Lying has become a common human behavior but it turns out humans are surprisingly inconsistent when it comes to separating the truth from the false. Signals that are thought to expose a liar are either too subtle to notice or are simply not there. A professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that observers, like you and I, are correct only 54 percent of the time when trying to distinguish between true and false statements. If you leave judgments up to chance, people are no better or worst are trying to figure out lies. They say the reason is that humans don't generally know what to look for. After research they found that, "The whole past of lie detection has been reconceptualized from paying close attention to a person's behavior to a more active and interactive task." The research is still cultivating but I think it will be interesting to find out how we can detect liars without looking at just their behavior. That way there is no biased opinions.
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The fact that people are wrong so often when figuring out if someone is lying surprises me. I would think that with how long scientists and other people have been trying to identify liars, it could be more exact. One question I have is; Is that 54% STAT APPLICABLE TO PEOPLE TAKING THE STAND IN COURT?
ReplyDeleteI found this article which gave more information about lying habits.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.forbes.com/2009/05/13/lie-detector-madoff-entrepreneurs-sales-marketing-liar.html
They also gave some tips for "sniffing out liars" however they then said they were unreliable. I think it would be interesting to do more tests on lying.
Only 54% of the time?! Really?? Wow, i hope they find an easy way to detect liars because then this would be beneficial to everyone out there... living with liars they never knew about. Apperantly "The guilty person may speak more than natural, adding unnecessary details to convince you... they are not comfortable with silence or pauses in the conversation." I found that on this site:http://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php
ReplyDeleteI've actually done school projects on lying before, and after training some poeple are able to detect liars up to 70% of the time. I've also heard that the face is the most reliable signal for detecting lies, there is a whole science of facial expressions that can betray hidden emotions. I've also learned that even polygraph machines are not 100% effective at detecting liars because of the methods these machines use. More research should be done in this field in order to provide more reliable evidence in court cases, etc.!
ReplyDeleteThere are many ways to detect if someone is lying, mainly in facial expressions, as Samantha mentioned. I found an article that explains most of them.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php
This article has a really interesting premise. Lying is a behavior in humans that can sometimes subconsciously cause of to give away signs, through our body language or word choice. I found another article about the science of lying.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
You would think that with so many ways to tell if someone is lying, you would be able to tell. I guess some people might just want to hear what they want so they might not care if it is a lie. I think it is important to tell whether someone is lying or not because often times, the lie effects more than just the person who is lying.
ReplyDeleteIt is so interesting how many different way you can tell a persons ives, if we want to go all sci fi here, we can say we are getting closer to reading people's minds, and how cool would that be??
ReplyDeleteI have talked to my grandpa, who was a judge for many years, and he has told me many times about how unreliable people are for testimony. He says this because it is very hard to tell if they are lying, and also their memory is not always perfect, so they may not even be aware that they aren't telling the truth. I read more about this, and found a intresting article by a former CIA agent talking about the various tells for lying. I think that most of these are things that we wouldn't intuitively see as lying right away, but if we were looking for them specifically, we would know fairly well. Many liers also known many of these tactics, so attempt to cover them up. In some cases, it may just not be possible to know if someone is lying without having conclusive evidence one way or the other.
ReplyDeletehttp://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2012/10/30/tips-from-the-cia-for-detecting-lies/