Are we all Pinocchios?

According to Panic! At the Disco, lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off (2005). My other reliable source, Tumblr, says that girls lie about orgasms to keep a relationship. Before you start getting the wrong idea, men also lie – just look at Pinocchio. But to put the icing on the cake, you must know that… wait for it… men lie, women lie, but Facebook DON’T lie. Yes, I just became one of the 923 fans of this Facebook page. Just think about it, how awesome can Facebook possibly get that it doesn’t lie? I think I’m going to marry Facebook now, if that’s the case.

But did we really learn from Pinocchio and his long nose? Or are our noses getting longer everyday? Back in 1996, DePaulo and colleagues found that undergrads and community members (in their study, at least) told 2 lies and 1 lie each day, respectively. Self-oriented lies were told more, which the authors described as lies told to protect or enhance the liars psychologically or to elicit a particular emotional response that the liars desired. After all, in a world where things are never what they seem, only the fittest (and the best liars) survive. 

But for every good liar, there’s an even better liar-catcher. There’s a Cal Lightman waiting to be recognized. We may not be as skilled in detecting every microexpression, but we’re attentive enough to detect the bigger movements – gestures, body movements and eye contact. So what does it take to have your own Lie to Me installment? It doesn’t take a Cal Lightman to take in the basics. Besides, it’s common knowledge that deceptive intent can affect nonverbal behavior, which in turn can affect judgment made by others (Fiedler & Walka, 1993; Levine et al., 2006). Eye contact is an important component of honesty; those who don’t look someone in the eye are often doubted – although Ma’am Chei might beg to differ. In a meta-analysis done by Zuckerman et al. (1981) and Miller (1985), they found that liars use more adaptors, hand gestures, posture shifts, have more pauses, longer response latencies and make more speech errors. This has been attributed to their feelings of guilt and fear, as well as the conscious effort they make to control their behavioral displays.

Indeed.

Porter et al. (2008) decided to extend these findings to criminal offenders, in the hopes of bringing justice to those who deserve it (Not that it’s never been done before). They had a group of offenders and another group of non-offenders to describe four emotional events, 2 honest and 2 completely fabricated, for a total of 5 minutes each. These testimonies were videotaped and then viewed by groups of people asked to assess the frequency of illustrators, self manipulations (e.g. number of times they touched/scratched their head/body), head movements and smiles and/or laughs. Speech rate and fillers (‘ummm’, ‘ahhh’, etc.) were also considered.

Only the offenders showed an increase in self manipulation which was said to be associated with nervousness (but don’t non-offenders get nervous, too?) as well as a decrease in smiling when lying. Apparently, smiling is associated with the embarrassment of lying and decreased credibility on the part of the speaker. Less detail is also associated with false stories. 

I don’t know about you, but the only moral lessons I got here are that I should smile less the next time I get interviewed (which reminds me, I kept smiling when I said I spend 6 hours studying everyday) and that I should take Lying 101 under Prof. Offender. No explicit mention was made regarding whether or not offenders lie more than non-offenders, or vice versa. But I’d like to assume that isn’t the case.

So the next time someone tells you, "You're the only one", look at that pretty face and make sure there's no smile.

I hate to say I told you so.

References:

De Paulo, B., Kirkendol, S., Kashy, D. & Wyer, M. (1996). Lying in Everyday Life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5), 979-995.

Levine, T., Asada, K. & Park, H. (2006). The Lying Chicken and the Gaze Avoidant Egg: Eye Contact, Deception and Causal Order. Southern Communication Journal, 71(4), 401-411.

Porter, S., Doucette, N., Woodworth, M., Earle, J. & MacNeil, B. (2008). Half the World Knows not how the Other Half Lies. Legal and Criminological Psychology 13, 27-38.