You Can See Everything and the science of spotting liars

It feels like everyone we know is talking about the new documentary You Can See Everything. It tracks the effort of comedian and documentarian Nathan Fielder to suss out how deceptive Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced founder of the company Theranos, is. And after watching the film, we all left the theater wondering -- what could we see? How possible is it to ever really spot someone lying? So we of course called up an expert in deception and counter-deception research, Maria Hartwig https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/maria-hartwig, a professor of psychology at CUNY, the City University of New York. For more on sussing out a liar, check out our episode about what's wrong with the polygraph http://lnk.to/9qHElv. Interested in more deep dives on the science behind pop culture blockbusters? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  So I know you guys invited me to stay here.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Does any part of you worry about me being here 24/7?

• 0:31Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 0:34Emily Kwong?

  As far as documentaries go, You Can See Everything is a blockbuster. It's the film all my friends want to talk about. It's all my boss wants to talk about. Shout out Rebecca Ramirez. And it kind of broke my brain. You Can See Everything centers Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a health tech company called Theranos that collapsed after fraud allegations came to light. But the film is also about Elizabeth's partner, Billy Evans.

• 0:57Speaker 04

  I fell in love in that first conversation.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Before or after that she revealed she was the founder of Theranos?

• 1:04Emily Kwong?

  And completing the triangle is comedian and documentarian Nathan Fielder. None of these people are scientists. But the scam at the heart of this story involves the potential of science, of medicine. And this big question, did Elizabeth Holmes know she was deceiving people about the potential of Theranos technology?

• 1:23Emily Kwong?

  Watching this movie, it's hard not to become an armchair psychologist. I was trying to interpret every pause, every muscle twitch as a sign of sincerity or deception.

• 1:34Speaker 05

  The cues to deception, if they exist, they are extremely unreliable. Lying doesn't come with the emotional and behavioral stereotypes that we think.

• 1:53Emily Kwong?

  Maria Hartwig is a professor of psychology at CUNY, the City University of New York, where she specializes in deception and counterdeception research. And she told us that if we left this movie feeling less sure about who was telling the truth, that doesn't mean we're stupid.

• 2:10Speaker 05

  People who have been conned, they often express feeling stupid. And I wish they didn't because we operate with a certain degree of credulity in everyday life. One way to express it is that we're truth biased.

• 2:29Emily Kwong?

  So is there a way to overcome our truth bias? Today on the show, deception detection, the ways we think we can spot liars versus what the science supports. And why just because you can see everything doesn't mean you know it's true. I'm Emily Kwong. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:54Speaker 06

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• 4:12Emily Kwong?

  All right, Maria, I'm not going to spoil this movie for you nor for our listeners, but I do want to raise some questions about it. It's actually filmed in a rental home, this big home on the California coast. There's panoramic views of the ocean, big windows. And you've done some research on how a person's physical environment affects the amount of information they will give in an interview. Can you tell us a little bit about that research?

• 4:32Speaker 05

  Those research findings essentially are that if a person is being interviewed in a room that is open, large, spacious, et cetera, the metaphor of openness is activated. And it has what is called metaphoric transfer effects. So the person is primed on the concept of openness.

• 5:01Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  Yes, it's quite wild. That translates into the behavioral effects of providing more information. So they are more open.

• 5:14Emily Kwong?

  See, raised Catholic, they should do confession in big rooms, not those little wooden boxes.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yes. Let's for a moment consider, what does the typical police interrogation room look like?

• 5:28Emily Kwong?

  Small.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  Yes. If you're the suspect, you're often in the corner. They're crappy rooms, really horrible rooms, hard walls. They didn't know about embodied cognition, which is the basis for these results, that open rooms lead to more open behavior. But yes.

• 5:49Emily Kwong?

  So in the very beginning of the movie, Elizabeth Holmes tells Nathan Fielder, she goes, "I've never lied in my life." What do you think of that idea?

• 6:01Speaker 05

  It's absurd. That statement in itself is one lie. And when we study how often people lie in everyday life, it's very hard to study because it's a socially undesirable behavior. So are people going to cop to the true extent? People do admit telling lies daily. But every now and then, there are people who claim that they never lie. Again, we count that as one lie. So because lying is part of the everyday fabric of life.

• 6:37Emily Kwong?

  Can you say more about that? Why is lying part of the everyday fabric of life?

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Yes, I think the common notion about lying is that it's nefarious and sketchy and possibly even criminal. It can be. But the type of lies that we tell in ordinary life are usually to either save ourselves from embarrassment or protect ourselves from some consequence that we don't want or to smooth or sort of lubricate social interactions. I urge you to picture a social world where people tell the truth to you all the time. Would you like to live in it?

• 7:25Speaker 05

  I don't. I really don't.

• 7:29Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, lies are a social lubricant. But I don't know. Lies have consequences, especially the big ones. And so I'm curious how you and your colleagues distinguish between different lies. How do you categorize them?

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Yes, there are quite a few ways of slicing deception into subtypes. One is to look at who's the target of the lie. Is it a stranger? Is it somebody that I know? Another way is to look at the reason for telling the lie. It's very rare that people just gratuitously lie. I think another major distinction is between the lies that we tell in ordinary life that typically have little consequence and the big lies

• 8:24Speaker 05

  that are probably serving the purpose of covering up bad behavior. That distinction matters as well.

• 8:34Emily Kwong?

  Have anything about the documentary that's kind of eerie? It's also really memorable is that the camera gets really close to its subjects. You can see the literal pores and pimples and beads of sweat on Nathan and Elizabeth and Billy's faces. I mean, there is this popular idea out there that you can just tell whether someone is lying based on their body language or their lack of eye contact or even these micro expressions. Is that accurate?

• 9:07Speaker 05

  No, the face is not a helpful source of information when it comes to deciding is this person truthful or not. People pay attention to the face. They think that there are indications there, especially in the eyes. This global belief that liars don't look you in the eye or they're shifty-eyed, it is simply not true.

• 9:38Emily Kwong?

  Just listening to you, you sound almost not frustrated, but a little like...

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm so frustrated with the industry of quote unquote, because this is not a scientific term, body language experts. Because these people are, if they were just selling their courses and crap to ordinary people, I would feel bad for ordinary people having wasted their money. But the problem is that they have heavily infiltrated law enforcement, security settings with their false pseudo-science. And in these situations, the truth really, really, really matters.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Getting decisions wrong is potentially catastrophic.

• 10:32Emily Kwong?

  So what is reliable? What is the right way for regular people like me to know when we're being lied to?

• 10:43Speaker 05

  The only really certain way is known or checkable facts. So you hold back the information that you have and you systematically ask them questions about the evidence without disclosing it. And the result is a statement that is very, very, very implausible.

• 11:13Emily Kwong?

  What do you call this methodology that you're describing?

• 11:17Speaker 05

  It's called a strategic use of evidence technique.

• 11:21Emily Kwong?

  And what is its goal?

• 11:23Speaker 05

  The goal is to gather information for the investigation. That's the purpose of any interview. But more specifically, the purpose is to give innocent people an opportunity, a chance to freely explain how the evidence that in their case isn't the evidence because they didn't do anything, how it could come to be.

• 11:55Emily Kwong?

  What's interesting about your work is you seem just as concerned with protecting innocent people as you do with uncovering guilty people. Why is that?

• 12:04Speaker 05

  They are both incredibly important for the legal system to get right. When an innocent person is convicted of a crime they didn't commit, we have the innocent person languishing behind bars where they shouldn't be. And we also have a perpetrator out on the streets. So that's an individual and societal disaster.

• 12:33Emily Kwong?

  You're causing me to reflect on the whole film differently. And specifically, when I was leaving the theater, me and everyone else was so caught up in, well, do you believe her or not? And I'm wondering if this determination to suss out a liar, at least for me, my need for certainty and control and the kind of calm that comes with knowing what's going on, it actually impairs our ability to know the truth because we're so determined to find it.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  I think that's true. I think that's how we want it to be, rather than how it is. We would like it to be the case that we could see if somebody was lying to us. It's a bit of a scary notion that it's not so. And we believe in a just world, even though there's ample evidence that the world is far from fair. So it violates that notion that a person can tell a big fat lie and there's no sign of it whatsoever, and you end up fooled.

• 13:48Emily Kwong?

  Yikes.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  Micro expressions, eye movements, et cetera. Easy. That's very easy. It's a silver bullet type thing. When in reality, what you have to do is collect information, gather evidence, investigate. Perhaps then you can begin the process of questioning a person in such a way that you will finally be able to conclude that the person is not being truthful. So it takes work. I wish it was as simple as the charlatans say. It's not.

• 14:31Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Emily Kwong?

  Maria, thank you so much for talking to me.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  I am at your service whenever you need yapping because I can yap about this all day. I love it.

• 14:46Emily Kwong?

  We love talking to folks like you, so thank you so much.

• 14:51Emily Kwong?

  For more on sussing out a liar, check out our episode about what's wrong with the polygraph. We'll link to it in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:18Speaker 00

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