I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies, the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.
If it's a book by Malcolm Gladwell, I can't anti-recommend it enough.
All of the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read have been tripe. Unless he has radically improved his writing and grasp of nuance in the last decade (and published retractions of his earlier books), his books are dangerous anti-knowledge which will make you feel smarter but actually be dumber.
Gladwell takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising.
Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right.
Ahh! Thank you for finally articulating what has always bugged me so much about his books. I am reading along thinking, "yeah, yeah, this makes sense" and then realizing later that it actually had no depth.
This is boiler plate Gladwell critique and has been part of his reputation for a long time. Ironically I think we are due for a contrarian shift back to him being brilliant.
When studying sculpture a tutor talked to me about people making “things that look like art”, which really stuck with me - they made objects that mimicked what they thought art should be like, but had a kind of conceptual hollowness. I think Malcolm Gladwell is similar in that he produces content that has the appearance of science, but once you start digging it doesn’t hold up. A bit like a version of “truthiness”, except that in his case it’s “scienciness”.
Oh right, art elitism as counter example, great. Who gets to define what I see as art? "conceptual hollowness" - that sounds nothing but esoteric to begin with. Reminds me of the (German) "Hurz"... event (https://youtu.be/MJ7jbQJXF68).
I hate posting anything negative but sorry, this was just too much.
Oh and I admit I actually didn't dislike the third of one Gladwell's book I once read, as well as a presentation he gave somewhere about the Norden bombsight. Every single one of the HN haters of him on the other hand remain exceedingly vague and don't really have anything of substance to say, only very over-styled ways to express that they dislike them, or even the man himself.
Leave aside the art metaphor if that's not to your taste, and perhaps a less metaphorical way of looking at it is that Gladwell is a storyteller, not a scientist. He creates coherent narratives, but they obey the logic of stories, not science. Other people have written detailed criticisms of his scientific writing - if you want to read them they're pretty easy to find. I genuinely think it's worth your time.
I listened to his podcast history of napalm, and found it compelling and interesting (but then I'm not a historian, so perhaps it's Murray Gell-Mann amnesia!) So I have more time for his historical work, partially because history is a kind of storytelling.
Science is not the same as history, and needs to be judged by different metrics. This is where he falls down.
Thank you for making my point. Your comment is as vague and nebulous as you say Gladwell's stories are. Neither does he claim to publish scientific papers, last time I checked those were "popular science" category books like millions of others. I'm not sure what value there is in singling out one guy, or to point out the gigantic discrepancy between a scientific paper and a popular book, especially when it's done worse than the latter and even farther from any rigor.
The vitriol, downvote-happiness and almost zealotry of "commenter movements" like anti-Javascript, or, here anti-Gladwell, to me signals that this is more a self-perpetuating fad driven by group think (trying to fit in and proof one is part of the core). If it was merely fact driven such as mine would be ignored - or not be given cause to exist in the first place. It's not like I care one iota about Gladwell, as I said, I never managed to read more than a small part of one book. What I did notice though and why I even paid any attention at all was the amazing level of effort - coupled with an equally amazing level of vagueness - some people put into this.
If one were to think logically, even if you conclude all of Gladwell's books are really really bad, you would just ignore the whole thing. That call to arms anytime anyone dares mention Gladwell - or Javascript - is scary and as far as I can see far worse than anything Gladwell may ever have written. It reminds me more of high school "cool kids" group dynamics.
Your characterisation of my arguments is not fair. I specifically said I appreciated his historical podcast, so I'm certainly not a zealot. And to remove doubt, I'm not an artist critiquing science from a point of ignorance, I have a scientific background too, indluding a masters in neuroscience. Gladwell's mischaracterisations of science are widely distributed, and I think that's why he comes up so often - if he was a relatively unknown blogger nobody would care. It's frustrating to see this kind of scienciness get so much attention when the people who do the science he writes narratives about, and whose work he piggybacks on, are much more circumspect about how widely their work generalises.
Again, I have said there are multiple critiques which go into detail about what is wrong with Gladwell's writing, so if your problem is the "nebulousness" of a comment on Hacker News (which is no place for a detailed critiqe), then I suggest you look for them if you're genuinely interested in why people have a low opinion of his science writing.
Sorry to have scared you. I don't think pointing out the scientific illiteracy and anti-knowledge in his books is far worse than the books themselves, but YMMV.
I commented on a relevant thread in the hope of saving someone else the time wasted reading them, and if I'm honest, because I'm still salty about the money and time he stole from me.
I criticise it in the same wa as if someone was expounding homeopathy or a fruit-baswd diet for cancer, or horoscope-based hiring.
Thank you for supporting my point! You demonstrate the very low level very well. Badly hidden snark akin to personal attacks instead of arguments. Exactly my point about that.. "criticism" of that author, far worse than anything I ever read or heard from him and at least an order of magnitude lower level intellectually, if not more.
"Remained exceedingly vague" isn't exactly fair. How much do you expect from a comment on a discussion board? If you want more specifics, ask for them! You're in attack mode here right out the gate.
He has admitted to "mak[ing] trouble" rather than believing everything he writes.[0] He acknowledges that his books are not "ends in themselves."[1] He cherry-picks supporting studies and leaves out their failure to replicate.[2] He throws around scientific terms but uses them incorrectly. [3] He offers ill-considered off-the-cuff "solutions."[3]
One reason HN comments might be "exceedingly vague" is because the specific criticisms have been laid out extensively over the past decade.
"Scientism" is a pretty common term for this. I.e. superficially coating arguments in a veneer of rigor and data, for the sake of riding on the epistemic prestige of empirical science.
One day on a flight I started reading his “Blink” when 1/4th of the way I realized he is full of crap.
The realization came after I started noticing a pattern: that he would give an anecdote, or present a situation, explain it a little bit then bam! He would generalize his conclusion to a broader situation. Rinse and repeat.
What a load of junk!
I got introduced to him via his TED talks which I liked. But after reading Blink (1/4th of it), I opened by eyes and stayed away from whatever he said or did.
Oh God, thank you for saying this. I cannot read two pages of Malcolm Gladwell and cannot fathom his popularity. Generalizing from anecdotes in an entertaining way: that’s his whole schtick.
Or, maybe I’m an old cranky curmudgeon and should let people enjoy reading his junk science.
I've only read Outliers and David and Goliath, but I really enjoyed them and feel that they provided some tangible benefits in how I think about things.
Could you share some of the criticism against him so I could update any incorrect beliefs I may have?
My opinion flipped the other direction. Which totally surprised me.
I used to dismiss Gladwell's "insight porn" (h/t lordnacho). But now I feel like he's a pretty effective advocate, popularizer of views and policies that I agree with. Briefly, he's punching up.
Michael Lewis was the catalyst to reassessing Gladwell. I just frikkin love his Against The Rules podcast series. Briefly, he argues that we do better, both as society and individuals, with referees and coaching.
Then I listened to a handful of Gladwell interviews. A long form chat with Lewis. Book tour stops for Talking with Strangers. I thought: Huh, Gladwell doesn't sound too bad.
So I started listening to other Pushkin Industry podcasts.
I especially love historian Jill Lepore.
So I guess my TLDR is: I reevaluated Gladwell because he's now working with two people I really admire. Virtue by association.
Good counterarguments, thank you. Some caution should be exercised when reading pop sci-like books.
The parts of the book that were meaningful to me were the summaries of other foundational studies and generalized beliefs based on lots of research. His conclusions were sometimes a bit of a stretch, but I accept a little 'dressing up' of results with additional opinion as part of writing to a broad audience
Yeah I need to check it out. I think it's also that people (me included) are deeply fascinated by the ability the read other people and what they think.
1) If law enforcement ever has the time, they might want to play Maffia or Werewolf. Playing those games enough makes you realize how idiosyncratic lying can be.
2) I'm glad to know that my lecture on lying when I studied psychology basically had the same conclusions as this article.
> Playing those games enough makes you realize how idiosyncratic lying can be.
In my view this is just one more error springing from the root error of turning "a jury of your peers" into "a jury of random strangers". One point of being judged by a jury of your peers is that they are familiar with the types of things you're likely to do.
But another is that your peers are familiar with the ways in which you're likely to react to things.
People are practiced at telling lies that their peers believe. Random strangers are better at being skeptical because they are not empathetic about the excuses that are necessary to smooth out an explanation.
No, I think everyone is probably equally terrible at detecting lies. Except for the few people who have actually been tested and shown to be good at it. Any other narrative is just a story - we're all pretty bad at guessing each others intentions.
Which is, of course, totally irrelevant. Nobody cares about detecting those lies. Where's the evidence that big lies are in any way related to little lies?
Everyone tells little lies. But it someone, in a game for example, is so good at lying that you have no idea whether they’re telling the truth, that raises some questions.
How can you trust your judgement on whether they’re truthful about bigger things?
> How can you trust your judgement on whether they’re truthful about bigger things?
You can't. You will believe what you want to believe, and good liars are great at finding out what you want. A well constructed lie rests on verifiable foundations - ie. they also know when not to lie to earn your trust - and comprises of almost exclusively truths. There is no way to defend yourself once you become the target and start listening.
Pathological lying is one of the indicators of psychopathy. Not quite the same thing as what you’re talking about but one can’t be too careful about those things.
You should try it. I found it very enlightening to find out how utterly incapable I was to get away with a pretend murder in a primitve computer game with random strangers.
(Even if like me you won't end up playing the game I found the experience worth five dollars)
I think people probably immediately think about how they react to their spouse or other very close relationships, and I suspect (haven't looked it up) that people are actually pretty good at detecting lies in those situations because we have so much experience with how that person acts.
Detecting the lies of strangers? Yeah... good luck.
This article primarily focuses on the ineffectiveness of using non-verbal cues. It doesn’t really go into that much depth on how easily (or not) liars can be detected by analyzing what they actually say. It briefly mentions that this method appears more effective (although the accuracy was still only 80% or so).
Lake Woebegon effect is such a terrible name. It is very easily possible that every student in a small town is above average compared to e.g. the national average.
I have to question whether you're trying to prove GPs point, as this is hilariously incorrect. Unless you're using very unlikely values for easy and/or small.
I have a basic understanding of statistics and a basic understanding of logical fallacies, and I deal with this kind of sounds-good-if-you-don't-think-too-hard "insights" all the time.
Perhaps an intermediate understanding would help. Entire schools tend to score higher or lower together, also wealth correlates to IQ and scholastic success and zip code. There are also other reasons an entire group would be biased higher or lower.
> I deal with this kind of sounds-good-if-you-don't-think-too-hard "insights" all the time
The probability is just pow(0.5, N) where N is the student population, assuming that the distribution has no skew, assuming independence between students, and assuming the students are drawn randomly from the general population. It's an exponentially decreasing function, so it becomes incredibly unlikely for large student bodies under these assumptions.
I disagree with this argument, but that's the basis of it.
Now I'm thinking of a horror fan fiction version of lake wobegon where they give all kids an IQ test at a young age and murder all those below the national average.
Just my crazy version of what "easy" could entail.
Firstly, you're assuming independent probabilities between the students.
If it's a single class of 30, for certain skills it might be much more likely than pow(0.5, 30) if they were all specifically coached on that particular skill, or if there are selection effects impacting what type of person ends up in that group of 30.
Secondly, even if we grant the assumption of independence, the claim doesn't rely on "unlikely values for ... small". There's many small towns with a student body of only 5 or less people, and pow(0.5, 5) isn't that unlikely.
Most policemen aren't really learning state of the art stuff. It's institutional knowledge passed down over time. So they're likely to be far behind the truth. They likely usually don't have the tools necessary¹ to even understand these studies since they are not taught how.
This manifests in hard to prove stuff like this, but also obviously in things like when facial recognition or shot spotter tech is used. Scientists and engineers comprehend the limitations of these tools, but the users here are similar to prehistoric man before the monolith. The tools are magic to them and they rely on them like they are magical truths.
This isn't particularly changeable. So for those who build for these users, it's important to guide them to the right truths and express the right uncertainties.
¹ After all, even the most basic adversarial analysis would be that people are aware of the "eyes averted" nonsense and would subsequently compensate. As a matter of fact, almost anyone who believes in this stuff also believes they can dodge detection because they know these secret truths that everyone knows.
The only way to lie effectively (if you are committed to lying, which IMO is not a good longterm strategy) is to commit to the lie 100% and then believe it yourself.
For example, if you want to lie about where you were, you have to believe yourself that you were there. If you consciously think you are lying, it won’t work. It’s like forming a new truth and then fully accepting that reality.
Many years ago I worked at a Dominos pizza with a pathological liar. It was so obvious everything he said was false, and he couldn’t stop himself from lying about literally everything. That is not effective lying. Effective lying is believable.
I worked with a pathological liar for about a year. We didn't have day to day interactions, but he was always eager for an audience and if I had time I'd humor him.
My goal was to let him spin his yarn and wait for him to contradict himself in some way. Rather than directly going a "gotcha" I'd act sincerely confused, "Oh, you just said you met him yesterday, but earlier you said you met that person months ago. I must be misunderstanding." Then I'd just enjoy how effortlessly he would create a new fabrication to cover up the gap in his story. I guess practice makes perfect, or at least better.
He was incredibly bold. Once he told me about spending Thanksgiving with a coworker ... and that coworker was in his cube immediately adjacent to mine. After the BS artist left I asked the guy in the next cube if her heard that ... nope, he was wearing his headphones. When I relayed the story, he said nope, he was more likely to shoot the BS artist than invite him over for a meal.
He ended up getting fired because he was taking time off work to attend classes at Stanford. After a few months of this someone in HR checked with Stanford and they said they had no record of a student by that name. LA few weeks after getting fired, HR received a call from another company checking references on one of our former employees, Dr. <bs artist surname>.
This was good, and I mostly agree that using verbal strategies that amount to digging into/reviewing the details of what a person is claiming is the best way to detect liars.
The TSA thing at the end seems like a bit of a derail though:
But, Mann says, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time.
I don't doubt the TSA "behavioral detection" is extremely ineffective, but presumably TSA is mostly leaning on other means to detect dangers and failure to detect weapons is more on the xray/backscatter scanners. It doesn't strike me as realistic for TSA to use verbal techniques like asking each passenger to sketch out his travel story to detect if he's lying about having a gun.
One interesting difference it raises is lying about the past/experienced events vs. lying about future intentions. Their techniques seem mostly geared towards differentiating between a person accurately recalling an event from memory vs reciting a fabricated version of their memory/actions. It makes sense this would be helpful for police interrogating a suspect, but it's not intuitively obvious the underlying idea maps to detecting someone lying about their intended future actions.
> In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back during a follow-on pat down.
I went through a screening with a "robot" - in quotes because it was literally a breadboard with a bunch of wires sticking out of it, a battery and a squarish box. Didn't even have to open the bag to show the agents what it was, went right through the scanner with no comment. And I was nervous as hell cause I was sure I was going to have to explain it, maybe even show that it worked. But nope, not a peep.
I've taken a lot of messy electronic prototypes through security when traveling for work. The TSA has never cared. My camera bag, on the other hand, seems to get some baggage screeners very excited. Something about the glass being opaque to x-rays? But most screeners don't care.
How white are you, out of curiosity? What's your demographic look like, and how closely did it match the screeners? Seems like if you were nervous that would be additional weighting in the direction of you being questioned, so the additional weighting doesn't seem to have motivated anything.
It was tucked into a backpack along with quite a few other things (including 2 soldering irons, actually). I don't remember exactly what else was in the bag as to whether there was anything that could have looked like fuel in the scanner though, so fair point potentially. However, while it wasn't the point of my anecdote, I'm also fairly confident being white was one of the factors that played into zero questions being asked.
I am white male, and it was in a Southern US airport that was also very white. While that wasn't the point of the anecdote, I'm also fairly confident it played a large part in there being zero follow-up questions.
It would be pointless for the scanners to ping on copper, ABS, or batteries because every single flyer would have to open their bags and buttholes. It's the C4 and other pyro that they want to know about.
I’ve seen TSA open a bag because they see something on the scanner, see the bag is too much of a mess, and close the back up seconds later and hand it back off to the passenger without investigating at all.
It's likely they want to use "behavioral detection" to be able to arbitrarily choose and pick who to examine. Who can say that the person they are examining did not fidget or look to the side.
This allows them to easily deflect potential racial screening complaints.
It's like the "smell of marijuana" for cops. I'm convinced that the reason (right-wing) law enforcement is against pot legalization is because it removes this excuse, along with "the dog alerted" for arbitrary searches.
Meth and crack also have an odor after smoking them and dogs already can alert on them even when they aren't smoked. It's already a commonplace lie and there's no repercussions when a search turns up empty so why wouldn't they just keep lying? Or even easier, just claim they smelled alcohol.
Police will continue with warrantless search and seizure until they actually face repercussions for misconduct.
I read the article. It sounds more like practically everyone is stuck in a steady state of believing the same "tells" like fidgeting, averting gaze, and stuttering they have been told forever, and those things don't work. That's not really like a GAN at all.
Additionally what you say about being able to spot the average liar, as an average person, is contrary to the article. I would encourage you to read the article more carefully to distill the main points.
Most of us can’t reliably tell when a romantic interest is actively signaling their mutual interest. If we can’t get cooperative activities right, most of us don’t have a chance to spot a liar through nonverbal cues. The fact is that random effects are huge when dealing with people. Is that person you’re interrogating not showing emotion because they’re a psychopath, or because they were taught not to display emotion? Is someone not looking a cop in the eye because they are lying, or because staring someone in the eye is perceived as defiance in many cultures and they don’t want to anger the cop? We’ll probably never be perfectly accurate at spotting lies. A bunch of biometric measurements might help, but current polygraph techniques can allegedly be beaten with training. If trained polygraph techs with special equipment can be beat I don’t know what rules of thumb we’re ever going to give to the general public that will work.
If you know someone really well, you might have a decent chance of knowing when they are acting unusual. Such is the case with parents and teenagers, but suspicion often gets the best of the parents and they misinterpret the cues that they spotted.
A good method would seem to be to catch someone on a logical contradiction, but that has issues when someone is under emotional distress. And emotional distress tends to appear often when someone is innocent but is afraid the evidence points towards them. The family cat may have knocked over Mom’s favorite vase, but the child is less interested in the truth and more interested in avoiding a spanking- so they embellish whatever story they had (in a misguided attempt to make it more believable), which introduces contradictions that the mom notices. The kid technically lied with the embellishments but was innocent of breaking a vase, and gets spanked when they didn’t deserve it. Then imagine the kid’s emotional distress being even higher the next time something happens.
I’m sure that there are a lot of learned people out there that study lying, but I agree with the article’s main theme that most of us can’t reliably tell when our why someone is lying, and we’re overconfident in our abilities.
That your post has been downvoted is disheartening. Your reply was factually correct, cited, and reasonably polite.
Perhaps instead of saying "at best" they are con artists, it would have been more polite to say at worst, they are con artists. Probably many earnestly believe in what they are doing, and are just wrong.
"In the United States of America, (where polygraph testing is a growth industry) the admissibility of lie detector test results is determined by courts and legislators on a State by State basis.
In the Federal legal system, test results are inadmissible as substantive evidence. Whilst some States have allowed test results in criminal trials, States such as such as California have prohibited the admission of such evidence unless all parties consent to its admission."
To vehemently support the policy of the hour as moral and correct, and then to be later shown to be wrong. At best a fool and at worst a criminal. Is more than many can tolerate. They would rather maintain the lie in the face of all evidence.
It really doesn't matter how earnest they are when polygraphs have been known to be garbage pseudoscience for decades, and especially when people's lives can be derailed by the fraudulent "results" obtained from a polygraph or even just the fiction that it can get results:
I’m not going to vigorously defend polygraphs, but I’ll play Devil’s advocate for a bit. From your the Salon piece you linked to, “In studies, polygraph diagnoses are often wrong, with rates hovering around 80 percent correct”
Which to some people sounds terrible. I certainly wouldn’t want to hang a murder conviction on something with a 20 percent error rate. But on the other hand, 80 percent is better than all but one of the cited results from the Atlantic article, and beats the results from all experiments using untrained people. These con artists are, at best, performing on par with specific lie detection training.
Maybe the equipment is just for show, but who’s to say that further biometric measurements, such as functional MRI, wouldn’t significantly increase the accuracy of biometric lie detection (still technically within the realm of nonverbal cues from the Atlantic article)? I don’t think it could be 100% accurate, but I can reasonably see future polygraphs being legitimate tools for lie detection.
I wouldn’t want my murder conviction to hang on the results of a current polygraph, but I would be satisfied using one to catch an office supply thief. Well, except it would probably be cheaper to just let someone keep stealing supplies than to pay $8k per employee to administer the tests.
> but who’s to say that further biometric measurements, such as functional MRI, wouldn’t significantly increase the accuracy of biometric lie detection
That isn't what they're doing. The "who" that will say it is actual, statistically significant evidence that it works.
The US government still requires polygraphs as a condition of having administrative access to classified systems. They're one data point of many, since you already have a clearance and were thoroughly investigated by other means, but this is an obvious area where it is acceptable to use shitty evidence. The cost of a false negative is extremely high, but the cost of a false positive is close to nothing. Any person who can't pass just has to get a different job.
Courts are the exact opposite situation and I hope the practice of using polygraphs in criminal investigations disappears at some point.
People tend to miss that the error rate in a diagnostic procedure is not enough to evaluate the usefulness of a procedure because you need the relative cost of different types of error as well. It's the same reason FAANGs can get away with shitty interview methods. Cost of false negatives is much higher than cost of false positives.
There is one weird bit of logic in favor of them in niche cases: they might be good at detecting people who have been trained to "pass" a polygraph test.
It gets even hazier, frankly, when you realize that not every statement you make can be firmly categorized as a truth or lie. Due to cognitive dissonance our lies to others can soon become lies to ourselves, and where do you draw the line between wholly believing in a lie to yourself and being flat-out mistaken?
This is another good point: you can be interrogating (or interviewing) a suspect under investigation, use a withholding technique and successfully catch them in a lie, only to have them lying for a completely unrelated reason to the original inquiry.
From what I've gathered, the best lies under interrogation are the ones with the most components of the truth and minimal superfluous information. The police will do everything to get you to talk and keep talking, which is why legal representation is so key.
There’s an interesting take[0] on defensive mechanisms societies have apparently evolved in order to detect a psychopath in their midst in daily life without having to know that person for a long time.
The TSA is security theater. They don't accomplish anything statistically significant.
The TSA is designed to make citizens of the United States feel better about their absurdly outsized risk of dying in a plane highjacking compared to literally every other civilised country on the planet.
Also, it's a huge cash-funnel for the plutocracy. Some people make an enormous amount of money selling this lie.
The article seems to have avoided mentioning the easy way of detecting a lie - go and collect some evidence then compare it to what the person is saying. Incentives count as weak evidence for detecting lies. While not foolproof, it is much more effective than looking for verbal cues.
Detecting lies by assessing someone's demeanour is a symptom. The average person seem to have this unshakeable belief that they are psychic and can deduce other people's thoughts. They can't.
> go and collect some evidence then compare it to what the person is saying
It's so much easier said than done though. Think about an example that might come up in daily life. Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their schedule just changed. How can you possibly tell? Either you have to do it repeatedly and look at it statistically, or go prying around or asking other people to vouch for their story, or you have to ask them directly. Are you willing to do that? Especially if it happens multiple times? What if they in fact didn't lie, but also feel it's an invasion of their privacy to have to give a compelling explanation of what happened? Or what if they did lie, but only due to circumstances beyond your imagination where you might have lied, too? Are you willing to risk your relationship with that person to make a determination?
> Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their schedule just changed.
Maybe they were just busy with the thing you spotted them doing? I’ve been “caught” a zillion times doing a thing by myself because I was booked on my own calendar and didn’t have time for anyone else
I appreciate that clarification. I was coming from the perspective where I’ve been treated as being busy by myself is treated as very clearly to the contrary of being busy.
Because that’s going beyond the idea of nonverbal cues. It’s easier to tell is someone is lying about a murder when you found the murder weapon with their fingerprints on it. If you have evidence you don’t really need to worry about spotting the lies.
Even this is hardly fool-proof, since human memory is far from perfect. Someone might say "I was at Tesco's at 4pm" and later video evidence shows they were actually at Tesco's at 2pm. Did they lie or misremember? Unfortunately, police are often very quick to assume that such a small mistake is done in bad faith and that they're lying. In reality, a lot of people just won't remember the exact time they were at Tesco's weeks or months ago; they may even get the day wrong, or the location.
This is why you just exercise your rights and not talk to the police. Let them figure it out instead of risk being branded a "liar" over a simple mistake.
The notion that behavioural tics can betray lying (or truth-telling) is also part of the kayfabye / stage dressing of truth-determination and vetting.
If you have a set of props (polygraph, truth-teller, various actual or fabricated observations, etc.) that you can present as a plausible basis for claiming someone is lying, then you can apply more severe psychological pressure, possibly getting them to break and confess, though often also simply forcing a false confession, a very real hazard.
(See various accounts suggesting that friendly-demeanor interrogation is far more useful.)
In the account I detailed in an earlier comment on this thread, I'd ... let slip to people who I thought might feed back my counterpart ... that I was in touch with some people who were incredibly good at hacking online information, and dug for (and revealed) a few details I'd turned up ... which actually were based on reverse-engineering a database structure and assessing the contents. (One ... glorious personal weakness of the adversary revealed some critical information I'd been looking for, in particular.) I suspect that message did find its way back, as my adversary was caught entirely unawares.
The net effects weren't entirely unlike a YouTube video on an "amazing mind reader" (actually warning of data surveillance and privacy ... on behalf of a bank): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
And the CIA's Crypto AG operation, in which a firm allegedly selling products to encrypt Telex communications had been back-doored for decades. The easiest way to decrypt or hack information is to have it in plaintext in the first place.
(Other than seeking justice in my own case, I've not made further use of the data I obtained. Though the information had proved tremendously useful, the experience was also a powerful cautionary tale as well.)
I played a ton of Among Us in 2020, which is a game where you have to figure out which of your friends are lying. I quickly learned that going off "well they're acting pretty guilty" was an easy way to lose. A friend of mine would immediately jump to accuse me whenever I cast suspicion on them, even if they were innocent.
Way better to rely on actual evidence and not hunches, even more so when it comes to giving someone a prison sentence.
I did the same, though there are weird people who lie for no reason and screw over the team, too, and sometimes you catch those idiots in a provable lie.
The best way to catch liars is to know things they don't know and trap them with that. In Among Us, it could be as simple as two people saw each other do a visual task (one that proves they're not an impostor) then have someone accuse the wrong person, or worse, be the only person that wasn't cleared that's left.
There is something of a meta-game there that doesn't exist in "real" cases like criminal investigations. Since everyone knows that they will be guilty some of the time, a reasonably strategy is to act guilty all of the time.
Except this comes in in real life all the time: "you don't need a lawyer here, you're not guilty..." - yes you do. You always need a lawyer. You always should plead the 5th if it applies. No, you should never be talking to law enforcement without a lawyer. No you should not let law enforcement "take a look around" without a warrant.
Real life is full of things you absolutely should do which are sold up and down through media as "looking guilty".
Yep, if anything, being innocent is the most important time for having a lawyer. I think not getting charged with a crime you didn't commit is more important than getting away with a crime that you did.
Also been playing a lot of Among Us with my friends.
We started out realizing how difficult lying really is. The early games definitely were characterized by just people not able to hide their lies (maybe we were not trained at it ;)).
But after some training it becomes easier to lie, and of course more difficult to spot.
We also sometimes play it with my kids and those from my buddies, but they have a hard time lying, basically partly admitting when they are accused.
A third is to come out with a lot of nonsense all the time so people don't really differentiate the important lies. I've noticed that technique in certain well known politicians.
That's more disinformation (saying something known to be false to destroy the ability to have a conversation) than misinformation (a lie or a simple mistake).
Yes, the best lies are based mostly in truth with a key substitution. And, it is a novice's mistake to keep babbling. The best liars are the ones who must do so their entire lives in order to survive.
To be honest, I do the opposite: I intentionally play with random people by telling them truths in a manner that comes across as lying.
I recall reading about a patient with split-brain (severed corpus callosum) could tell when people were lying. It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie.
> It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie.
Yes. Not being able to detect lies is a social construction, part of culture. (And so the results reported in TFA are technically useless because everyone involved is operating as part of the unconscious "conspiracy" and so would naturally "discover" that it's hard to detect lies.)
You can tap into this with hypnosis, but it's unpleasant, like being an alien. Imagine being the only person in the room that can tell when someone, anyone, is lying. It would be pretty creepy, eh? Like Twilight Zone creepy. People would shun you. You'd have to hide the ability, eh? And so we come full circle: we all can tell but we're taught not to as children.
I think there are three decent ways to tell if someone is lying: the statement itself (did it contain self-contradictions), the context around the statement (was their hand in the cookie jar), and credibility (does the person have a history of lying).
You can use each of these questions to sway your belief in the truth of a statement, but nothing, short of corroborating facts at hand will give you an absolute assessment. Most of the time you just don't know, and it's a good reminder just how important trust is to a functioning society, and amazing how far some pathological liars can get. Importantly, behavioral queues are often misleading, and a person might be acting nervous for an independent reason, yet register all the behavioral clues of lying.
David Simon's book, Homicide, has an apropos section:
"""Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little. Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too much, avoids eye contact. Doesn’t blink. Stares."""
... which (although in a slightly different context) captures the problem of detecting lies in interrogation very well.
Thank you for posting - I found this video fascinating. Made me think about the law in the UK. Interestingly when arrested here we are told : “You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
I’d be interested if anyone has experience of the UK system and if the same strategy of staying silent would be advised in the uk.
I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I believe that the court may draw an inference from your silence. You are innocent and decided to remain silent only to have a perfect explanation that fits will all evidence known to the police weeks later. Why didn't you offer this earlier?
There is an interesting TV show called 24 Hours in Police Custody[1] that follows people in the 24 hours after they are arrested. Naturally, there are many scenes of police questioning. Plenty of people do just answer "No comment" to every question, even after consulting a solicitor.
If they ask you why you didn't offer this earlier, you send them a link to this video. But in all honesty, I think it's of course very different when it's a PR situation vs a court situation. If you are asked about what just happened by press, "no comment" or "wanting to plead the fifth" might instantly make you enemy of the public even if you are innocent and want to be strategic about it.
> I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I believe that the court may draw an inference from your silence. You are innocent and decided to remain silent only to have a perfect explanation that fits will all evidence known to the police weeks later. Why didn't you offer this earlier?
this is my understanding of the UK system too (note: I am an american). it's quite different in the US because, among other things, the jury is explicitly instructed not infer anything from the defendant's use of their 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination. even if you have a perfect explanation for what happened, it's often best to just be quiet and let the prosecution fall apart.
The negative inference comes from the fact that you can't push an affirmative defence at trial that you haven't hinted at during questioning.
So, if you are arrested for beating up X, and you invoke your right to silence, THEN at trial you put forward a defence of "I wasn't there!" without any substantive evidence to back it up, the prosecutor can say "well, look, if there was an alibi, why didn't you tell the police about it?" The judge is supposed to then instruct the jury that they can draw an inference as to your honesty on the grounds you didn't bring it up during police interview.
The legislation that brings that into force are ss34-39 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
"The negative inference comes from the fact that you can't push an affirmative defence at trial that you haven't hinted at during questioning."
absolute nonsense
the statute with the meaning that you are trying to whitewash your argument applies only to application for dismissal of the indictment based on a claim it's reasonable for you to have provided earlier thereby preventing the proceedings progressing to court
"Plenty of people do just answer "No comment" to every question, even after consulting a solicitor."
precisely because that's the best advice that you will get from a solicitor in the circumstances!
I rather belaboured my earlier responses to this same question, because I wanted to make it understood how rarely there's any justification to arrest someone. UK LEO arrest people by default and they absolutely do not have a automatic right to arrest anyone and certainly not only to bring you in to interview.
I'd also be interested to hear the advice, particularly as the Police seem to have a number of situations where you must give them varying amounts of information, and could be committing an offence if you don't, and other situations where you can say "no comment" to everything including name and address even when arrested. It's really confusing.
For example, the police can get you to show your documents, name, address if they think you are not a UK citizen. Another example: in a stop and search you must tell the police what they might find during a search.
if you are stopped lawfully the law does require you to identify yourself if asked, generally.
this requirement you linked to also provide your address I'd have to look at further to tell you categorically that providing your ad is specifically in connection with this stature, but when you are asked to identify yourself providing a address is quite normal, but I am surprised that I actually don't know if you have to give your address with your name by law or if your name is always sufficient for all other cases. it is equally likely that I'm trying to clarify ambiguity that arises only from the language of the linked information of course
Refusing to cooperate or exercising one's right to silence is absolutely NOT the best strategy in the UK. Whether you should or not will depend heavily on a variety of factors. If you plan to offer an affirmative defence at trial, you can't just spring it on prosecutors.
In addition, England (dunno about Scotland) does NOT have the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine regarding illegally or improperly collected evidence as is seen in a lot of US legal dramas.
The best strategy if arrested in England is to seek legal advice, either from your own solicitor or from the duty solicitor.
I waited overnight before checking that this still needs a contrary opinion just for the way you phrased your advice, which seems to impart greater and hidden argument to always cooperate with UK LEO.
a court "may" infer from your silence a negative presumption...
so goes the doctrine
"may"
"may"
"may" conduct a mis-trial if they do.
the UK police have very few powers in reality.
you may not be coerced to provide a statement or submit to a interview.
you can be arrested for justified suspicion and required to attend a police interview.
you are not required to respond in any way
you can elect to provide a prepared written statement instead, which must be construed by a court to have answered and not been un-cooperative. It is a good idea to prepare this prior to your interview and amend if you wish afterwards.
Handing over a statement won't excuse you from a formal interview when under arrest.
But a advance statement can enable your attorney to challenge the grounds for your arrest and detention.
the UK has very strict controls governing arrest for investigation purposes.
arrest is in fact prohibited unless the arrest is required for your attendance or protection of evidence.
the justifying facts can be challenged at any time. A good attorney will pay close attention to the detail of your interview questions and your attorney and you both have the right at any time to stop the interview and seek advice and counsel in private including from additional specialist lawyers. no time limit applies to the time out you call, although it may not count for the maximum limit of time you can be detained without judiciary approval
this being hn I'm g to assume that you have some recourse to the agency of trusted friends and financial resources.
specifically if you have such resources, I cannot recommend enough for you to make your solicitor instruct a reputable criminal barrister the moment you find out what's going on. cooperation with interview obviously helps you learn something helpful and if it doesn't you absolutely should be alarmed and proceed as follows :
you require your counsel to immediately obtain your warrant and any advance information available from the Crown Prosecution Service to be able to advise you on the possibility that your arrest is prejudicial because of a preexisting theory of your guilt.
bogus arguments for your arrest will never be fully compiled for reference and the possibility of embarrassing you calling you at work surely applies to most of us and all who we know.
unless you are unlikely to attend interview on request and unless you are provably likely to destroy evidence or interfere with witnesses YOU SHOULD NEVER BE ARRESTED AT ALL
the fact that potential witnesses won't be disclosed to you normally before interview is why you need to find out what you can as well as decisively excercise your right to counsel the moment you understand more regardless if it's two minutes into a interview everyone took all day to arrange.
as soon as the police can be said to not be forthcoming with witnesses you supposedly will meddle with, presuming you are not vagrant, the game is over for keeping you under arrest
now for 24 hours the duty custody sergeant must authorise your detention at intervals usually connected with the fact that the sergeants job is to oversee the correctness of proceedings and the provision of the rationale to go arrest you and slam you in a cell.
UK police sergeants are good stuff and I say that notwithstanding the contrary is true for too many officers in UK LEO - sergeants are on a different career path and don't like nonsense. they're also much older and more experienced folk. you'll be stood in front of yours at various times when you get your phone call and when you are called to interview and if the station isn't busy you can usually question them directly about your detention. officers have played endless games and detectives likewise - that'...
you know I could have answered from personal experience and toll you that I have absolutely no reason to believe that silence causes anyone any harm whatsoever nor will silence be construed to your detriment by any court and my experience with this includes courts in which I believed I was going to get nothing except for a prejudicial hammering on all points
but I haven't even ever heard anything said in any court about the accused giving a no comment interview. never.
I probably shouldn't have gone to such length as I did earlier only to respond to your questions, either, but the reason why I replied at length is because it is so important for people to learn how much everything is biased against the individual member of the public in every way beginning with our popular understanding of the applicable laws and logic.
the warning that you quoted, the UK Miranda equivalent warning, people somehow always seem to think applies to subsequent procedure in particular the interview process.
if you are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, the first thing you should do is to establish whether you should have been arrested in the first place and prior to letting anything else further happen to you.
obviously this is a little difficult when you are in custody.
police station solicitors even for large firms are a neglected and weary bunch totally disconnected from the rest of everything that is going to happen to you. right here is the worst disconnect of incentives imaginable because the actions of a smart lawyer in the earliest stages of every proceedings can have disproportionate and incredibly serious consequences.
I wrote to tell anyone who is in such a position where possible to get a barrister specialist in police law to consult with as soon as you have gained any understanding of the situation at all.
this will not make your solicitor happy. but a solicitor who refuses the instructions of their client in the UK commits a crime and your life is not a joke but the kind of service for anyone in this situation who hasn't prepared or already gotten good connections, sure makes you think someone's laughing at your rights.
it should be obvious that you want to stop the police before they think that spending time and resources on finding evidence to incriminate you is a good idea. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that this is when you can do this and about your only chance very likely.
I think the majority of arrests are actually unlawful in the UK, because it has been standard procedure for all of my lifetime and the knowledge of anyone older than me I've asked, to automatically go arrest the person of interest and bring them in to custody as if that's their perfect God given birthright. Well heck it is not!
I only hope by my admittedly rather long comments that somebody who has to go through things like this can possibly experience UK LEO without a bunch of unnecessary fears and emotions and prejudicial ideas in their heads that are altogether doing nothing except work against the individual freedoms and rights which we still mercifully but effectively tragically don't in effect often really have.
I had few issues with that video while it was extremely entertaining and captivating. Yes, there are innocent people getting a guilty verdict. But the actual question is, statistically how often? It's easy to cherrypick few examples, because law of large numbers means that if there's 0.0001% chance of getting wrongfully prosecuted if you talk as an innocent person, there's bound to be some famous examples.
But maybe in 99.99% cases speaking the truth and co-operating quickly will spare you many months of stress and time.
All I'm saying is, that from the video alone it is not clear to me what the risk/reward here is and of course it is situation dependant.
He talks about this at ~9 minutes. Even if you said something good for your case, it won't be heard in court because its hearsay. And if you're in a spot when the police wants to interview you, the decision for your arrest was already made; you can only make the situation worse.
>when the police wants to interview you, the decision for your arrest was already made;
That's not true. The police will interview everyone connected to a crime. Like if your SO turns up dead you're going to be one of the first people the police talk to. Depending on what else they've found they will have varying levels of suspicion. That level will absolutely change on how you do in that interview or if you refuse to talk.
Fine, but the police level of suspicion is not relevant.
Never, ever agree to be interviewed by police without your attorney. There is no reason not to have someone who knows the game play for you. You have no clue what the police know or think they know already and your innocuous answer about something that seems unrelated may seem to confirm some wrong information they already have.
Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
>Fine, but the police level of suspicion is not relevant.
Of course it is. The police aren't the sole decision maker in the process, but as a rule if they don't think you did it you won't get arrested. Conversely if they think they can prove you did it you probably will end up getting arrested.
>Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
Sure it can. Juries and the police are fallible and can be swayed by a convincing performance. Jeffrey Dahmer, as an infamous example, managed to get the police to return one of his drugged victims by convincing them he was drunk and it was a lovers quarrel.
Extremely wrong. If you don’t agree to speak with police you will always have an opportunity to clear your name in the future, through an attorney who knows the game either before or during court. Every shred of information you share with them is ammunition and, again, you have no clue how they will use it, what it may appear to confirm or even what crimes they are actually investigating.
Every assertion you make to police opens you up to being prosecuted for completely separate crimes, including lying to the police, depending on what other information they already have (correct or incorrect).
Take the advice that every cop, every attorney takes and also gives to their kids: don’t talk to the police. Just get an attorney.
(A wild scenario of police catching someone in the act of a crime is not only not what we are talking about, but that individual was not exonerated.)
if there's enough evidence to justify an arrest, you're not going to talk your way out of it. even if you're innocent, it's much more likely you say something that makes the officer decide to arrest you.
I bet even if the stakes were "if I find out the number, you go to prison for one year" he wouldn't be able to.
My point was not that detectives are useless, interrogation does work wonders -- in some cases making the criminal confess, in others making the innocent confess to something he did not do.
My point was getting convicted based on some lie detection bullshit or just some confession alone is evil.
The article linked explicitly cites a study that disproves that assumption. People cannot tell liars apart better than chance even when watching videos of murderers' interrogations.
Scenarios in the article may be cherry picked and videos are not the same as being in the same situation in real life. Also in article they didn't have a chance to provoke subject into verbal contradictions as they were only looking at visual cues.
Even in the article they mentioned 85% success rate after some training.
I don't quite understand what point you're making. The article explicitly says that "spotting" a liar, that is detecting lies based on non-verbal clues does not work. However, other interrogation techniques, such as getting the subject to talk more freely to give them chance to make contradictive statements does work. That's what the 85% rate is about, don't use nonverbal cues, use verbal techniques.
Fair, but as a defendant the trial is pretty much your only chance to tell your side of the story to the people whose decision actually matters. Police officers and prosecutors don't decide whether you go to jail so there's never a point to trying to prove your innocence to them.
Countless times when I was a kid (and sometimes now) people thought I lied when I was innocent because of timidity (and not diagnosed but maybe on the spectrum), so yeah I was unsettled. Uncontrollable smiles were the worst ("that makes you laugh!"). I can’t blame neurotypical people for having heuristics, but I’m still afraid to be interrogated in something serious with my reactions analyzed.
The article shows neurotypical people should have the same concerns. Interogators who think they know how to spot lying are usually wrong, regardless of whether they are interviewing neurotypical people or people on the spectrum.
I'm not on the spectrum, but I was a rebellious kid who didn't like to take shit from teachers. My defiant and sarcastic reactions to accusations were often considered evidence that I'd done wrong when I was innocent.
It's not that lie-spotting heuristics work better for neurotypical people or worse for people on the spectrum. They don't work at all for anyone. We're all in the same boat.
It's more like people wanting to be done with it using any excuse. I don't think jobsworths would particularly care who did what, they wanted things to go away. They were probably paid so little it made no sense to play a detective.
Well to be fair, you shouldn't accuse someone of something they aren't, or something they didn't do.
For instance, it'd be incredibly unfair for me to accuse you of being a jackass for a comment like this, when I know nothing about you... it'd also be equally unfair for me to assume you're an authoritarian... because I don't know anything about you, and therefore have no reason to make such an assumption.
"My defiant and sarcastic reactions to accusations were often considered evidence that I'd done wrong when I was innocent."
You were rebellious. From the point of view of a common teacher, that means you are not innocent. There is actually a old common saying, when some kid got a beaten, but it later turned out to be not guilty of that ... "well, he deserved it anyway" or "well, then the beating was in advance for something he is about to do" "or some other hidden sin", instead of a apology.
Which means self fulfilling prophecy. Punishing someome for something they didn't do - and for sure there will be reasons later on for things they will have done.
There are still way too many teachers and alike, who think a childs free spirit needs to be broken first, before they can learn something useful.
Having been through army basic training, I can confirm this is not an attitude unique to school teachers. To be fair, discipline and self control is incredibly valuable even if it’s not the be all and end all.
I was a fairly disruptive kid in school. It was all boyswillbeboys stuf. Drinking and smoking with friends in abandoned sections of the school. The kind of stuff that seems really serious then, and inconsequential now.
I was brought in front of the board for expulsion after a litany of these types of things, and questioned about anything and everything for about two hours.
We took the case to the board of education and got copies of all of the board members notes, one of which enraged me then and now.
Scrawled in the margins of this members notes - random physiological and psychological phrases. "R.E.M?" for rapid eye movement, "no empathy", "slouching" etc.
Some armchair psychologist that thinks a kid in a high pressure situation, looking around at a board of nine people, is displaying sociopathic traits. That somehow my seating posture related to my character.
They expelled me, and it was ultimately overturned by the state. Still bothers me that people try to apply these dogshit cues to make real life major decisions.
"Vindictive" and "spiteful" were some other good ones. They'd convinced themselves I was doing it to get them or something. The truth is, I was a bored unstimulated kid and the only consideration they got, was how I could avoid them as much as possible. Absolutely zero interest in sticking it to them or making their lives more difficult.
It is pretty shitty of them to write those things about a kid, but they were asked to make a judgement. They weren't using these observations to figure out if you were lying, and when you say they thought you were "out to get them", you're actually playing into the same armchair psychology they were.
I don't mean to give you grief because I've been in similar situations. But I hope you've learned from it that people will hold you responsible for behaviors they observe, and not for your intentions behind them (e.g. acting sullen because you are actually terrified inside).
They were assessing character and yes, making a judgement on it, which was their role. I find it likely that OPs behavior came off as seeming vindictive and spiteful, even if not intended that way. They would have done better to observe specific behaviors (which they did fairly with "slouching"), but their intent was likely to judge character and fit for the school, based on the evidence in front of them.
Not saying it's easy, especially for a kid, but if you go in front of a panel like that, if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way.
Not saying it's easy, especially for a kid, but if you go in front of a panel like that, if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way.
This only furthers the advantage of those most willing and able to lie. Especially so when the system and punishment is arbitrary and capricious rather than rooted in first principles. We should focus on outcomes and shared goals, not easily faked attitudes.
Why do you assume it's a lie? I'd say it's at worst uncorrelated to the truth. And, apart from whether you mean it or not, I believe there's value in learning how to tell people that you do. It's up to you then to decide whether you want to use that power to lie.
> if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way
It sounds like you're presuming to know more about what happened there than you can. I fully expressed remorse, and explained how in hindsight I understand that what I was doing was disruptive, and that I wouldn't behave that way in the future, etc.
Their rubbish analysis was just that. Also, how is "slouching" a fair thing to observe in analysis? I sit with bad posture. I did then and I do now. It's completely irrelevant.
Oh, I should also point out that by this point I had been clinically diagnosed with ADD - which they expressed, and I'll have to paraphrase as it was about 13-14 years ago, was "made up" and that it couldn't possibly explain my behaviour.
Yeah, I wasn't there and don't presume to know what actually happened. This will come off the wrong way, but I don't know another way to say it so... Feedback is a gift. Even if it's wrong, it is based on some kind of truth in someone's perception. Sometimes it's truly worthless, but I believe there's always something to learn from our fellow humans, even if they express their message in an utterly disgusting way.
This is an extreme case, but not an unusual one. People draw conclusions about people with very little information. They then carry on to believe that their conclusions have real weight, and are based in fact. It's part of why there were always be socially fluid types and con artists.
I know this isn't quite your point, but I can't tell you how many jobs I've not been offered due to missing some trivia question and the interviewer deciding my fate based on that.
I have a lot of anxiety about getting my next job, due to this and other reasons. "But you're well-qualified," my friends will say. Yes, but interviewers are capricious and irrational.
I remember being berated for uncontrollably smiling as a fear response. In one sense, it was a good lesson - smiling at people who are angry with you can make them angrier. But it was also a lesson in abject helplessness: interacting with people who have power over you will result in arbitrary, potentially unbounded pain and your best efforts to “play the game” will fail. Internalizing that lesson has done me very little good!
I have the same issue! When anyone asks me about something I haven't done (or should have done and did), I feel like they won't believe me anyway and go into a over-defensive/explanatory mode, basically acting like a culprit.
I wonder if there's a way to change how one thinks, to not assume that the other person won't trust what one says, and so avoid getting nervous / acting like a culprit
I wonder if thinking "I get paid anyway the same each month, what does it matter if they believe me or not" helps (unless one might get fired)
My bro has a thyroid condition. So he doesn't blink, holds eye contact. We were cold busted so many times as kids. Often with physical evidence. He always got off.
I had a time where a group of bullies picked up the innovation of using the school administration to harass. So I found myself in the situation of having chats with the principal a few times a week.
The optimal strategy was to courteously deny and be silent. It works over half the time. I’d also use my time waiting around to “charm” the support staff by being nice to them and making myself useful. Eventually, most disciplinary referrals ended up getting lost, as the secretaries clued up to what was happening.
My high school was a similar object lesson in how the world actually works. I went from almost getting expelled freshman year for "breaking the library computer"[1] to having the assistant principal accept, but probably not believe, every word I said over underclassmen in any sort of conflict.
Hey I did the same but added SOUND RND (1000,1,-1) or whatever it was to an entire bank of econet computers.
We were in the class next door that had one computer and we could hear it go off.
Hilarious hijinks until caught/blabbed on. Serious business afterwards. Teachers are scared shitless of computers even now and ‘hacking’ back then... well, I was waiting for MI6 to come get me.
Funny you mention this, Freud wrote a whole essay about how people how people who suffer neurotic disorders are in serious risk of being convincingly misinterpreted when being drilled under pressure in legal settings, and that legal officials need to rethink what they think true speech is, as a neurotic will indict themselves even if they're innocent
There's no difference to an observer. If you tell me you saw a white car in a parking lot and video footage shows a blue car, there's no way to know if you were lying or mistaken/misremembering.
How to tell if someone is lying: do they have something to gain by lying? Are they a politician? Are they a celebrity? Do they have a history of lying?
The more yes answers to the above, the more likely the person is lying to you.
So how does one take this over to metaphorical poker? Because if the situation calls for having physical control over someone with the threat that they're about to go to jail, then okay, sure.
It was a joke, a reference to a Quentin Tarrantino movie where a character says there are 17 pantomimes that give a male liar away, but the character doesn't list them.
I recently got to spend some time with Jeff Deskovic (we met while he was on vacation), the exoneree mentioned at the top of the article for having spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He is looking for folks with technical backgrounds to to consult with Deskovic.org which has helped exonerate 9 other wrong-fully convicted persons.
If anyone is interested, please contact me at the address in my HN profile!
I've had two especially notable experiences with pathological liars, discounting smaller encounters with hucksters and various sales/marketing types (not all, but some, and an absolute showstopper when it occurs).
The first was at a part-time job during my days at uni. A new guy had joined the crew, intelligent and affable, but it turned out, simply a pathological lair. We weren't aware of this until ... I forget precisely what had occurred, but apparently lying when filling out bank cheques was among his failings....
The second was a more personal relationship, in which it transpired that I'd been lied to from the very beginning. This person displayed many of the characteristics of borderline / narcissistic personality disorder, and would often become wildly (and increasingly inappropriately) upset under questioning, deflecting or projecting questions and accusations back. I'd had little experience with the behaviour previously and it was exceedingly disconcerting.
- Finding several people who'd known something of the person's background, and comparing notes. Inconsistencies immediately started popping up. Score one for the consistency rule of truth determination. Various audit methods rely heavily on these.
- Realising I had a trove of communications from the person (legitimately obtained --- they'd given them to me, though some reverse-engineering was required to recover data, both points that held significance in later proceedings). It took some patching together of these to generate a clear picture, which was hampered by the false / incomplete story I'd been told, but the full story eventually was clear.
Eventually we were able to pin down the individual under testimony showing the scope of deception and the fact that it was intentional, premeditated, and predated my encounter with the person (I happened to be the sufficiently clueless victim appearing at the right or wrong time, depending on whose viewpoint you take).
Many standard bullshit-detection tactics (see several referenced in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...) turn out to apply. Sloppy logic, imprecise language, deflecting questions, various forms of special pleading, turning to accusations against the questioner when the situation gets too heated, etc., vagueness as to facts, and inconsistencies within the story (these can require close listening) were ultimately the tells. Even once presented, there was a lot of work left to uncover the actual truth.
In more mundane dealings, what I find is that fairly sensitive and alert to unqualified claims, inconsistent actions, or statements at odds with facts of which I'm aware. It's interesting to see just how often this occurs (I'm thinking of examples from an appliance purchase, broadband service calls, and medial services, within the past year or three), and once those occur, I call the person on their bullshit. I've walked away from purchases or services strictly due to such behaviours --- if you cannot be trusted to tell the truth or admit to the limits of your knowledge or understanding on the simple stuff, much as with Van Halen's brown M&Ms, why the hell should I trust you with the complex bits I don't have knowledge of?
Liars of this type probably have been practicing in real situations where their lies got them something.
I think most of us (non nefarious people) don’t have to deal with lies of real significance. I’ve lied at stand-up, and I’m sure people know it. It’s a polite request for dignified forgiveness.
The only real lie that can happen in your life is with a spouse/partner, since that is a calamity in relative terms (betrayal). Kids/Teens will lie about a lot of things, but that should be expected (immaturity). Your company has to lie to you (business).
If for whatever reason you are dealing with major lies of any other kind, then you are probably dealing with a criminal.
So yeah, we should be bad at spotting serious liars since we have no business being around them (e.g your business is crime).
The guy isn't dressed like a jogger. Joggers don't usually carry bottles of water either. That's some actual evidence he is unlikely to be a jogger. Instead the policeman is focusing on what the person say.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadAll of the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read have been tripe. Unless he has radically improved his writing and grasp of nuance in the last decade (and published retractions of his earlier books), his books are dangerous anti-knowledge which will make you feel smarter but actually be dumber.
Gladwell takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising.
Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right.
He tells a decent story, and you feel like you've learn something after reading him. Scratch below the surface, and it turns out you haven't.
I hate posting anything negative but sorry, this was just too much.
Oh and I admit I actually didn't dislike the third of one Gladwell's book I once read, as well as a presentation he gave somewhere about the Norden bombsight. Every single one of the HN haters of him on the other hand remain exceedingly vague and don't really have anything of substance to say, only very over-styled ways to express that they dislike them, or even the man himself.
I listened to his podcast history of napalm, and found it compelling and interesting (but then I'm not a historian, so perhaps it's Murray Gell-Mann amnesia!) So I have more time for his historical work, partially because history is a kind of storytelling.
Science is not the same as history, and needs to be judged by different metrics. This is where he falls down.
The vitriol, downvote-happiness and almost zealotry of "commenter movements" like anti-Javascript, or, here anti-Gladwell, to me signals that this is more a self-perpetuating fad driven by group think (trying to fit in and proof one is part of the core). If it was merely fact driven such as mine would be ignored - or not be given cause to exist in the first place. It's not like I care one iota about Gladwell, as I said, I never managed to read more than a small part of one book. What I did notice though and why I even paid any attention at all was the amazing level of effort - coupled with an equally amazing level of vagueness - some people put into this.
If one were to think logically, even if you conclude all of Gladwell's books are really really bad, you would just ignore the whole thing. That call to arms anytime anyone dares mention Gladwell - or Javascript - is scary and as far as I can see far worse than anything Gladwell may ever have written. It reminds me more of high school "cool kids" group dynamics.
Again, I have said there are multiple critiques which go into detail about what is wrong with Gladwell's writing, so if your problem is the "nebulousness" of a comment on Hacker News (which is no place for a detailed critiqe), then I suggest you look for them if you're genuinely interested in why people have a low opinion of his science writing.
I commented on a relevant thread in the hope of saving someone else the time wasted reading them, and if I'm honest, because I'm still salty about the money and time he stole from me.
I criticise it in the same wa as if someone was expounding homeopathy or a fruit-baswd diet for cancer, or horoscope-based hiring.
JavaScript is fine by me.
Thank you for supporting my point! You demonstrate the very low level very well. Badly hidden snark akin to personal attacks instead of arguments. Exactly my point about that.. "criticism" of that author, far worse than anything I ever read or heard from him and at least an order of magnitude lower level intellectually, if not more.
He has admitted to "mak[ing] trouble" rather than believing everything he writes.[0] He acknowledges that his books are not "ends in themselves."[1] He cherry-picks supporting studies and leaves out their failure to replicate.[2] He throws around scientific terms but uses them incorrectly. [3] He offers ill-considered off-the-cuff "solutions."[3]
One reason HN comments might be "exceedingly vague" is because the specific criticisms have been laid out extensively over the past decade.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm-gladwe...
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/column/behavioral-economist/artic...
[2] https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_deb...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.htm...
One day on a flight I started reading his “Blink” when 1/4th of the way I realized he is full of crap.
The realization came after I started noticing a pattern: that he would give an anecdote, or present a situation, explain it a little bit then bam! He would generalize his conclusion to a broader situation. Rinse and repeat.
What a load of junk!
I got introduced to him via his TED talks which I liked. But after reading Blink (1/4th of it), I opened by eyes and stayed away from whatever he said or did.
Or, maybe I’m an old cranky curmudgeon and should let people enjoy reading his junk science.
Could you share some of the criticism against him so I could update any incorrect beliefs I may have?
I used to dismiss Gladwell's "insight porn" (h/t lordnacho). But now I feel like he's a pretty effective advocate, popularizer of views and policies that I agree with. Briefly, he's punching up.
Michael Lewis was the catalyst to reassessing Gladwell. I just frikkin love his Against The Rules podcast series. Briefly, he argues that we do better, both as society and individuals, with referees and coaching.
Then I listened to a handful of Gladwell interviews. A long form chat with Lewis. Book tour stops for Talking with Strangers. I thought: Huh, Gladwell doesn't sound too bad.
So I started listening to other Pushkin Industry podcasts.
I especially love historian Jill Lepore.
So I guess my TLDR is: I reevaluated Gladwell because he's now working with two people I really admire. Virtue by association.
Anders Ericsson, who conducted the study upon which "the 10,000-Hour Rule" was based has written that Gladwell had overgeneralized, misinterpreted, and oversimplified his findings. https://web.archive.org/web/20190320062202/https://radicalsc...
The parts of the book that were meaningful to me were the summaries of other foundational studies and generalized beliefs based on lots of research. His conclusions were sometimes a bit of a stretch, but I accept a little 'dressing up' of results with additional opinion as part of writing to a broad audience
1) If law enforcement ever has the time, they might want to play Maffia or Werewolf. Playing those games enough makes you realize how idiosyncratic lying can be.
2) I'm glad to know that my lecture on lying when I studied psychology basically had the same conclusions as this article.
In my view this is just one more error springing from the root error of turning "a jury of your peers" into "a jury of random strangers". One point of being judged by a jury of your peers is that they are familiar with the types of things you're likely to do.
But another is that your peers are familiar with the ways in which you're likely to react to things.
How can you trust your judgement on whether they’re truthful about bigger things?
You can't. You will believe what you want to believe, and good liars are great at finding out what you want. A well constructed lie rests on verifiable foundations - ie. they also know when not to lie to earn your trust - and comprises of almost exclusively truths. There is no way to defend yourself once you become the target and start listening.
The only winning move is not to play.
(Even if like me you won't end up playing the game I found the experience worth five dollars)
Lake Wobegon effect for people reading.
I mostly think this because every time someone on TV insists they're innocent, I believe them, and then they turn out to be guilty.
Detecting the lies of strangers? Yeah... good luck.
Did you spot one here?
> I have a basic understanding of statistics
Perhaps an intermediate understanding would help. Entire schools tend to score higher or lower together, also wealth correlates to IQ and scholastic success and zip code. There are also other reasons an entire group would be biased higher or lower.
> I deal with this kind of sounds-good-if-you-don't-think-too-hard "insights" all the time
Uh-huh.
I disagree with this argument, but that's the basis of it.
Just my crazy version of what "easy" could entail.
Firstly, you're assuming independent probabilities between the students.
If it's a single class of 30, for certain skills it might be much more likely than pow(0.5, 30) if they were all specifically coached on that particular skill, or if there are selection effects impacting what type of person ends up in that group of 30.
Secondly, even if we grant the assumption of independence, the claim doesn't rely on "unlikely values for ... small". There's many small towns with a student body of only 5 or less people, and pow(0.5, 5) isn't that unlikely.
We're all very good at detecting the liars we detect.
(This is the fundamental diagnostics fallacy. Absent some known ground truth, identifying hard-to-detect, hard-to-confirm phenomena is, well, hard.)
(This then gets coupled to the treatment fallacy, post hoc ergo prompter. I did A, B was cured, therefore A cured B.)
This manifests in hard to prove stuff like this, but also obviously in things like when facial recognition or shot spotter tech is used. Scientists and engineers comprehend the limitations of these tools, but the users here are similar to prehistoric man before the monolith. The tools are magic to them and they rely on them like they are magical truths.
This isn't particularly changeable. So for those who build for these users, it's important to guide them to the right truths and express the right uncertainties.
¹ After all, even the most basic adversarial analysis would be that people are aware of the "eyes averted" nonsense and would subsequently compensate. As a matter of fact, almost anyone who believes in this stuff also believes they can dodge detection because they know these secret truths that everyone knows.
For example, if you want to lie about where you were, you have to believe yourself that you were there. If you consciously think you are lying, it won’t work. It’s like forming a new truth and then fully accepting that reality.
Many years ago I worked at a Dominos pizza with a pathological liar. It was so obvious everything he said was false, and he couldn’t stop himself from lying about literally everything. That is not effective lying. Effective lying is believable.
My goal was to let him spin his yarn and wait for him to contradict himself in some way. Rather than directly going a "gotcha" I'd act sincerely confused, "Oh, you just said you met him yesterday, but earlier you said you met that person months ago. I must be misunderstanding." Then I'd just enjoy how effortlessly he would create a new fabrication to cover up the gap in his story. I guess practice makes perfect, or at least better.
He was incredibly bold. Once he told me about spending Thanksgiving with a coworker ... and that coworker was in his cube immediately adjacent to mine. After the BS artist left I asked the guy in the next cube if her heard that ... nope, he was wearing his headphones. When I relayed the story, he said nope, he was more likely to shoot the BS artist than invite him over for a meal.
He ended up getting fired because he was taking time off work to attend classes at Stanford. After a few months of this someone in HR checked with Stanford and they said they had no record of a student by that name. LA few weeks after getting fired, HR received a call from another company checking references on one of our former employees, Dr. <bs artist surname>.
The TSA thing at the end seems like a bit of a derail though:
But, Mann says, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time.
I don't doubt the TSA "behavioral detection" is extremely ineffective, but presumably TSA is mostly leaning on other means to detect dangers and failure to detect weapons is more on the xray/backscatter scanners. It doesn't strike me as realistic for TSA to use verbal techniques like asking each passenger to sketch out his travel story to detect if he's lying about having a gun.
One interesting difference it raises is lying about the past/experienced events vs. lying about future intentions. Their techniques seem mostly geared towards differentiating between a person accurately recalling an event from memory vs reciting a fabricated version of their memory/actions. It makes sense this would be helpful for police interrogating a suspect, but it's not intuitively obvious the underlying idea maps to detecting someone lying about their intended future actions.
> In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back during a follow-on pat down.
That doesn’t inspire much confidence.
It does example how superfluous the TSA is.
The 9/11 commission's recommendations never included anything like the TSA - just better comm between the 3-letters and reinforced cockpit doors.
Random wires, breadboards, etc aren’t going to explode without a source of fuel.
This allows them to easily deflect potential racial screening complaints.
Police will continue with warrantless search and seizure until they actually face repercussions for misconduct.
The liar and the discriminator continue to evolve in an arms race.
I, as an average discriminator can probably tell the bad liars but could be fooled by the good ones.
Additionally what you say about being able to spot the average liar, as an average person, is contrary to the article. I would encourage you to read the article more carefully to distill the main points.
If you know someone really well, you might have a decent chance of knowing when they are acting unusual. Such is the case with parents and teenagers, but suspicion often gets the best of the parents and they misinterpret the cues that they spotted.
A good method would seem to be to catch someone on a logical contradiction, but that has issues when someone is under emotional distress. And emotional distress tends to appear often when someone is innocent but is afraid the evidence points towards them. The family cat may have knocked over Mom’s favorite vase, but the child is less interested in the truth and more interested in avoiding a spanking- so they embellish whatever story they had (in a misguided attempt to make it more believable), which introduces contradictions that the mom notices. The kid technically lied with the embellishments but was innocent of breaking a vase, and gets spanked when they didn’t deserve it. Then imagine the kid’s emotional distress being even higher the next time something happens.
I’m sure that there are a lot of learned people out there that study lying, but I agree with the article’s main theme that most of us can’t reliably tell when our why someone is lying, and we’re overconfident in our abilities.
No training is needed because polygraphs don't work. Polygraph testing is about as worthwhile as astrology:
https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph
https://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/polygraph/
And inadmissible in court in many places:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MurUEJL/2000/6.html
> if trained polygraph techs with special equipment
There are no trained polygraph techs. They are, at best, con artists.
Perhaps instead of saying "at best" they are con artists, it would have been more polite to say at worst, they are con artists. Probably many earnestly believe in what they are doing, and are just wrong.
> And inadmissible in court in many places:
I'm not aware of any place that accepts polygraphs in a court.
"In the United States of America, (where polygraph testing is a growth industry) the admissibility of lie detector test results is determined by courts and legislators on a State by State basis.
In the Federal legal system, test results are inadmissible as substantive evidence. Whilst some States have allowed test results in criminal trials, States such as such as California have prohibited the admission of such evidence unless all parties consent to its admission."
I look back on the people I admired, and they questioned authority.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-doug-williams-war-on...
Calling them con artists is about as polite as I can be.
Which to some people sounds terrible. I certainly wouldn’t want to hang a murder conviction on something with a 20 percent error rate. But on the other hand, 80 percent is better than all but one of the cited results from the Atlantic article, and beats the results from all experiments using untrained people. These con artists are, at best, performing on par with specific lie detection training.
Maybe the equipment is just for show, but who’s to say that further biometric measurements, such as functional MRI, wouldn’t significantly increase the accuracy of biometric lie detection (still technically within the realm of nonverbal cues from the Atlantic article)? I don’t think it could be 100% accurate, but I can reasonably see future polygraphs being legitimate tools for lie detection.
I wouldn’t want my murder conviction to hang on the results of a current polygraph, but I would be satisfied using one to catch an office supply thief. Well, except it would probably be cheaper to just let someone keep stealing supplies than to pay $8k per employee to administer the tests.
Yes, it's a con.
> but who’s to say that further biometric measurements, such as functional MRI, wouldn’t significantly increase the accuracy of biometric lie detection
That isn't what they're doing. The "who" that will say it is actual, statistically significant evidence that it works.
Courts are the exact opposite situation and I hope the practice of using polygraphs in criminal investigations disappears at some point.
People tend to miss that the error rate in a diagnostic procedure is not enough to evaluate the usefulness of a procedure because you need the relative cost of different types of error as well. It's the same reason FAANGs can get away with shitty interview methods. Cost of false negatives is much higher than cost of false positives.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/05/05/dares-costly-signals-a... on dares and costly signals, also discussing The Psychopath Code by late Pieter Hintjens.
1. FM 2-22.3 (section 9-6)
The TSA is designed to make citizens of the United States feel better about their absurdly outsized risk of dying in a plane highjacking compared to literally every other civilised country on the planet.
Also, it's a huge cash-funnel for the plutocracy. Some people make an enormous amount of money selling this lie.
Detecting lies by assessing someone's demeanour is a symptom. The average person seem to have this unshakeable belief that they are psychic and can deduce other people's thoughts. They can't.
The problem is that is not easy. Lies can be generated easily. Disproving them requires probably 20x the time.
It's so much easier said than done though. Think about an example that might come up in daily life. Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their schedule just changed. How can you possibly tell? Either you have to do it repeatedly and look at it statistically, or go prying around or asking other people to vouch for their story, or you have to ask them directly. Are you willing to do that? Especially if it happens multiple times? What if they in fact didn't lie, but also feel it's an invasion of their privacy to have to give a compelling explanation of what happened? Or what if they did lie, but only due to circumstances beyond your imagination where you might have lied, too? Are you willing to risk your relationship with that person to make a determination?
Maybe they were just busy with the thing you spotted them doing? I’ve been “caught” a zillion times doing a thing by myself because I was booked on my own calendar and didn’t have time for anyone else
Perhaps you made a sandwich with that knife earlier in the day.
Perhaps you own the gun, and therefore of course it has your prints on it. That doesn't mean you fired the lethal shot.
This is why you just exercise your rights and not talk to the police. Let them figure it out instead of risk being branded a "liar" over a simple mistake.
If you have a set of props (polygraph, truth-teller, various actual or fabricated observations, etc.) that you can present as a plausible basis for claiming someone is lying, then you can apply more severe psychological pressure, possibly getting them to break and confess, though often also simply forcing a false confession, a very real hazard.
(See various accounts suggesting that friendly-demeanor interrogation is far more useful.)
In the account I detailed in an earlier comment on this thread, I'd ... let slip to people who I thought might feed back my counterpart ... that I was in touch with some people who were incredibly good at hacking online information, and dug for (and revealed) a few details I'd turned up ... which actually were based on reverse-engineering a database structure and assessing the contents. (One ... glorious personal weakness of the adversary revealed some critical information I'd been looking for, in particular.) I suspect that message did find its way back, as my adversary was caught entirely unawares.
The net effects weren't entirely unlike a YouTube video on an "amazing mind reader" (actually warning of data surveillance and privacy ... on behalf of a bank): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
And the CIA's Crypto AG operation, in which a firm allegedly selling products to encrypt Telex communications had been back-doored for decades. The easiest way to decrypt or hack information is to have it in plaintext in the first place.
(Other than seeking justice in my own case, I've not made further use of the data I obtained. Though the information had proved tremendously useful, the experience was also a powerful cautionary tale as well.)
Way better to rely on actual evidence and not hunches, even more so when it comes to giving someone a prison sentence.
The best way to catch liars is to know things they don't know and trap them with that. In Among Us, it could be as simple as two people saw each other do a visual task (one that proves they're not an impostor) then have someone accuse the wrong person, or worse, be the only person that wasn't cleared that's left.
Real life is full of things you absolutely should do which are sold up and down through media as "looking guilty".
We started out realizing how difficult lying really is. The early games definitely were characterized by just people not able to hide their lies (maybe we were not trained at it ;)).
But after some training it becomes easier to lie, and of course more difficult to spot.
We also sometimes play it with my kids and those from my buddies, but they have a hard time lying, basically partly admitting when they are accused.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
To be honest, I do the opposite: I intentionally play with random people by telling them truths in a manner that comes across as lying.
This immediately made me think of Camus’s The Stranger, though maybe it’s an overreaction to bring existentialism into the conversation!
Yes. Not being able to detect lies is a social construction, part of culture. (And so the results reported in TFA are technically useless because everyone involved is operating as part of the unconscious "conspiracy" and so would naturally "discover" that it's hard to detect lies.)
You can tap into this with hypnosis, but it's unpleasant, like being an alien. Imagine being the only person in the room that can tell when someone, anyone, is lying. It would be pretty creepy, eh? Like Twilight Zone creepy. People would shun you. You'd have to hide the ability, eh? And so we come full circle: we all can tell but we're taught not to as children.
When they're really young their minds are not yet formed.
And children are biased to trust their parents and adults in general.
You can use each of these questions to sway your belief in the truth of a statement, but nothing, short of corroborating facts at hand will give you an absolute assessment. Most of the time you just don't know, and it's a good reminder just how important trust is to a functioning society, and amazing how far some pathological liars can get. Importantly, behavioral queues are often misleading, and a person might be acting nervous for an independent reason, yet register all the behavioral clues of lying.
Are actually signs someone is uncomfortable/insecure.
And while you might be such because you lie, you might also be such without lying and you might not be such when lying.
Which might be why LEO are so partial to them. The power to ruin vulnerable people is irresistible to some folks.
"""Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little. Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too much, avoids eye contact. Doesn’t blink. Stares."""
... which (although in a slightly different context) captures the problem of detecting lies in interrogation very well.
Yeah, he couldn't.
In summary, you lose the moment you agree to talk.
I’d be interested if anyone has experience of the UK system and if the same strategy of staying silent would be advised in the uk.
There is an interesting TV show called 24 Hours in Police Custody[1] that follows people in the 24 hours after they are arrested. Naturally, there are many scenes of police questioning. Plenty of people do just answer "No comment" to every question, even after consulting a solicitor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_in_Police_Custody
this is my understanding of the UK system too (note: I am an american). it's quite different in the US because, among other things, the jury is explicitly instructed not infer anything from the defendant's use of their 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination. even if you have a perfect explanation for what happened, it's often best to just be quiet and let the prosecution fall apart.
So, if you are arrested for beating up X, and you invoke your right to silence, THEN at trial you put forward a defence of "I wasn't there!" without any substantive evidence to back it up, the prosecutor can say "well, look, if there was an alibi, why didn't you tell the police about it?" The judge is supposed to then instruct the jury that they can draw an inference as to your honesty on the grounds you didn't bring it up during police interview.
The legislation that brings that into force are ss34-39 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/III/crossh...
absolute nonsense
the statute with the meaning that you are trying to whitewash your argument applies only to application for dismissal of the indictment based on a claim it's reasonable for you to have provided earlier thereby preventing the proceedings progressing to court
precisely because that's the best advice that you will get from a solicitor in the circumstances!
I rather belaboured my earlier responses to this same question, because I wanted to make it understood how rarely there's any justification to arrest someone. UK LEO arrest people by default and they absolutely do not have a automatic right to arrest anyone and certainly not only to bring you in to interview.
For example, the police can get you to show your documents, name, address if they think you are not a UK citizen. Another example: in a stop and search you must tell the police what they might find during a search.
i.e. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_information/sto...
this requirement you linked to also provide your address I'd have to look at further to tell you categorically that providing your ad is specifically in connection with this stature, but when you are asked to identify yourself providing a address is quite normal, but I am surprised that I actually don't know if you have to give your address with your name by law or if your name is always sufficient for all other cases. it is equally likely that I'm trying to clarify ambiguity that arises only from the language of the linked information of course
In addition, England (dunno about Scotland) does NOT have the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine regarding illegally or improperly collected evidence as is seen in a lot of US legal dramas.
The best strategy if arrested in England is to seek legal advice, either from your own solicitor or from the duty solicitor.
a court "may" infer from your silence a negative presumption...
so goes the doctrine
"may"
"may"
"may" conduct a mis-trial if they do.
the UK police have very few powers in reality.
you may not be coerced to provide a statement or submit to a interview.
you can be arrested for justified suspicion and required to attend a police interview.
you are not required to respond in any way
you can elect to provide a prepared written statement instead, which must be construed by a court to have answered and not been un-cooperative. It is a good idea to prepare this prior to your interview and amend if you wish afterwards.
Handing over a statement won't excuse you from a formal interview when under arrest.
But a advance statement can enable your attorney to challenge the grounds for your arrest and detention.
the UK has very strict controls governing arrest for investigation purposes.
arrest is in fact prohibited unless the arrest is required for your attendance or protection of evidence.
the justifying facts can be challenged at any time. A good attorney will pay close attention to the detail of your interview questions and your attorney and you both have the right at any time to stop the interview and seek advice and counsel in private including from additional specialist lawyers. no time limit applies to the time out you call, although it may not count for the maximum limit of time you can be detained without judiciary approval
this being hn I'm g to assume that you have some recourse to the agency of trusted friends and financial resources.
specifically if you have such resources, I cannot recommend enough for you to make your solicitor instruct a reputable criminal barrister the moment you find out what's going on. cooperation with interview obviously helps you learn something helpful and if it doesn't you absolutely should be alarmed and proceed as follows :
you require your counsel to immediately obtain your warrant and any advance information available from the Crown Prosecution Service to be able to advise you on the possibility that your arrest is prejudicial because of a preexisting theory of your guilt.
bogus arguments for your arrest will never be fully compiled for reference and the possibility of embarrassing you calling you at work surely applies to most of us and all who we know.
unless you are unlikely to attend interview on request and unless you are provably likely to destroy evidence or interfere with witnesses YOU SHOULD NEVER BE ARRESTED AT ALL
the fact that potential witnesses won't be disclosed to you normally before interview is why you need to find out what you can as well as decisively excercise your right to counsel the moment you understand more regardless if it's two minutes into a interview everyone took all day to arrange.
as soon as the police can be said to not be forthcoming with witnesses you supposedly will meddle with, presuming you are not vagrant, the game is over for keeping you under arrest
now for 24 hours the duty custody sergeant must authorise your detention at intervals usually connected with the fact that the sergeants job is to oversee the correctness of proceedings and the provision of the rationale to go arrest you and slam you in a cell.
UK police sergeants are good stuff and I say that notwithstanding the contrary is true for too many officers in UK LEO - sergeants are on a different career path and don't like nonsense. they're also much older and more experienced folk. you'll be stood in front of yours at various times when you get your phone call and when you are called to interview and if the station isn't busy you can usually question them directly about your detention. officers have played endless games and detectives likewise - that'...
but I haven't even ever heard anything said in any court about the accused giving a no comment interview. never.
I probably shouldn't have gone to such length as I did earlier only to respond to your questions, either, but the reason why I replied at length is because it is so important for people to learn how much everything is biased against the individual member of the public in every way beginning with our popular understanding of the applicable laws and logic.
the warning that you quoted, the UK Miranda equivalent warning, people somehow always seem to think applies to subsequent procedure in particular the interview process.
if you are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, the first thing you should do is to establish whether you should have been arrested in the first place and prior to letting anything else further happen to you.
obviously this is a little difficult when you are in custody.
police station solicitors even for large firms are a neglected and weary bunch totally disconnected from the rest of everything that is going to happen to you. right here is the worst disconnect of incentives imaginable because the actions of a smart lawyer in the earliest stages of every proceedings can have disproportionate and incredibly serious consequences.
I wrote to tell anyone who is in such a position where possible to get a barrister specialist in police law to consult with as soon as you have gained any understanding of the situation at all.
this will not make your solicitor happy. but a solicitor who refuses the instructions of their client in the UK commits a crime and your life is not a joke but the kind of service for anyone in this situation who hasn't prepared or already gotten good connections, sure makes you think someone's laughing at your rights.
it should be obvious that you want to stop the police before they think that spending time and resources on finding evidence to incriminate you is a good idea. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that this is when you can do this and about your only chance very likely.
I think the majority of arrests are actually unlawful in the UK, because it has been standard procedure for all of my lifetime and the knowledge of anyone older than me I've asked, to automatically go arrest the person of interest and bring them in to custody as if that's their perfect God given birthright. Well heck it is not!
I only hope by my admittedly rather long comments that somebody who has to go through things like this can possibly experience UK LEO without a bunch of unnecessary fears and emotions and prejudicial ideas in their heads that are altogether doing nothing except work against the individual freedoms and rights which we still mercifully but effectively tragically don't in effect often really have.
But maybe in 99.99% cases speaking the truth and co-operating quickly will spare you many months of stress and time.
All I'm saying is, that from the video alone it is not clear to me what the risk/reward here is and of course it is situation dependant.
That's not true. The police will interview everyone connected to a crime. Like if your SO turns up dead you're going to be one of the first people the police talk to. Depending on what else they've found they will have varying levels of suspicion. That level will absolutely change on how you do in that interview or if you refuse to talk.
Never, ever agree to be interviewed by police without your attorney. There is no reason not to have someone who knows the game play for you. You have no clue what the police know or think they know already and your innocuous answer about something that seems unrelated may seem to confirm some wrong information they already have.
Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
Of course it is. The police aren't the sole decision maker in the process, but as a rule if they don't think you did it you won't get arrested. Conversely if they think they can prove you did it you probably will end up getting arrested.
>Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
Sure it can. Juries and the police are fallible and can be swayed by a convincing performance. Jeffrey Dahmer, as an infamous example, managed to get the police to return one of his drugged victims by convincing them he was drunk and it was a lovers quarrel.
Every assertion you make to police opens you up to being prosecuted for completely separate crimes, including lying to the police, depending on what other information they already have (correct or incorrect).
Take the advice that every cop, every attorney takes and also gives to their kids: don’t talk to the police. Just get an attorney.
(A wild scenario of police catching someone in the act of a crime is not only not what we are talking about, but that individual was not exonerated.)
But if you knew you did something that could land you in prison and you were supposed to hide it, that would be a completely different scenario.
My point was not that detectives are useless, interrogation does work wonders -- in some cases making the criminal confess, in others making the innocent confess to something he did not do.
My point was getting convicted based on some lie detection bullshit or just some confession alone is evil.
Even in the article they mentioned 85% success rate after some training.
Well worth the time.
EDIT: Seems I wasn't the first to make that recommendation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26608636 ;)
The trial is about figuring out the truth.
Even that is an assumption.
I'm not on the spectrum, but I was a rebellious kid who didn't like to take shit from teachers. My defiant and sarcastic reactions to accusations were often considered evidence that I'd done wrong when I was innocent.
It's not that lie-spotting heuristics work better for neurotypical people or worse for people on the spectrum. They don't work at all for anyone. We're all in the same boat.
For instance, it'd be incredibly unfair for me to accuse you of being a jackass for a comment like this, when I know nothing about you... it'd also be equally unfair for me to assume you're an authoritarian... because I don't know anything about you, and therefore have no reason to make such an assumption.
Sort of like the teachers in the prior comments.
You were rebellious. From the point of view of a common teacher, that means you are not innocent. There is actually a old common saying, when some kid got a beaten, but it later turned out to be not guilty of that ... "well, he deserved it anyway" or "well, then the beating was in advance for something he is about to do" "or some other hidden sin", instead of a apology.
Which means self fulfilling prophecy. Punishing someome for something they didn't do - and for sure there will be reasons later on for things they will have done.
There are still way too many teachers and alike, who think a childs free spirit needs to be broken first, before they can learn something useful.
It is!
But you don't need to break someone, to help them learn it. Breaking people is just the cheapest method.
I was brought in front of the board for expulsion after a litany of these types of things, and questioned about anything and everything for about two hours.
We took the case to the board of education and got copies of all of the board members notes, one of which enraged me then and now.
Scrawled in the margins of this members notes - random physiological and psychological phrases. "R.E.M?" for rapid eye movement, "no empathy", "slouching" etc.
Some armchair psychologist that thinks a kid in a high pressure situation, looking around at a board of nine people, is displaying sociopathic traits. That somehow my seating posture related to my character.
They expelled me, and it was ultimately overturned by the state. Still bothers me that people try to apply these dogshit cues to make real life major decisions.
"Vindictive" and "spiteful" were some other good ones. They'd convinced themselves I was doing it to get them or something. The truth is, I was a bored unstimulated kid and the only consideration they got, was how I could avoid them as much as possible. Absolutely zero interest in sticking it to them or making their lives more difficult.
I don't mean to give you grief because I've been in similar situations. But I hope you've learned from it that people will hold you responsible for behaviors they observe, and not for your intentions behind them (e.g. acting sullen because you are actually terrified inside).
Not saying it's easy, especially for a kid, but if you go in front of a panel like that, if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way.
This only furthers the advantage of those most willing and able to lie. Especially so when the system and punishment is arbitrary and capricious rather than rooted in first principles. We should focus on outcomes and shared goals, not easily faked attitudes.
The presence of the word "only" clearly makes an assumption that it is a lie.
It sounds like you're presuming to know more about what happened there than you can. I fully expressed remorse, and explained how in hindsight I understand that what I was doing was disruptive, and that I wouldn't behave that way in the future, etc.
Their rubbish analysis was just that. Also, how is "slouching" a fair thing to observe in analysis? I sit with bad posture. I did then and I do now. It's completely irrelevant.
Oh, I should also point out that by this point I had been clinically diagnosed with ADD - which they expressed, and I'll have to paraphrase as it was about 13-14 years ago, was "made up" and that it couldn't possibly explain my behaviour.
And they go on believing forever that that weird first random idea they got, was right.
(I might be exaggerating a bit.)
I wonder if thinking "I get paid anyway the same each month, what does it matter if they believe me or not" helps (unless one might get fired)
I had a time where a group of bullies picked up the innovation of using the school administration to harass. So I found myself in the situation of having chats with the principal a few times a week.
The optimal strategy was to courteously deny and be silent. It works over half the time. I’d also use my time waiting around to “charm” the support staff by being nice to them and making myself useful. Eventually, most disciplinary referrals ended up getting lost, as the secretaries clued up to what was happening.
[1]
We were in the class next door that had one computer and we could hear it go off.
Hilarious hijinks until caught/blabbed on. Serious business afterwards. Teachers are scared shitless of computers even now and ‘hacking’ back then... well, I was waiting for MI6 to come get me.
Now convenience and reliability are issues. Also maybe intelligibility.
The more yes answers to the above, the more likely the person is lying to you.
If anyone is interested, please contact me at the address in my HN profile!
The first was at a part-time job during my days at uni. A new guy had joined the crew, intelligent and affable, but it turned out, simply a pathological lair. We weren't aware of this until ... I forget precisely what had occurred, but apparently lying when filling out bank cheques was among his failings....
The second was a more personal relationship, in which it transpired that I'd been lied to from the very beginning. This person displayed many of the characteristics of borderline / narcissistic personality disorder, and would often become wildly (and increasingly inappropriately) upset under questioning, deflecting or projecting questions and accusations back. I'd had little experience with the behaviour previously and it was exceedingly disconcerting.
This essay on diversion tactics covers many of the behaviours I'd experienced in that incident (I'd submitted it to HN a few months back, though there was no traction): https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversio...
What ultimately broke that case for me was:
- Finding several people who'd known something of the person's background, and comparing notes. Inconsistencies immediately started popping up. Score one for the consistency rule of truth determination. Various audit methods rely heavily on these.
- Realising I had a trove of communications from the person (legitimately obtained --- they'd given them to me, though some reverse-engineering was required to recover data, both points that held significance in later proceedings). It took some patching together of these to generate a clear picture, which was hampered by the false / incomplete story I'd been told, but the full story eventually was clear.
Eventually we were able to pin down the individual under testimony showing the scope of deception and the fact that it was intentional, premeditated, and predated my encounter with the person (I happened to be the sufficiently clueless victim appearing at the right or wrong time, depending on whose viewpoint you take).
Many standard bullshit-detection tactics (see several referenced in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...) turn out to apply. Sloppy logic, imprecise language, deflecting questions, various forms of special pleading, turning to accusations against the questioner when the situation gets too heated, etc., vagueness as to facts, and inconsistencies within the story (these can require close listening) were ultimately the tells. Even once presented, there was a lot of work left to uncover the actual truth.
In more mundane dealings, what I find is that fairly sensitive and alert to unqualified claims, inconsistent actions, or statements at odds with facts of which I'm aware. It's interesting to see just how often this occurs (I'm thinking of examples from an appliance purchase, broadband service calls, and medial services, within the past year or three), and once those occur, I call the person on their bullshit. I've walked away from purchases or services strictly due to such behaviours --- if you cannot be trusted to tell the truth or admit to the limits of your knowledge or understanding on the simple stuff, much as with Van Halen's brown M&Ms, why the hell should I trust you with the complex bits I don't have knowledge of?
There's...
Prison escapee convinces cop he is actually a jogger: https://youtu.be/vBrnBmUmVzI
Liars of this type probably have been practicing in real situations where their lies got them something.
I think most of us (non nefarious people) don’t have to deal with lies of real significance. I’ve lied at stand-up, and I’m sure people know it. It’s a polite request for dignified forgiveness.
The only real lie that can happen in your life is with a spouse/partner, since that is a calamity in relative terms (betrayal). Kids/Teens will lie about a lot of things, but that should be expected (immaturity). Your company has to lie to you (business).
If for whatever reason you are dealing with major lies of any other kind, then you are probably dealing with a criminal.
So yeah, we should be bad at spotting serious liars since we have no business being around them (e.g your business is crime).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lee_McNair