7 You had to bring the towers down.

Speaker 7 And you say, No, actually, this happened, this happened, this happened, you can see it, and this is the explanation for that.

Speaker 7 And they then take and say, What about World Trade Center 7, the third building in the middle? That came down and demolished, and it wasn't hit by a plane at all. And

Speaker 7 you think to yourself, but can't you see that that makes your whole theory actually completely mad?

Speaker 7 You're saying somebody went to all the trouble to take two planes into two large buildings to make it look, and brought them down by controlling

Speaker 7 demonstrators, to make it look like an attack, but couldn't be asked to do it with World Trade Center 7.

Speaker 7 For

Speaker 7 some kind of strange, capricious reason, or they'd run out of planes.

Speaker 8 But Richard.

Speaker 9 I think, actually, didn't Patrick Moore have this lovely idea that when he used to receive a crackpot letter with some weird theory, he'd say, I know exactly the person you should speak to, and he'd send that person the name and address of another crackpot letter.

Speaker 9 Which is a great idea of linking them up.

Speaker 6 But given that we are constantly lying to each other, being lied to and deceiving each other almost by the minute, is it not reasonable to believe that we're being deceived constantly?

Speaker 9 Well, I think we are, but what we have to realize is the reason we can't detect lies is that that's really good for us. Because

Speaker 9 it's fine when someone's giving an exploitative lie, you know, that they're having an affair and they're not telling you or whatever. Of course, you'd want to know about that.

Speaker 9 But you don't know the rest of what they're thinking, about what they really think about you.

Speaker 8 And so

Speaker 9 it bonds us together. And there's an idea which is radical honesty therapy, which is you take couples and you say, no, just tell each other exactly what you think of one another, just for 24 hours.

Speaker 9 Oh my gosh, that's the end of every relationship.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 9 it bonds together. It's why we are bad at detecting lies.
We should celebrate that because without it, we wouldn't have a society, I don't think.

Speaker 8 Who dreamt that up?

Speaker 9 That was a German psychologist.

Speaker 1 But how do we find out? I mean, when we, it's interesting, we're thinking of some of those conspiracy theories, and some people we were talking about in the green room, where you watch certain people,

Speaker 1 what's his name, Alex Jones? Alex Jones, who talks a lot about conspiracy theories. And you see him on television shows, and I personally find he's so much of a huckster in the way that he.

Speaker 1 I'm now trying to think of how to say this without it being slander.

Speaker 1 This is going to be hard, and I thought I better just say something about L. Ron Hubbard instead.

Speaker 1 But no, I've watched his technique, and I can't help but feel I don't think he believes this. This seems to be a way of making money.
Maybe it's not, but that's what I see.

Speaker 1 And then other people as well, I sometimes watch them, I think these conspiracy theories that they're using to sell their books and to sell out, you know, big places, Wembley Arena or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 I'm not certain whether they really believe it. And at what point, when they're standing on stage,

Speaker 1 do they at that point, like you were saying with Tony Bear, do they at that point go, I really do believe this idea of how the universe is manipulated?

Speaker 1 Or are they inside just going, I'm making a mint?

Speaker 7 It's been true for a long time that if you want to sell a book, you come up with some really involved conspiracy theory.

Speaker 7 So when I first came up with the idea to my publishers about a book which essentially debunked conspiracy theories, they said, Yeah, that's very good, but it would sell more books if you actually were to say they were true.

Speaker 7 So, I'm going to find one that's true, and so on.

Speaker 7 And the main question I get whenever I'm talking about the book is somebody will always say in a kind of hopeful tone of voice, Are there any conspiracy theories that turned out to be true?

Speaker 7 Because they want them to be true, and people on the whole want the story to be true. So, there are people who create books to order.

Speaker 7 But the majority of people I've found who I discuss conspiracy theories with who espouse them definitely believe them. They do believe them.
They make sense to them.

Speaker 7 They make sense of the world to them.

Speaker 7 And whilst there are hucksters in any kind of business who've just worked out the percentages and work out you can sell more conspiracy theory books than not,

Speaker 7 by and luck, there are also people putting books out there of extraordinary nonsense all the time, which they absolutely and fundamentally in their marrow believe to be the truth.

Speaker 6 And I assume that there's a predisposition to be if you believe one, you're much more likely to believe others.

Speaker 6 Or are you generally the case that there's some that this is the moon hoaxer here, and the moon hoaxer will not believe in the 9-11 hoax?

Speaker 6 Do they tend to believe in lots of them?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean,

Speaker 7 there are strange kind of combinations. I mean, I'm played at the moment by people who support UKIP, who also support Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
I mean, there's a strange kind of combination.

Speaker 6 Well, that's Nigel Farage, yeah.

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 7 and it's all, and it's all because of one single complete attitude towards what they see as the establishment in in Britain, which is that they disbelieve everything about it.

Speaker 7 And once they disbelieve everything about it, they almost take everything it says and reverse it and say it's not true.

Speaker 6 You've seen this with the anti-the climate change deniers.

Speaker 6 There tends to be a political spectrum. They tend to be on the right of the political spectrum, essentially.
It tends to be more libertarian people.

Speaker 6 I think there are very few people on the political left who think that climate change is a hoax.

Speaker 7 And that one originated, but that one originated from essentially American groups who said that

Speaker 7 talking about climate change was a way of gaining control of their lives. You would then tell them what to drive, when to travel, what they could buy, what they couldn't buy, and how to live.

Speaker 7 And it was all part of a sort of vaguely socialist plot to make you do that. And that was the kind of, if you like, is the kind of conspiratorial origin.

Speaker 7 Now, other more sophisticated people say, well, essentially, it's scientists bigging themselves up, but as we know, that doesn't happen.

Speaker 8 It's not possible. Sophie,

Speaker 1 how can we try and battle the lies we make to ourselves rather than looking at other people's lives?

Speaker 1 Is there a system when you look and you think, I want to believe in this, I have to realise how partisan I am when I look at this piece?

Speaker 1 I mean, I sometimes, if I'm reading newspapers, you read one particular newspaper and you go, oh, this rubbish, this is typical of the Daily Mail.

Speaker 1 And then the other one, you go, well, this is my property. And if you swap around the newspapers really quickly, sometimes you go, another typical bit of rubbish from the Daily Mail.

Speaker 1 Oh, I've forgotten I'm reading the Independent now.

Speaker 1 And you have this thing where you by doing that, it at least kind of alerts you to the fact that you're constantly changing your reality and your judgment on it.

Speaker 11 You do, and it can be phenomenally difficult to disentangle yourself from it. There's a phenomenon in memory research called shared memories, particularly common with twins.

Speaker 11 You also get it with siblings.

Speaker 11 So, I have one with my sister, and it's where one sibling-it's obviously my sister's done this to me, obviously, I'm right, but they take something that's happened to the other sib or the other twin and they make it about them.

Speaker 11 And so, I have this something you want at a family party, it was me, said something really hilarious, and everybody stopped and applauded it because it was so funny, funny. And it was by me.

Speaker 11 Unaccountably, my sister thinks it happens to her. I actually found myself trying to Google the answer to this.

Speaker 11 Oh no, okay, it's probably not on Google yet.

Speaker 11 And it's insane. So, neither of us, I have to accept that there is at least a 50%

Speaker 11 chance that it happened to her. The only thing that is always true about shared memories, they are always things that make you look better.
They're never like that's when I was sick on the dog.

Speaker 11 It's always good, it's always like you were really funny at the party.

Speaker 11 So, So, you're kind of and you're so you're appropriating it because it makes you feel better about yourself, like which, which is one of the things we're pretty much doing all the time.

Speaker 11 And once you've got one, you cut it's and when we're all doing this all the time, it's very, very hard to actually separate it.

Speaker 11 So, I know it can't be the case that it was both of us, and it probably could be well be her. It's not, obviously, it was me.

Speaker 11 So, it's actually all you can do is bear in mind that it's massively fallible. Our brains are brilliant, and they're hugely excellent at many, many things.

Speaker 11 But once they they think something's true, they will only look to confirm it. They will never look to disconfirm it.

Speaker 11 So, all your conspiracy theorists never say, well, hang on, let's try and weigh this one up here.

Speaker 11 Even, you know, at a university, when you ask people to write essays comparing contrast, people just follow one argument. We like to kind of just choose something and then stick with it.

Speaker 11 So, that bias, all you can do really is remember that you have it, and every so often try and test out the hypothesis that you could be wrong.

Speaker 1 You've offered us a lovely image, by the way, today. We've had flirty sparrows and dogs being sick and all the us being all sick over dogs.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much for really adding to the album of memories for our audience.

Speaker 11 I've still got you in the kimono, though, so you know.

Speaker 8 Oh, I'm really sorry about that, yeah.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I say,

Speaker 1 Ding dong.

Speaker 1 That's the we'll always have Paris moments. I've always got you imagining you were Julia Roberts in some bizarre remake of Silence of the Lambs trying to sell a perfume.

Speaker 6 You mentioned Google there, so in general, we have access to unprecedented amounts of information now. So, as a society,

Speaker 6 are we drifting? Are we becoming more susceptible to conspiracy theories? Are we becoming less gullible? Are we becoming more rational?

Speaker 11 I think it's very, very hard to say. I suspect we have always been unbelievably gullible and not very rational.

Speaker 11 And you can see all sorts of cultural phenomena we try to build to limit the chaos that can happen from us just unraveling with our what we'd like to believe to be true.

Speaker 11 So, I suspect, I don't know if there's any evidence that things are getting worse. I think it's just a lot easier for people to tell you about it.

Speaker 11 You know, people are emailing you and writing you letters, and you know, the stuff's out there and easy to find out about, and you can make contact with other people doing it much more easily than you used to be able to do it.

Speaker 6 Exactly, so you can build a group of people who all believe that we didn't land on the moon or whatever it is.

Speaker 7 We can, but you can also

Speaker 7 debunk it more quickly.

Speaker 7 And that's one

Speaker 7 I

Speaker 7 got when I was doing my research on my book, I got got very gloomy about it because it was obvious that you get professors who said, I believe that 9-11, like everybody else, was like this.

Speaker 7 But then I looked at a few interesting websites. You thought, you're a professor of theology, for heaven's sake.
You looked at a couple of interesting and you changed your, and people did.

Speaker 7 But then it became, but then we began, I think people began to catch up with it, began to become more sophisticated themselves.

Speaker 7 Authority on the internet is always a problem, where to find it, who's got it, and so on.

Speaker 7 And that's going to be, I'm absolutely convinced, that's going to be one of our major educational objectives over the course of the next 10, 20 years, is allowing people and teaching people how to find authority through this kind of information.

Speaker 6 People to filter information.

Speaker 7 How to filter it. But I think actually we're becoming quite good at debunking.

Speaker 9 I'm always fascinated by the devices that people use. So the most common one when you read conspiracy theorists or people who experience paranormal events is they say, I used to be a sceptic.

Speaker 9 I used to be a sceptic and then I looked into it or then I saw a ghost and went to a psychic or whatever. And you think that's just a device.
You weren't ever sceptical of it.

Speaker 9 And so I live for the day when someone says,

Speaker 9 I'm a credulous fool.

Speaker 9 So I think just the devices, you know, we're constructing a communication here. We're not actually telling people what we really think.
We're trying to persuade them to our point of view.

Speaker 9 And once you understand that's what communication is, I don't think it's quite as confusing then.

Speaker 1 What a lovely upbeat ending. So

Speaker 1 we will have now, we always ask our audience a question to get their take on the world. And today's question is: which fact do you wish was actually a lie? So here we are.

Speaker 1 The first one is Gravity by Julia, who's just up there.

Speaker 8 It's a serious one.

Speaker 6 We know more about space than we do about the ocean.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is.

Speaker 1 Nigel Farage is not a comic creation.

Speaker 1 Still my favourite line, thinking of bizarre images. There was a lovely, I can't remember where they were.

Speaker 1 I think they were a UKIP member, and they said the problem with Britain nowadays is the homosexual machine is out of control. What a lovely image that is.

Speaker 8 It's over there! It's coming now.

Speaker 1 It's escape from Bletchley Park.

Speaker 8 Everyone down!

Speaker 1 Which fact you wish was actually a lie that the moon landings were faked.

Speaker 1 Humans cannot travel at the speed of light and nothing. A lot of people wanted to travel faster than the speed of light.

Speaker 1 They've obviously used the same virgin train service that I used from Coventry the other day. So

Speaker 1 that'll have to be cut though it did take bloody ages. At least they've got East Coast.
Brilliant. I love suspense in travel and now all sides are covered.

Speaker 1 Every single bit of train travel. Another Beckett play waiting to happen.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 1 just not to get that out of my system. I've been touring a very long time now.

Speaker 1 So thank you to our panel, Professor Soby Scott, Professor Richard Wiseman and David Aranovich. 11 Series in and we still have people with different solutions to what the infinite monkey cage means.

Speaker 1 And today it's Emily Davidson. Dear beloved monkey cages, I've come to the conclusion that the whole concept of caging a monkey depends on your definition of a monkey.

Speaker 1 If, say, we take monkey to mean all of the atoms that once made up a monkey, but now is a free gaseous format, this would be extremely difficult to cage.

Speaker 1 If we assume a cage that is infinite in any respect other than volume, which we can since it's not explicitly stated, then there must be a boundary to the cage somewhere in space.

Speaker 1 And this is a problem for the concept of caging our theoretical monkey gas, since since objects as large as buckyballs have been shown to appear on the other side of barriers due to quantum effects.

Speaker 1 One could create the cage out of a material that is sufficiently thick that this effect is supremely improbable, but there would still be a reasonable chance that some of the monkey atoms would end up inside the cage material, making it more of a monkey sponge than a monkey cage.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much. That was the infinite monkey sponge.
Goodbye.

Speaker 1 travel.

Speaker 8 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 1 Feeling that nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm.
Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

Speaker 1 What do you think? It should be more than 15 minutes. Shut up.
It's your fault. You downloaded it.
Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Speaker 6 Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alkaseltzer.

Speaker 1 Life Scientific.

Speaker 6 There's Adam Brother Fiddy. His dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

Speaker 1 That's Inside Science. All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Speaker 6 Richard Hammond's sister.

Speaker 1 Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian.
And also, Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

Speaker 1 These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

Speaker 3 Be our guest at Disney's enchanting musical, Beauty and the Beast. Fill your heart with joy and Disney magic.
Brought to life like never before.

Speaker 3 Coming to the Orpheum Theatre July 14th through August 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.