More Lies
More than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, “How can you tell when people are lying?” The number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze.
And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn’t correlated with lying at all, studies have shown. Liars don’t shift around or touch their noses or clear their throats any more than truth tellers do.
There is no unique telltale signal for a fib.
By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars’ voices can become more tense or high-pitched. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details.
“Their stories are too good to be true,” says Bella DePaulo
On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55% of the time.
“Deception Detection,” by Carrie Lock