Ryan Moyer: Hello and welcome to Why Do We Do That, a psychology podcast that deconstructs the human experience through the perspectives of social scientists, psychologists, and other experts who apply psychology in their work. I'm your host, Dr. Ryan Moyer. Why do people lie? Even when telling the truth might be easier. Lying is a nearly universal behavior, but most of us do it far less often than we might assume. At the same time, a small group of people may be responsible for a surprisingly large percentage of the lies we encounter. So, who lies? Why do they do it? And are any of us actually good at detecting deception? Today I'm speaking with Dr. Tim Levine, a leading researcher on deception, and the author of Duped Truth Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. We discuss the many reasons people lie, the difference between everyday dishonesty and pathological lying. And why our natural tendency to believe others makes successful communication and successful deception possible. We also examine whether avoiding eye contact or appearing nervous actually tells us anything about whether someone is being truthful. Whether you consider yourself highly trusting or someone who can always spot a liar, this conversation may change the way you evaluate what other people tell you. So why do we do that? Let's find out. Okay, today I am joined by Tim Levine. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Tim Levine: Happy to be here. Ryan Moyer: Tim is an expert on lying. he's a researcher who's dedicated most of his life to understanding deception. And so we're gonna be talking about lying today, why people lie, who lies, lie detection, if there's any evidence behind some of the ideas around lie detection. why don't we start by talking about why people lie? I was Thinking about this before the recording. I was trying to see how many motives I could come up with for lying. And I would imagine that there are more motives than the average person might guess. but at the same time, I was thinking, you know, could it be defined by two or three key motives? So why don't you start by giving an overview of the reasons why someone might lie? Tim Levine: Sure. So generally, when we communicate with other people, we communicate for reasons. That is, we have communication goals. So conveying information can be a communication goal. Right? We can foster impressions with communication. We can try to influence people. We can try to Make relationships, we can try to manage relationships, we can coordinate activities. So we have these general sets of communication goals. Deception generally is not an end goal itself. So the goals that guide honest communication and deceptive communication are the same. What differentiates honest communication from deceptive communication is that there's some element in the truth as we understand it or some constraint that interferes with our communicative goals and deception provides a convenient workaround and efficient workaround so if the truth works in your favor everybody's honest by default with the possible exception of pathological line but for everybody else deception is only done on an as needed basis. So if the truth works just fine, so if you ask a question that I know the answer to, you get a truthful answer. Ryan Moyer: Yeah, and and it's go ahead. Right. Tim Levine: If you ask a question I don't know the answer to, then I have the decision. I can honestly tell you I don't know. Or I can try to bullshit. Ryan Moyer: And it's interesting because, this space, this like, you know, this small fraction of time when someone asks you a question that you don't know. I mean, just the idea of saying I don't know is hard for many people. And Tim Levine: Yes. Ryan Moyer: it it was one of the first things I thought of is is, you know, we we try to hide the fact that we don't know something. Sometimes we'll go right into a, you know, a bullshit answer. and sometimes we might lie. And, Out of all the motives I could come up with for lying, the I I'm super interested in the identity management part because it seems as though we have this such a strong motive to make sure that other people see us in a very specific way that it that it it may drive us to deception more often than we would like. Tim Levine: yes, so I would differentiate impression management. so where I'm just kind of trying to come off a little bit better than I really am. From an outright false identity, like impostors or catfishing. I think I tend to see those as as a little different. I suspect in the impression management there's huge individual differences in this. So and it's probably just kind of how comfortable you are in your own shoes. I think age is probably pretty relevant in this. So teenagers right are very, very concerned about how their friends and peer groups see them. this becomes for in part just as as as we age and as we socialize. our identity already becomes known. Right? So there's less ability to construct an identity when we're in an intact social group for a long period of time. So I suspect there's individual differences in it, life stage differences in it, personality. You know, if you're a narcissist, you're gonna this is gonna generate you know, a lot of narcissistic lies or impression management focused. Ryan Moyer: Yeah, and I d I do want to talk about that a little bit. beforehand though, could could you talk a little bit about some evolutionary ideas related to lying? So, you know, generally speaking, you know, you can take a a pattern of human behavior and you can ask this question, did this serve a purpose for our ancestors? And, I liked how you you kind of explained that there's like a hierarchy where, well, if the truth is fine, then that is what I do. But might I have to execute a different program, so to speak, when the truth might have consequence. could you talk a little bit about some potential evolved purpose? You know, even just answer the question like, is there an evolved purpose to lying? Tim Levine: so before I I'll answer that, let's not forget to go back to the list of deceptive motives beyond Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: just kind of impression management things. so I think what humans evolve to do is communicate. human species are in just by our nature social, and our survival rests on our social nature and cooperation. So, you know, the only reason you and I can talk do this interview is because we have technology that works. And that requires that knowledge, trustworthy knowledge, be passed along. And the whole story of human existence, moving from hunters-gatherers into agriculture, into cities, into the industrial age, all rests on. Communication and knowledge being trustworthy. And we have to cooperate with. Now, in order to communicate the way we do, we have to have things like theory of mind. We have to be able to mentally represent other people's thoughts, understand that other people have different ideas than we do. And the very structures that give rise to communication give rise to discipline. the trouble is, or from an evolutionary point of view, at least the one I'm trying to sell in truth to fault theory, is that what we get out of communication, all the goodies we get and all the survival, just outweighs the cost of occasional deception. Ryan Moyer: It it almost sounds like you're saying that that lying is virtuous in a way. in in the sense Tim Levine: Mm-hmm. Ryan Moyer: of like I mean, I know you're not saying that per se, but I don't know, the the way you kind of just described it as, you know, communication being this framework, this this foundation of of development that that perhaps occasional lying to to make sure things run smoothly, at least from an individual's perspective, might be very functional. Tim Levine: So I think communication's very functional. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: I think the cognitive complexity that's involved in deception, at least some deception, is very functional. Ryan Moyer: Mm. Tim Levine: I think that lying is way less prevalent than most people think it is. I think that most deception is completely inconsequential. So the virtue of inconsequential deception is that it's easy and that we can smooth things over. So almost anything that you could do with a little white lie, you could also do with something I call packaged honesty. So there's almost always tactful ways to accomplish the same communication goals. But but that takes, yeah, so Ryan Moyer: Can you talk a little bit more Yeah. Tim Levine: you ask me a question, I don't know the answer. The it might be the easiest thing is to bullshit. coming up with a good face-saving way to say I don't know, right? Or a more challenging one, like you get a gift you don't like. So explaining that you don't like a gift in a way that doesn't hurt the other person's feelings, right? And they still feel valued and respected and appreciated. It's a difficult communication task. It's just easier just to say you like it and move on. Ryan Moyer: Is it fa is it Sure? Yeah. It Tim Levine: I'm I'm not sure that's virtuous, but it's efficient. And because For the most part, it doesn't really matter. Ryan Moyer: Is it fair to break up lying into these categories of of of a lie that is told for the right reasons versus a lie that's told simply for completely selfish reasons? Tim Levine: I don't think of those as categories. I think of those Ryan Moyer: Interesting. Tim Levine: as varying along multiple continuum. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: And because communication can isn't monogal, right? We can we can do multiple functions at the same time with communication. It can do, you know, we can at once be protecting your feelings and protecting my my impressions. I do think there's a continuum on consequences. you know, some lying is profoundly destructive. other is almost invariably successful, almost invariably goes unnoticed. And if it was noticed, it wouldn't make any difference at all. Ryan Moyer: Yeah. Tim Levine: Can we jump back now to talk about the different modus for lying? And I think this will feed in to this. So the question is why do people lie? And there's lots of reasons. And I don't think there's any kind of mutually exclusive, exhaustive list of them. But here's some that show up in my research. A very common reason is what I call transgression lies. You did something wrong and you need to hide it, and you want to avoid punishment. there are incentivized lies, which can be economically incentivized or otherwise incentivized, or there's something to gain. You know, the truth isn't working well for you, you need this thing. You know, frauds, scams fall into this. but also, you know, I need the day off, my boss isn't gonna give it to me. Right? So Ryan Moyer: Sure. Sure. Tim Levine: there's some kind of incentivized. those generally kind of fall in under the opponent conditioning sort of gain rewards, avoid punishment sort of categories. there's lies we talked about to create impressions. there's lies we talked about to protect others' feelings. there's lies I think that generally just kind of fall into maintain interaction smoothness. just kind of they're socially conventional, polite. they just ensure smooth interactions. lies can be told maliciously, so you could spread false rumors about somebody to try to harm them, for example. some jokes and pranks. involve deception. There's deception that is used in entertainment, like in magic shows. and then there's pathological lying, which might seem like no no reason at all. Ryan Moyer: So it are all of these categories are are all of these categories types of lies that a a typical person would engage in? Because I'm trying to get a sense of, you know, is it the case that everyone lies, especially for the, you know, the polite type of lying? And and only a few people, lie habitually or or engage in that kind of that advanced deception where it's, you know, the organized type of deception. Cause yeah, I if I had to guess, you know, everyone lies in a certain context or or they're way more likely to lie, engage in those white lies as people have have, you know, used that term. but I'm not I I I wanted to know if if an if an average person also hits those other categories. Tim Levine: So when it comes to thinking about this, the average is incredibly misleading. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: because there's big individual differences and they're not normally distributed. So there are a few people who almost never lie. there are my students tell me that there's a few people out there they self-identify that they just don't think they can lie. They think when they lie, they just can't pull it off. so I think there's probably a few people I call them transparent liars who are just so bad at it. They just don't. Ryan Moyer: Sure. Sure. Tim Levine: for whatever reason, they just can't pull it off. I think there's some other people, maybe they're a little neurodivergent, who just kind of blurt. and Ryan Moyer: I've tried to I've tried to kind of have conversations with my with my stepdaughter about lying. And it's interesting, you know, you that you mentioned that, she does, you know, blurt on on occasion. but I I've noticed some very complex conversations about lying with her, especially as it relates to we're gonna go shopping for mom's birthday, but don't tell her we went to to the bookstore. And she's like, I'm not gonna do that. And I'm like, Okay. Tim Levine: Ha ha Ryan Moyer: Yeah, I I understand that you you don't like lying. let's try not to think of this as a lie, more of a surprise. And Tim Levine: Mm-hmm. Ryan Moyer: I I found that it was it was a prickly conversation. It was not immediately understood or accepted. And it made me very sympathetic. to how a neurod sh you know, she she is neurodivergent and it made me very sympathetic to how neurodivergent people think about honesty versus lying. Tim Levine: So I think that's a category. And then I think there's a third category of these unusually honest people who just buy into the honesty as a virtue. It's the right thing to do, it's the moral thing to do. Therefore, you have an obligation as a good person to be honest and not to do. Then there's what I might Colleague Kim Schroeder and I call the normatively honest folks. And this is roughly three-quarters of people. And if you track them on any given day, they tell between zero and two lies, on 90% of which will be little white lies. So the zeros are more common than the ones, and the ones are more common than the twos. But on any given day, they are very likely. To report zero, one, or two lies. And almost all, again, ninety percent inconsequential things. so they lie, you know, once in while. you know, maybe on average, once a day, a little less than once a day. then there's a group of people who fall into what we call the prolific liars. And this might be about 10, 15 percent of the people, and they tell six or more lies per day. Ryan Moyer: Ten to fifteen percent that sounds like of the of of a population. That seems like a lot. Tim Levine: Або тенден процент до полічин плосида. Ryan Moyer: Interesting. Tim Levine: So maybe half of all lies are told by the top 10%, and maybe 25% are told by the top 1%. Ryan Moyer: So are there meaningful differences in their behavior other than just the sheer you know amount of lying? I I know that that a pathological lying is kind of in this territory, which is I'm not really sure how it's characterized, but I have a a a friend who might very easily be categorized as a pathological liar and and everyone around this person knows it and there's very, you know, there are very little consequences. It's a very unique type of lying in the sense of sometimes it feels like it it's happening for no reason. It doesn't it's not necessary. It doesn't fit that kind of nice box of, well, you know There's a big negative consequence if you like. No, no, no. Sometimes it's just lying for lying's sake. so could you talk a little bit about any meaningful differences between the zero, ones, and twos per day and and and this other prolific category? Tim Levine: so the prolific categories hard to study because they're by definition infrequent. And social science is all about, you know, averages in most people. The way I think about it is most prolific liars aren't pathological, but pathological Ryan Moyer: interesting. Tim Levine: liars tend to be prolific. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: so let me give you an example of a non-pathological frequent liar or two. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: so when I I teach a class on deception, and one of the assignments I've used for the past 15 years or so is I have every student in my class keep a deception diary. And they have to track how often they lie, write it down, and also the lies that are told to them. know and describe the motives and and I can't publish this data because it doesn't have IRB approval. but it's given me this incredible data set over time and also I can track changes over time. and the two biggest liars I've had in my class one of them a job was a receptionist in a doctor's office where the doctor Always ran late. If it if you weren't the first appointment in the morning, you were always late. And she was not allowed to tell people that this was the case. She'd always say the doc. So she told the same lie over and over and over and over again, purely Ryan Moyer: Well Tim Levine: as a function of how many people were scheduled on that day. And she almost never lied outside that. The second one in that category was someone who worked in a female apparel store. And she told the that looks good on you, why? Just repeatedly. And like the first, this was an otherwise honest person who had this recurring situation in their life where the truth was a problem, leading to the same lie over and over that said virtually nothing about their personality. And everything about their occupation. Ryan Moyer: Ha ha. Tim Levine: there, you know, so when we say prolific liars, we all have in mind, you know, these pers, you know, like maybe something on the dark triad, you know, with Machiavellian or psychopathology or narcissism. and and those populate that too. But there's also these kind of tran or situational things. Ryan Moyer: Or fun it sounds like a functional you know, the word that comes to my mind is functional. It's it's functional like you know. Tim Levine: Yeah. Yeah, functional. Yeah. you know, I imagine if you have a very, very high maintenance significance other, right? This might lead to lots of embellishment. Right? Because, you know, they're not gonna do well with a little bluntness. and and and packaged honesty might not. go over as well. So it's it's this incredible confluence of things. But one of the things that gets people to lie a lot is pathological lying, and it's pretty clear that it's a thing. And it looks like it's probably compulsive. to meet the definition, kind of we talked a little bit before about. Curtis and Hart's work on pathological line before the recording started. you know, according to their definition, it it has to be pretty seriously dysfunctional to be classified, you know, as truly pathological. So what happens is, is everybody in the friendship circle knows this. Right? And it causes problems in relationships. Pathological liars tend to get fired from their jobs because they lie to their boss and they get caught. And most employers really don't want frequently lying, unreliable, unbelievable employees. Right? It's very hard to be in a romantic relationship with these folks. Right? It just, you can't trust them. Right, it and it gets out in a social circle and everybody knows. Ryan Moyer: And what what is what yeah. Tim Levine: Right. And it's it's really, really, really dysfunctional and you're just never sure what's the case. It's disorienting. It's it's it's you almost feel like you're gaslit by them sometimes. I don't know if that's your experience, but Ryan Moyer: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely I mean, absolutely. it it's what's interesting is it is the pathological type of lying, to me and and other people who I've talked to about this, it's more mysterious than anything. Because because there when there is no clear motive, you know, you you just kind of have to ask yourself like because you know. the pathological line tends to be a little bit bigger and more grandiose. Tim Levine: Mm-hmm. Ryan Moyer: you know, I used to play I almost played for the New England Patriots or some there's a friend of mine that would would always tell that and we would we would laugh. and he wouldn't because I think he meant it. but there's you know the the typical person hears these grandiose lies from this type of personality and they're just like, do they do they really bel like Are they deceiving themselves concurrently with, you know, is it just something that kind of spills out of their mouth? Because it's hard to believe that someone could say a sentence like that and not have the filter go, no one's gonna believe that. Tim Levine: So I don't have any research to back this up. This is just my speculation based on observation. But I think there might be two categories here. One category is kind of the pathological liar. And it's just compulsive. And they wish they didn't do this. They know it causes them problems. it's dysfunctional. They can't help themselves. I think there's another category of extremely rare lying that I call bold and shameless lying. So what bold lying is, is you know, these kind of grandiose lies where you know that people are gonna fact check you and you know it's not gonna hold up. And it's shameless in that once you get called out, you're just like, nope. You stick with your you stick with your lie no matter what. I Ryan Moyer: Interesting. Tim Levine: think we can think of two recent politicians in American culture who were like this. one of whom had some consequences, but then got pardoned. and the one who pardoned him. and they just tell these. Big falsehoods that are easily proven false, right? Fact-checkers anywhere can disprove it. And they just repeat them over and over. And the if if you call them a liar, they'll just call you a liar back. and it's it's completely done shamelessly. in booth, but but it it it doesn't seem necessarily as dysfunctional as as the first type. Those seem to make it work for them, at least for a while. and and they Ryan Moyer: Yeah. Tim Levine: and they're they're they're too infrequent to like do real systematic studies on them. but they show up in pop culture. Ryan Moyer: I in an earlier episode of the show, I I encourage listeners to go check it out. I interviewed a researcher named John Petricelli, and he he works on studying bullshitting, which is a which Tim Levine: Mm-hmm. Ryan Moyer: is you know, a lot of people equate the two, but they're actually very, very different. you know, bullshitting, you know, or lying rather, you have to be intimately familiar with the truth because you're fabricating a lie. Whereas bullshitting is this very interesting category of, you might not know the truth. And other people who are in the conversation may not know the truth. And so you kind of you know, you say something like, I'm better at I'm very, very good at at at something. you know, I'm I'm I'm very good at chess. You know, I'm I'm a prof I'm almost professional chess player, you know. or you know, I I could I can throw an eighty-five mile an hour fastball. It's like there's there is no there is no way to prove or disprove in the immediate moment. And so bullshitting takes on this different flavor where it's like, well, sometimes it may be true and sometimes it may not be true, but it it's the it's the mystery of of whether or not it's true that right, the truth doesn't matter. Tim Levine: In in the truth doesn't matter. The truth isn't the point. So in deception, the big difference is in deception, I want you to believe something that's not the case. Right? And in bullshitting, it's okay if you know I'm bullshitting. Right? That's that's perfectly fine. We we know what we're doing, right? We're we're being we're having right? We're saying what we're saying. Ryan Moyer: Yeah, it's Tim Levine: And the truth just is it relevant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan Moyer: We're playing the game. We're playing the conversation. It's like the conversation game. You Yeah. Tim Levine: It's you know, it so i in certain circumstances at least, right? Bullshitting can be fair game, just like bluffing is in poker. you know, it's it's one of these kind of kind of i as long as everybody's on the same page, no harm, no foul. whereas deception deception doesn't work if we're on the same page. Ryan Moyer: So let let's talk about you know, the bulk of your work is based on well you call it truth default theory. It's this idea that is is centered around why lying is in fact so so widespread. It's why it is effective. Tim Levine: It's it's actually the opposite. Ryan Moyer: I'm sorry. okay. Tim Levine: so lying is incredibly infrequent relative to honesty, and that's what makes it effective. Ryan Moyer: Right, right. So one so can you can you talk about about why you know why people you know why people are easily duped by by people who are engaging in effortful deception. Tim Levine: sure. so the basic idea of truth default theory is that honesty's the default mode of communication. We're honest unless we have a reason not to. We have to have a deceptive motive unless we're pathological. And we accept what other people say at face value unless we have a reason for skepticism or doubt, which I call a trigger. So there has to be so you and I are talking, if we weren't talking about deception, it would never even come to mind. that I'm really Professor Levying that or not, that right? We just accept stuff at face value and it has to be this because otherwise communication doesn't work. If you second guess everything you hear, you just get bogged down in uncertainty. Right? You can't treat every sentence somebody gives as an hypothesis to go test that may or may not be true. Right? It's just completely, from my point of view, completely untenuous to So what we have to do is kind of turn on our deception radar. in situations where it's needed. And for the most part, keep it off. Because if if we have it on all the time, we're not gonna have any friends or romantic partners, right? We're gonna we can't trust anybody, we can't learn anything. but the trouble is is this lets people slip deception past. But this isn't really much of a problem for us for the most part. Because A, most communication's honest. B, most communication that isn't is in most deceptive communication is inconsequential. And see what happens is if it is a deception about something important, the truth comes out over time, then everybody in the social circle learns not to trust that person. Right? Very often that person gets ostracized, and and and and it becomes known, don't trust them. Right? So it's yeah. Ryan Moyer: It's kinda like a like like herd immunity kind of where you might not have the truth vaccine, but when you're with enough people who are experiencing and interacting, then the y you start to develop information that maybe not first hand, but you develop information that the person is deceptive. Tim Levine: Yeah, right. You know, once the scammer becomes known, right, then they have to leave town, so to speak. Ryan Moyer: So does this mean does this mean that if our if our default is truth, does this mean that some individuals, let's say, you know, starting in childhood, going through adolescence and young adulthood, that if they're exposed to a meaningful amount of deception? from their parents or close relationships that that they will you know develop or cement a a more suspicious orientation moving forward. Tim Levine: I don't know, but I think that's plausible. So where I'd really like to do some research is in places like maybe Putin's Russia, or maybe like North Korea, or really, really oppressive societies with really aggressive disinformation. And the question is, is do people just learn not to trust anything the government says? But I think even in those environments people still trust the family. So I I I I don't think you can totally lose your truth to fault with everybody. I think it has to apply either it has to apply to an in-group or you don't have an in group. Ryan Moyer: Yeah, and it also makes sense that that you know you brought up in group because I was just thinking about just the the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking and the tendency to you know, there are some people that have a default that is the opposite. Like they think that, well, if the government said it, it is false. Or Tim Levine: Yes. Ryan Moyer: or I mean there are other manifestations of this. so Is is it the case that I mean, would you make the argument that people are generally truth default, but then, you know, different different you know, i you said in group. So maybe the out group it's a little bit more complicated where it's you're much more quick you much more quickly developed out. Tim Levine: Yeah, my jargony phrase for this is trigger moderators. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: And I think probably the two most powerful trigger moderators are what I believe my confirmation bias Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: and the norms of my in group. So I think what you're describing in these situations is. Situations where information runs counter to these folks' own belief and what their in-group thinks. and I think when that happens, they are likely to disbelieve anything regardless of its veracity, right? Or anything that's consistent with in-group beliefs and own beliefs is believed regardless of veracity. Ryan Moyer: That yeah, that definitely checks out. Tim Levine: Ha ha ha. Ryan Moyer: Yeah, yeah. I it's it's Tim Levine: So I had to build that in, otherwise kind of real life seems to disconfirm. Ryan Moyer: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, people, you know, no it's it's no a noted finding in social psychology that when you know, when people are trying to determine or when they figure out that there's some deception going on, sometimes they don't make the adjustment properly. They don't you know, they they don't correct enough to account for the some new information that might call into question a fact or a figure or something like that. Tim Levine: Yeah, absolutely. Ryan Moyer: I want to pivot and talk about lie detection because this is another another area of your work. obviously, you know, the the general public has probably come across some sort of myth or idea related to lie detection. so is is the average person again, I I hate to use the term average, but is is the average person Good at detecting lies. Tim Levine: it's a trick question. it depends under what conditions. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: So under some conditions, the average is a very, very good depiction of the individual. so there's a huge literature on deception detection. And within and it turns out that those hundreds of studies all share certain design features. That if you have these certain design features, That do not mimic the real world at all. They're almost entirely a product of the lab. Then you get a really reliable finding where everybody appears to suck at lie detection. So the well, it depends on how you define awful or bad. So the finding is in the typical lie, I'll talk about what those criteria are in a second, but in the typical lie detection study, people are 54% accurate, where 50% is genetics. And 54% is highly significantly, you know, if you're a p-value significance tester and want to rule out the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is absolutely false at P00001. But everybody looks at 54% and goes, that's awful. People are horrible light detectors. Now, as it turns out, that's Within the confines of the task. So if all we're going on is how you're coming off, what I would call QS and demeanor, and you have to make a prompted judgment in real time where half the communication is honest and half the communication is deceptive, then you very reliably get 54%, plus or minus a standard deviation of about 6%. And findings are nicely normally distributed around that, both within and across studies. Now when you start changing up any of those criteria. Then you get different findings. So in almost all deception detection experiments, they ask: Do you think this is a lie or truth? Or rate the honesty? The second you ask, people are thinking about it. If there's any truth at all to truth-to-fault theory, this wouldn't come to mind unless the researchers were asking you. So prompted deception yields deception judgments. Unprompted deception yields Just Jill's belief. It never even comes to mind. So if you did this where you showed people truths and lies, and I've done this, but you don't tell them it's a deception experiment or that they might be lies and just ask what they're thinking, they're thinking about what shirt the person's wearing. They're thinking about what they're doing later. they're thinking about is this person cute or not? They're thinking about all kinds of things, but they're not thinking, are they lying or are they being honest? This Ryan Moyer: Yeah. Tim Levine: So in imprompted situations, whether you're right or not is almost a perfect function of whether the person's honest or not. If they're honest, you're probably gonna be right. If they're lying, you're gonna be wrong. And that's called the veracity thing. Ryan Moyer: It reminds me of of the toupee fallacy, which is this idea that, you know, people, if you ask people, are you good at detecting when somebody's wearing a hair piece, they'll say, Yeah, yeah, I can s I can spot those things a mile away, right? And what what what is missing from that story is that you're only considering the the hair pieces that are bad that you are that you're clocking. And you're Tim Levine: Yes. Ryan Moyer: omitting ever you're omitting every example of a person who had a hair piece that did fool you because they don't make it into your mental data set. Tim Levine: Yeah. And I can't remember the last time I wondered, is that a wig or a toupee? this you know, it doesn't happen to me very often in my life. So the other element of those is deception and truth and deception detection are equally problemate. And what happens is is people are get it right more when there's more honesty in the communication environment, and wrong more when deception. And the third criteria there is it's based only on cues and demeanor, only on how people are coming off. And as it turns out, how people come off is almost completely non-diagnostic. There might be these few people who just can't lie. And if you force them to lie, they're bad at it, and very obvious liars. But this isn't most people. Most people can pull off a lie perfectly well. When we break down how people come off, people fall into different buckets or categories, but don't re-these are really continuum. They're I'll I'll just for ease talk about them categorically. there's a lot of people, in my studies, maybe 50%-ish, that are just kind of inscrutable. you can't tell whether they're lying or telling the truth. And if I show to a bunch of people, people get half the people get them right, half the people get them right. so the fifty four percent applies to judges, it doesn't apply to who you're judging. about half the people it applies to. But then there's maybe a quarter who I call matched. What you see is what you get. you know when they're honest they really come off as honest. or they're liars who you know are obviously bad liars. But then there's this other group that are mismatched. And this is people whose natural communication styles misalign with their veracity at the moment. Ryan Moyer: Mm-hmm. Tim Levine: So they fall into two groups. There's a group of people who are just kind of friendly, confident extroverts. Right? They come off as confident, composed. sure of themselves, friendly, engaged, you know, born to be salespeople. Ryan Moyer: Okay. Tim Levine: right? And when they're lying, you believe them, and when they're truth telling, you believe them. Right? And when they're lying, you get them wrong. Then there's another group of people, it's not one bucket, it's a bunch. There's some people who are just kind of socially awkward. There's some people who are kind of neurodivergent. There's some people who have social anxiety. Ryan Moyer: Mm-hmm. Tim Levine: And these people tend to trigger deception judgments when they're honest. Ryan Moyer: Mm. Tim Levine: And people systematically, so when you track particular communicators over time, you find that there's some people that people almost always get right, and other people people always get wrong, the matched and mismatched, and they cancel out. And this is what yields the 54%. Ryan Moyer: Mm. Tim Levine: But this is only when communication content is irrelevant. Ryan Moyer: Right. Tim Levine: and there's all kinds of situations where you can tell when somebody's lying, or at least truthful, because of what they say. Maybe you already know the truth, and what they say is contradicting something, a known truth. maybe it's something you can, you know, you make note of, you suspend judgment, you go fact check. if you have content expertise, you can assess the plausibility of something. you can ask yourself, do they have a motive for deception? If we know when and why people lie. we can ask: is this a situation where lies are likely or not? I can ask you questions to help get at these sorts of things. And also, since most people's natural tendency is honest. I I can persuade you to be honest sometimes. so there's all these ways to get better at Ryan Moyer: So it's that seems yeah. Tim Levine: deception detection, but most of them are kind of after the fact things or things you can do through interaction. Ryan Moyer: Right. and and I think, you know, part of the problem is that our culture is so hyper focused on these body language. As I think you put it as cue and demeanor categor what we love, Tim Levine: Yes. Yeah, cuined meaner body language. Ryan Moyer: yeah. What could you maybe give some just w walk us through some of the most common body language type myths that exist around lie detection? Tim Levine: There's one that is far and away more common than all the rest. Not precisely body language, it's eye behavior. And interestingly, this is pancultural. There's been studies done in more than 50 countries that have found that people everywhere believe liars won't look you in. Ryan Moyer: Interesting. Tim Levine: Right, they I think this is wishful thinking, 'cause gaze aversion does communicate something. It communicates shame. Right. So I think if we think kind of not logically, but common in it's kind of very intuitive common sense and kind of wishful thinking that lying's a shameful activity, because this is what we all taught. Don't lie when we're growing up, right? Lying's bad. then it's kind of wishful thinking. But the first thing we all learn, you know, as we're learning to lie as a kid growing up, is you gotta look the person in the eye. So there's absolutely no correlation between eye behavior, that's looking down, looking up into one particular. There's no correlation between any type of eye contact, gaze aversion, eye behavior at all, and any kind of deception. none of that's true, but it's incredibly widely helpful. Ryan Moyer: And and and it's also interesting, you know, you mentioned just the general n general nervousness. and it, you know, it reminds me of of why the lie detector data is so flawed, which is it's Tim Levine: Yeah. Ryan Moyer: the jump from what it's measuring to what you're concluding, which is, you know, the story goes that the you know the lie detector. Is detecting when people are experiencing anxiety from their lies. And as you pointed out just not a couple minutes ago, just because someone is experiencing increased heart rate, increased breathing and perspiration in the middle of a conversation, that there are multiple reasons why that might occur. And so it would be a mistake to conclude that there's a one-to-one relationship between. those physical signs of nervousness and and truth, right? Tim Levine: And and what the really good professional polygraphers tell me that I've talked to about this is you should never see a reaction to a question. You know that what those show is just you're reacting to question. And the question is always why. So what you do is you do follow-up questions to try to figure out and narrow down, you know, why, what what is it about this question that's bringing out a reaction. And it can be a lot of things besides law. Ryan Moyer: Well, we have run out of time. thank you so much. it was it was a pleasure. And that is that is one hundred percent an honest take on our conversation today. once again, yeah, I know, I know. yeah, I I Tim Levine: no, it went so fast. I had so much more to say. Ryan Moyer: really appreciate you taking the time to be on. just to mention Tim has a book called Duped. which talks about his work in line. you can find that wherever books are sold. thank you so much for being on Tim Levine. Tim Levine: You're very welcome. This is a blast.