Facts and fiction about truth and deception | Charles Honts | TEDxBoise

Can you tell when someone is lying to you? Do lie detection wizards exist?

Charles R. Honts, Professor of Psychological Science at Boise State University, is an internationally known expert on deception and deception detection. Having testified as an expert witness more than 100 times in court, he dispels common lie detection myths through the lens of science and demystifies the topic of deception detection. He continues a 36-year long research program that focuses on applying psychological science to real-world problems. He is internationally recognized as one of the world's top experts on credibility assessment.

Professor Honts has published and/or presented more than 350 scientific papers on deception detection. He has also published and given expert testimony on interrogation and false confession, eyewitness identification, and the forensic interviewing of children. Besides the United States, Professor Honts has given lectures and continuing education in Canada, China, Columbia, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, and The Netherlands, and has appeared in courts around the world as an expert witness 121 times.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Truth and deception.

Lying and telling the truth

and knowing the difference
between the two.

It's something that I think about a lot.

And it's not that I'm
sort of a cynical, morbid, old guy

who thinks a lot about lying, but I do,
and I do because it's important.

(Laughter)

It's important for us
in an interpersonal level.

We have conversations with people;

we often are concerned

whether they're being
truthful with us or not.

It's important for us as a society.

It's important for us as a world.

When lies get told to societies,
and they're believed,

it has a special name;

it's called propaganda.

And when propaganda happens,
some really bad things can happen.

And so I want to talk
about that topic tonight

from a point of view of science.

And the science is really interesting

because it's got
some interesting contradictions

and, I think, surprising findings in it.

But I'd like to make this real for you
with a couple of stories,

just to begin with.

The first one is about a young man
named Jeffrey Deskovic.

You can see Jeffrey here;

he's about 16 years old,

living the life of the average
American 15- and 16-year-old.

He was in high school,

everything was going fairly well,

and in the fall of 1989,
a tragedy befell his high school

and one of his classmates.

A classmate named Angela
went out on a photographic project

and went missing.

She was gone for a couple of days.

And then her body was found,

and she'd been brutally
raped and murdered.

Jeffrey took this kind of hard.

He knew Angela;

they were not boyfriend and girlfriend,
but they knew each other.

Angela had been nice to him;

she'd helped him with his homework.

And he was deeply affected by her loss.

He went to the funeral.

He wrote a letter
that he put on the casket.

He broke down and cried
during the funeral.

This was in a small town in New York.

The police were very interested
in solving the crime,

and as they often do,
they went to the funeral.

They thought Jeffrey
reacted just too much,

and they became interested in Jeffrey.

They interviewed Jeffrey
a couple of times,

but they also interviewed
a lot of other people.

And for some reason,

they just got very interested in Jeffrey.

One morning, they came to his school,
and unbeknownst to his parents,

they took Jeffrey,

and they asked him if he'd come
and take a polygraph test.

He thought he was going to go down
to the local police station,

but he was taken some distance away.

He was introduced to a polygraph examiner.

And really, there was no intention
of running a real polygraph test that day.

They wanted to interrogate him.

The interrogation lasted six hours.

And at the end of six hours,
Jeffrey was reduced to tears.

He was on the floor in the fetal position.

The polygraph examiner,
who had been with him for those six hours,

gave up,

and two other detectives came in.

And they did what you
hear call the "good cop."

So they were now the helpful police.

And they tell Jeffrey,

"If you'll just be honest with us,
we'll get you some treatment,

you won't have to go to jail."

And within about an hour,

he had confessed
to having raped and killed Angela.

But they were lying to him.

They didn't take him to treatment.

They arrested him
and charged him with murder.

He almost immediately
recanted the confession,

and said he only did that

because he thought that was the only way
he was going to get away from the police.

He eventually went to trial,
was convicted,

and spent the next 16 years in jail.

The Innocence Project got involved.

They discovered that there was
still DNA from the victim

that the rapist had left behind.

They, after a long court battle,

got permission to test that
against the national database,

which now existed, 16 years later.

And a hit was found, a positive hit,
on the contributor of the semen.

And Jeffrey was released
as a wrongfully convicted person.

He sued and ended up
with quite a bit of money.

And today, Jeffrey
is actually doing quite well.

He took some of that money
and created a foundation

to help wrongfully convicted people.

And right now he's in law school,

going to become a lawyer
to represent wrongfully convicted people.

But here's a young man
who told the truth to the police,

and he wasn't believed.

Then he lied to the police
because he gave a false confession,

and he was believed.

Then he went to trial,
and 12 people sat in judgment over him,

and he said that he was innocent,
and they didn't believe him.

And he went to jail.

That would be tragedy enough
if it was just Jeffrey.

But it's not just Jeffrey.

From the Innocence Project,
we know that there have been

a quite a number of wrongfully
convicted people.

About one out of four of them
wrongfully confessed

to a crime they didn't commit.

So this is not an unusual, isolated event.

The other event I want to mention is 9/11.

And 9/11 is of interest
because those 19 terrorists

who came to the United States
to attack us,

every one of them was interviewed
by agents of the United States Government.

Every one of them,
interviewed at least three times.

So they were interviewed at the embassy
where they applied for a visa -

probably interviewed more than once,
given where they came from -

they were interviewed by Customs

when they came to the border
of the United States

to come inside the United States,

and they were also
interviewed by Immigration.

Each of them lied three times.

We didn't catch even one of them.

Think what a different world
we'd live in today

if we'd caught even one of them early on

and talked to them.

So, that's my interest,
and this is what I do.

I'm a psychological scientist.

I study truthfulness and deception
and how you tell the difference.

And that science, I think,
is really interesting.

And I want to give credit to some people

because I'm gonna talk -
this is not just my work;

this is work of a group of people
who do research in this area.

And I want to just give
some of them credit upfront.

Charles Bond, Bella DePaulo,
Maria Hartwig, David Raskin, Aldert Vrij.

And if you're interested,

those are names
to go look for to read more.

And the science has
some interesting things in it.

One is we have interesting
attitudes about lying.

If you ask people,

"What makes up good character?

What do you want to see in people
to think that they're a good person

and have good character?"

And near the top of that list
is always "sincere, honest, truthful."

And at the bottom of that list -
what's bad character?

The number one or sort
of the numbered last is "liar."

We don't like liars.

At least we say we don't like liars.

But if you go and you look
at people's behavior,

you find out something really funny,
really interesting, that doesn't fit.

Because if you look at people's behavior,
they lie frequently.

If you look at conversations
that last at least 10 minutes,

the data say we lie in about
one out of every four of those.

We lie to about one of every three people
we have a conversation with.

When we talk to our
significant others, our spouses,

we lie in about one out of ten of those.

Hmm.

(Laughter)

Now, all that lying
might not be a problem

if we were good at detecting lies.

And actually if you ask people,
most people think

they're pretty good at detecting lies,
particularly in people they know well,

like their children
or their significant others.

But again, when you look at the data,

that's not true.

And I wish I could tell you
that there is some magic bullet,

some magic finding from researching.

Goodness knows there are people out there
who will tell you that

because they teach seminars,
and they sell books,

and they train police officers.

But what the research says

is that if you look at the ability
of having a conversation with someone

and detecting whether
they're telling you the truth or not,

your accuracy is about 54 percent.

If you flip a coin, it's 50 percent.

What terrible it is.

And it turns out there just
really isn't much to find.

You know, I can ask that question, "Why?
Why are we so bad at this?"

And I think there are two reasons.

One has to do with our motivations.

And there's a very large
psychological literature

about how we make decisions,
and I think it's appropriate here.

And I don't have time to tell you
all the details of that research,

but I can capture it for you
from some literature.

There was a fantasy book
that was very popular

about 10 years ago

written by a fellow named Terry Goodkind;

it's called The Wizard's First Rule.

And the wizard's first rule is this:

With a little bit of motivation,

almost anybody can be led
to believe almost anything,

either because:
1) they want to believe it's true,

or 2) they're afraid that it's true.

I want you to think about that
for a little while and just process that.

But, you know, that captures
an awful lot of psychological research.

So that's one problem we have.

Our motives get in our way [in] how
we interpret the data that we see.

The other is that it turns out,
it is just really hard to do this.

There is very little in the body language,
and in the voice, and in the face

that gives away liars.

And the reason for that

is that the very things
that make the liar nervous,

they're afraid they're going
to get caught -

it does cause changes;

people do get anxious about that;

they do alter their behavior.

But the truthful person -
think about Jeffrey -

the truthful person
who is talking to people,

who he thinks don't believe them,

you have fear that you're not going
to be believed when you're truthful.

And the body language you give off
is exactly the same.

So, where does that leave us?

Well, science hasn't given up.

And one approach is technology.

I've been involved
in one of the technologies

for most of my adult life,
and that's polygraph testing.

I was trained as a polygraph tester
and have done that work,

and although there's a lot
of mythology about polygraph,

what the science says is that:

Properly conducted polygraph tests
can be rather accurate.

In the lab, we can easily get
test accuracies up around 90 percent,

and there are field studies
that have replicated that,

but there's a problem with polygraph.

One is it requires a skilled
examiner to run the test.

And a test takes two hours.

So you need an instrument,
an examiner, and two hours.

Most of the time, we don't have that;

it's really expensive in that regard.

The other problem is
there are police agencies

like the one that Jeffrey Deskovic
got involved in,

where they used the polygraph
as a pretense for interrogation.

And the polygraph
is very dangerous in that setting.

Recent research has just reported
that [if] you look at the FBI -

and the FBI is an agency

that uses polygraph
as a pretense to interrogate -

if you are actually innocent,

and you agree to take
a polygraph from the FBI,

your chance of not being interrogated
is only 20 percent.

Four out of five innocent people
get interrogated.

There are other technologies.

There are some new ones
that look at the central nervous system.

So there's EEG and the fMRI.

And again, they involve
expensive equipment.

They've looked interesting
in the laboratory,

and they haven't made it out
into the field.

There's also a new test

called an ocular-motor
detection of deception test

that looks at the eyes.

So the pupils of our eyes
do get smaller and larger

as we are processing.

It is harder to lie
than it is to tell the truth.

And those tests are around.

There's some research on them
that looks promising.

We're waiting for more data
to come in on this.

And we will need to see
if they'll move out into the field

and be useable.

The final area, though, comes back -

the problem with all those technologies
is that they're expensive.

You're not going to use that

if you want to talk
to somebody who works for you,

or you want to find out

whether your spouse
is telling you the truth or not.

And so, are there ways that we can improve
interpersonal detection of deception

and reading body language,
and face, and all that doesn't work?

But there are ways we can go about that

because what the research says
is that what people say

is way more important
than how they say it.

So, there's an interview technique
that's been developed -

it's a forensic interview technique -
and it's really pretty much common sense.

But, of course,

common sense often isn't common.

And all this technique really does involve

is letting the person
you're interested in assessing

tell their story.

It's called a free narrative.

So, you literally do just that.

"Tell me what happened."

And then you have to stop talking.

A lot of us find that really hard to do.

That's not how we have
conversations with people.

Conversations usually go back and forth.

But in this case, you want to just
ask them to tell you their story,

and then stop talking, and listen.

Listen carefully, take notes.

If you have facts,

there are things you know to be true,

don't tell them about those.

If they contradict them,
don't confront them.

Just listen until they finish.

And then when they finish,
you strategically use your evidence.

It's called "the strategic
use of evidence."

Isn't that surprising?

(Laughter)

So the person finishes their story.

You've been listening carefully.

You know X happened,
but they never mentioned X.

And so you go, "Well, I'm confused.

I know that at this time X happened,
but you didn't talk about that.

Can you tell me why?"

And for the innocent person,
most likely it is they just forgot.

Because when we tell stories
about things we have experienced,

and they're true stories,

we often forget to tell about the details.

We often have to go back and fix it.

Think about talking to a friend
about something that happened to you

just recently.

And you'll know that that's true.
We do that all the time.

For the innocent person,

that new evidence is easy
to incorporate into their story

because it's in fact true.

Their story is true.

"Oh, I just forgot to tell you that.
This is blah blah ..."

And they fill it in.

For the liar, it's much more difficult.

Because the liar -

you know, the first rule of lying
is you got to keep the lie straight.

And so they've now told you
their whole story.

And now you've given them
a new piece of evidence.

They've got to work a lot harder
to put that back in.

And if you have more pieces of evidence,
you strategically introduce them

one at a time.

And what we find is

that with people who are outright lying,
their stories eventually collapse

because they just can't keep up
with the influx of new evidence.

So, I want to end up with two ideas.

One is that you have to talk to somebody
and try to make an assessment

about whether they're being
truthful or not.

Listen.

Listen carefully to what they have to say
and remember that what they say

is far more important
than how they say it.

Because even innocent people
can look very nervous.

And the other one is:

Don't believe anything

just because you want
to believe that it's true

or because you're afraid that it's true.

Our relationships, our lives,

our country, the world, in fact,

may well depend upon that.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)