Summary: The media overflows with people’s confident evaluations of who told the truth at the Kavanaugh hearing. They are the bottom line of the spectacle, whose result will help shape America for many years. Unfortunately, people are not good lie detectors (neither are lie detectors). Again we show our disinterest in science and facts. This habit will not end well for us.
Hordes of journalists and political gurus plus millions of people watched the testimony of the Kavanaugh. Afterwards the media overflowed with confident assessments as to who was telling the truth – and who lying. That’s logical, because we have read so many articles like this!
- Business Insider: “Former Detective Reveals How To Tell When Suspects are Lying.“
- A&E TV: “How to Tell if Someone is Lying: A Retired Detective Reveals All.“
There is a large body of research about this important topic. Almost all of it comes to the same conclusion. People, even trained experts, cannot detect lies. Scientists continue to look for useful methods.
“Research has consistently shown that people’s ability to detect lies is no more accurate than chance, or flipping a coin. This finding holds across all types of people — students, psychologists, judges, job interviewers and law enforcement personnel.”
— “Deception Detection” by Laura Zimmerman in the Monitor on Psychology of the American Psychological Association, March 2016.
The FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin explains the problem in “Evaluating Truthfulness and Detecting Deception” by David Matsumot et al. (2011).
“While interviewing the suspect who claims ignorance about an incident, the witness who saw it happen, or the informant who identified the perpetrator, the detective asks a question that will eviscerate the perpetrator’s story. As the suspect prepares to answer, he looks up and to the left, purses his lips, tenses his eyelids, and brings his eyebrows down.
“The investigator knows that a suspect displaying shifty eyes and gaze aversion and looking up and to the left when answering uncomfortable questions is exhibiting signs of lying. The suspect is not totally disinterested, but he is reluctant to participate in the interview. Because the suspect’s behavior suggests dishonesty, the detective prepares to drill still deeper in the questioning.
“Unfortunately, this investigator likely would be wrong. Twenty-three out of 24 peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals reporting experiments on eye behavior as an indicator of lying have rejected this hypothesis. No scientific evidence exists to suggest that eye behavior or gaze aversion can gauge truthfulness reliably.
“Some people say that gaze aversion is the sure sign of lying, others that fidgety feet or hands are the key indicators. Still others believe that analysis of voice stress or body posture provides benchmarks. Research has tested all of these indicators and found them only weakly associated with deception.”
Both of these articles are optimistic about the development of new methods, as they scientists have been for a century (other examples are this and this).
Joe Navarro combines his experience and knowledge of the studies to explain the problem: “The Truth About Lie Detection” in Psychology Today — “We do it every day, but most of us only do it half right.”
“As the best researchers can tell, and in my own experience as an FBI Special Agent (now retired), detecting deception is very difficult. Every study conducted since 1986, when the famed researcher Paul Ekman first wrote about this, has demonstrated that we humans are no better than chance at detecting deception …. That means that if you toss a coin in the air you will be as likely to detect deception as the truth. …
“I have listened to jurors post trial comment that they thought a witness was lying because they had ‘heard somewhere that if you touch your nose you are lying.’ Likewise I have talked to many a law enforcement officer who is convinced that they are experts at detecting deception. They have deluded themselves that they are, as have judges and other professionals. In fact, every time I hear Judge Judy (of TV fame) say, ‘I know you are lying,’ I cringe (unlike us she is covered by judicial privilege in saying what she wishes, the rest of us would be sued for slander). …
“Starting in 1971, when I first started studying the subject, I have heard of claims of individuals being able to detect deception based on behavior such as when someone avoided eye contact, looked up and to the right, touched their lips while speaking, cleared their throat, or displayed micro expressions. Instructors both in law enforcement and even researchers came in and lectured us young FBI agents about deception armed with videos of someone who touched their nose or covered their mouth when lying, or they showed signs of contempt as if that were scientific proof of deception.
“They were wrong and they were also incorrect in insisting that they were right; an anecdotal vignette of a person as they perform a behavior when lying is not science. It is interesting, but it is not science nor is it reliable. There are other times when the person uses the same behavior merely to relieve or reduce stress based on circumstances (e.g., in a police interview or the person is worried about getting to work late during a stressful traffic stop) and they are not lying but those are never shown. …
“{A} polygraph result cannot be used against you in court) and …the American Academy of Sciences had less than choice words for the use of the polygraph in its formal report on the polygraph in 2002.
“As for other gimmicks out there including machines that read eye behavior or voice stress analysis, again, I am dumbfounded by how many people are convinced that these machines actually work. Test after test has shown that these systems do not detect deception.”
But we’re so confident!
In this, as in so many things, people grossly overestimate their skills. It is the overconfidence effect (also well-established by psych research).
“The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person’s subjective confidence in his or her judgements is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgements, especially when confidence is relatively high.”
— “The Role of Individual Differences in the Accuracy of Confidence Judgments” by Gerry Pallier et al, Journal of General Psychology, 2002. Gated. Open copy here.
In “Assessing Credibility” Hazel Genn explains why we have difficulty telling true from false testimony. She is a Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at University College (London), 2016.
“Experimental research by psychologists has established that few people do better than chance in judging whether someone is lying or truthful. The research also consistently shows that most people think they are making accurate judgments when they are not.
“Studies suggest that people are about 45 to 60% accurate in spotting lies – in fact, very close to chance, which would be 50%. One study comparing the ability of different professional groups to detect lies found that the police were no better than ordinary people in identifying who was lying, although they were confident that their judgments were better. In another US study involving secret service agents, psychiatrists, judges, robbery investigators, FBI polygraphers and college students, the only group to score significantly above chance in detecting lies were the secret service agents. In all groups, the subjects’ self-assessment of their skill at lie detection bore no relation to their actual score.
“This all suggests that although we are not very good at detecting deceit, we think that we are.“
How did America watch the Kavanaugh hearings?
George Orwell gave us a model of a class structure that fits modern America (see A picture of America, showing a path to political reform. Each class sees these things differently. It is America, so everybody is quite open about their feelings and methods.
There is the bourgeois, the top few percent who own most of America (the 1% own over a third; the top 3% over half). There is the inner party, the highly paid senior leaders of our political, non-profit, and business institutions. They are cool and unsympathetic, seeing the hearings purely in terms of power – a struggle for control of the undemocratic core of our political system (nine people with lifetime terms, with vast and ill-defined authority).
There is the outer party of managers, small business owners, and professionals. They want simple stories that explain events in terms of good guys and bad guys. Cheer our team! Thrill at tales of the bad guys’ dastardly deeds! They want stories that provide entertainment and catharsis plus a sense of belonging to a community (a virtual tribe). Politically ineffectual, they want to believe themselves engaged. So they consume information (becoming well-informed) and write posts or comments (21st C letters to the editor). The Kavanaugh hearings were crafted to appeal to them.
There are the proles, America’s workers, and the underclass. Neither care for these political spectacles.
Truth is an irrelevance today.
Posts about the Kavanaugh hearing
- The Kavanaugh hearings’ warning: the Court is so powerful that extreme measures are appropriate to take control of it.
- Hidden knowledge: false rape accusations by women are common.
- Lies are a useful and appropriate tool to use for political conflicts.
- The Kavanaugh hearings: lawfare used against us.
- The heart of the Kavanaugh hearing is our false confidence in our ability to detect lies.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the Supreme Court, about Reforming America: Steps to New Politics, and especially these…
- American politics is a fun parade of lies, for which we pay dearly.
- Our minds are addled, the result of skillful and expensive propaganda.
- Swear allegiance to the truth as a step to reforming America.
The book about the heart of the problem
The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution
By David Kaplan (2018).
A good liberal, Kaplan became upset about the Court’s power only when the Right took control of it. But his supporting evidence and logic are sound, despite his partisanship. From the publisher …
“With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court has never before been more central in American life. It is the nine justices who too often now decide the controversial issues of our time – from abortion and same-sex marriage, to gun control, campaign finance and voting rights. The Court is so crucial that many voters in 2016 made their choice based on whom they thought their presidential candidate would name to the Court. Donald Trump picked Neil Gorsuch—the key decision of his new administration. The next justice – replacing Anthony Kennedy – will be even more important, holding the swing vote over so much social policy. Is that really how democracy is supposed to work?
“Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and dozens of their law clerks, Kaplan provides fresh details about life behind the scenes at the Court – Clarence Thomas’s simmering rage, Antonin Scalia’s death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s celebrity, Breyer Bingo, the petty feuding between Gorsuch and the chief justice, and what John Roberts thinks of his critics.
“Kaplan presents a sweeping narrative of the justices’ aggrandizement of power over the decades – from Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore to Citizens United, to rulings during the 2017-18 term. But the arrogance of the Court isn’t partisan: Conservative and liberal justices alike are guilty of overreach. Challenging conventional wisdom about the Court’s transcendent power, The Most Dangerous Branch is sure to rile both sides of the political aisle.”
