17-year-old Marty Tankleff spent 17 years in prison because authorities didn’t believe in his innocence, because apparently, he was too calm when he found out that his mother was stabbed and his father was mortally bludgeoned in their home.
Jeffrey Deskovic, a 16-year-old man, also spent a number of years (16 years, to be exact) in prison because authorities didn’t believe in his innocence, but for a different reason; Jeffrey was too eager to help the detectives after his classmate was found strangled.
Both were thought to be guilty of a crime, but one was too calm, and the other was too upset and too willing to help. But do these two characteristics really indicate if the person is lying?
They’re not, says psychologist Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The men, both later exonerated, were victims of a pervasive misconception: that you can spot a liar by the way they act. Across cultures, people believe that behaviors such as averted gaze, fidgeting and stuttering betray deceivers.
In fact, researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology. Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”
In other words, it is difficult to identify liars. But is there a way to increase our chances of guessing correctly? Fortunately, there is.
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