Born Liars (6 page)

Freud's rather clumsy attempts to psychoanalyse authors via their work neglected the extent to which good writers are able to shape their own material, whatever its source. Stevenson's nightmare was just the raw material; the story was shaped and written ‘awake, and consciously'. If writers are compelled to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights, not just about their own lives but about our shared experience. Outside the pet shop, Dylan was practising a skill he used over and over again to ignite his grander creations – songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man', in which he takes us to a place where ‘memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves'.

The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa writes that fictions ‘express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised as something it is not'. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

* * *

People who can't stop telling tales, and who know they are lying, suffer from a different kind of madness to chronic confabulators, and a different kind of lack.

Joe Galloway and Jonathan Aitken would not be considered pathological liars in the clinical sense. Though they seem to have got carried away with their own lies, and clearly lacked scruples, they exerted a significant degree of control over their lying behaviour (which only makes their behaviour more reprehensible). Such liars can be considered distinct from
compulsive
liars who become addicted to frequent self-glorifying fibs, often because they are socially insecure, and whose lies usually harm nobody but themselves.
Pathological
liars are a different category again. Manipulative, cunning and egotistical, they lie compulsively but with specific, self-serving goals in mind. They can be charming and credible in pursuit of their goals, and wreak great damage on those unfortunate enough to cross their paths, who often find it hard to rebuild their trust in people in the wake of such an encounter. Pathological liars remain oblivious or careless of the effect their lies have on the possibility of building relationships; their short term gains are usually at the expense of long-term social reputation.

Such behaviour may be linked to a very specific deficit of emotional capacity. Adrian Raine is a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who specialises in the study of how the brains of persistent criminals differ from the rest of us. He and his collaborators carried out brain scans on people whom they established as having psychopathic personalities. (Not all pathological liars are psychopaths – itself a complex and contentious classification – but there is considerable overlap between the two conditions.) The subjects were given a decision-making task to think about while in the scanner. The dilemma they were presented with is the kind of diabolical scenario beloved of moral philosophers, and it was dramatised in the last-ever episode of
MASH
.

It's wartime. You are hiding in the basement of a house with some of your fellow villagers. You can hear the enemy soldiers outside, whom you know have orders to kill anyone they find. You are holding your own baby. Your baby has a cold. You know that if she coughs or cries then the soldiers will hear, and they will find your hiding place, kill you, your baby, and all of your friends. Should you smother and suffocate your own baby to save the village? Or should you let the baby cough, knowing the consequences?

Don't worry, there isn't a right or wrong answer. In fact, the researchers weren't interested in how the subjects said they'd respond, so much as what was happening in their brains while they thought about it. When normal, non-psychopathic individuals are given this test, they display a high amount of activity in parts of the brain responsible for the governing of emotion. If you spent just a moment thinking about that dilemma you probably felt some sense of discomfort or unease; it is a horrible choice, after all. Psychopathic personalities, however, are less likely to experience that feeling. The brain scan results showed that the more psychopathic the individual, the lower the activation in the amygdala and other emotion-regulating regions as they considered the dilemma. In other words, these murderers seemed to lack an emotional component to their moral decision-making process, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that most of us are very reliant on our emotions, or intuitions, to make moral decisions.

It's often said that psychopaths are people who don't know right from wrong. But that's not true – they could probably pass a test of moral reasoning as well as you or I. Their problem is that they can't
feel
right from wrong.

This void extends to feelings of honesty and dishonesty. The reason that most of us are honest most of the time, even when it might suit our purposes to lie, is that we
feel
uncomfortable with deceit – like the children who read the George Washington story, we have learnt to take pleasure in truth-telling and to feel emotional discomfort with fibbing (even if we sometimes suppress this discomfort and lie anyway). Pathological liars don't have this feeling. What they can do is give an extraordinary
imitation
of felt honesty, and sometimes with a great actor's grasp of verbal nuance and subtle gesture. Hervey Cleckley, author of the classic study of psychopaths,
The Mask of Sanity
, wrote that ‘Overemphasis, glibness, and other signs of the clever liar do not show in his words or manner . . . during the most solemn perjuries he has no difficulty at all in looking anyone tranquilly in the eyes.' The most powerful liars cast a spell that is almost impossible to resist. Cleckley confessed that even after many years of working with psychopathic personalities he couldn't help but be taken in by them. Time and again, he said, he had been fooled by patients who implored him to lend them money, never to return it.

There may be another neurological characteristic common to pathological liars
.
Adrian Raine carried out a study on this topic with Yaling Yang, when both were at the University of Southern California. Initially, they faced an interesting problem: how to identify and recruit their subjects. After all, ask a liar if they're a liar and you risk being plunged into a logical vortex. Their ingenious solution was to ask the temporary employment agencies of Los Angeles to open up their rolls to them. Raine and Yang knew that pathological liars usually find it impossible to maintain long-term relationships of any kind, or to hold down long-term jobs. They are soon caught in one lie too many and have to keep moving on, socially and professionally, like parasites looking for new hosts.

By starting with a pool of temporary workers, Raine and Yang guessed they'd find who they were looking for more quickly. After asking for volunteers to take part in a psychological test they subjected the 108 who replied to a detailed questionnaire. ‘We looked for things like inconsistencies in their stories about occupation, education, crimes and family background,' said Raine. They then interviewed those whom they suspected of habitual dishonesty. ‘Pathological liars can't always tell truth from falsehood, and contradict themselves in an interview,' Raine explained. Not that they were pretending to be truth-tellers – one of the common characteristics of people with this condition is a brazen disregard for how they are perceived, and a sense of grandiosity that allows them to feel invincible. In the interviews, some of the subjects would happily admit to preying on people, coolly relating stories of running cons and using aliases. Eventually the researchers identified twelve of the volunteers as the real thing, and used brain scans to look for structural brain differences between the pathological liars and the control groups.

Raine and Yang hypothesised that pathological liars would have some kind of neuronal deficit in their frontal lobes. The results of the scans showed they were right: the pathological liars had significantly less cortical matter in this region than the control group. What surprised the researchers was that the liars also displayed an
excess
of something: they had more ‘white matter' – the brain fibres responsible for making connections. The more neuronal networking there is in the brain, the more varied and original is a person's stream of thought, and the higher their verbal skills. Although the study is far from conclusive, it suggests that pathological liars have powerful equipment for lying, and fewer of the inhibitions that most of us have about doing so; and that they are bursting with inventiveness while lacking crucial censoring mechanisms, including a capacity for moral feeling. Unable to find wider significance or solace in their own creativity, they remain trapped in the frozen world of their own lies.

What are the signs of a lie?

‘Where are the gold pieces now?' the Fairy asked.

‘I lost them,' answered Pinocchio, but he told a lie, for he had them in his pocket.

As he spoke, his nose, long though it was, became at least two inches longer.

Carlos Collodi,
The Adventures of Pinocchio

Charles Bond, a psychologist at Texas Christian University, asked 2,520 adults in sixty-three countries how to spot a liar. More than seventy per cent said that liars tend to avert their gazes, and most said that liars squirm, stutter, touch or scratch themselves or tell longer stories than usual. The same liar stereotype exists in every culture, says Bond. This would be less puzzling, he continues, if it was accurate, but the stereotype just isn't supported by the evidence. As a result, it leads us astray.

Bond partnered with fellow lying expert Bella DePaulo to carry out a meta-analysis of over a hundred academic studies of deception detection. They found that subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, forty-seven per cent of the time. In other words, they'd be better off flipping a coin.

That's when people are
looking
for a lie. In everyday life we live with a ‘truth bias'. Unless there is a compelling reason to think somebody is lying, it doesn't occur to us that they are. And why should it? The world would be a deeply unpleasant place if we were forced to consider that everything we hear could be a lie – indeed, as Browne's Law tells us, society would be unworkable. But this, of course, is what gives the skilled liar a head start over the rest of us.

So what
should
we be on the lookout for? There have been endless investigations into this question, but no simple answer has been found. For one thing, different people have different ‘tells'; one person might blink rapidly; another might stare unblinkingly. The signs of lying also depend on the type of lie being told. When people tell complicated lies, they frequently pause more often and for longer and speak more slowly, but if the lie is simple or highly polished they tend to do the opposite. Bad liars sometimes exhibit the symptoms of discomfort we expect but, overall, liars are
less
likely to blink, to move their hands and feet, or to make elaborate gestures.

What's clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you'd be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we're inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves ahead of their interlocutor. Their testimony under interrogation is often more coherent than that of the average truth-teller because they have thought their story through. They are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble, which strikes us as dishonest-sounding. If someone says they can't remember things, we get suspicious, but actually, people who spontaneously correct themselves or say that there are details they can't recall are as – or even more – likely to be truthful than those who spin a smooth and fluent narrative line. Having said that,
really
good liars will make deliberate mistakes, to simulate spontaneity.

Liars are more difficult to spot than we imagine and very skilful liars are almost impossible to see through. Practised liars identify their own giveaways (or the conventionally assumed giveaways) and teach themselves to avoid them. They also anticipate what others are looking for: to be a good liar, you don't need to know which behaviours separate liars from truth-tellers so much as which behaviours people
think
separate them.

Just because there are no unassailably reliable signs of lying doesn't mean our internal lie detectors can't be honed and refined. There are two prominent schools of thought on where to look for a lie. One focuses on the liar's face; the other on his words.

There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes.

‘
Lyin' Eyes
'
The Eagles

In 1967 Paul Ekman was approached by a group of psychiatrists from the Californian hospital in which he had been working to see if he could help them tell when suicidal patients were lying to them. Ekman, a psychologist, wasn't sure that he could answer their question, but he remembered a reel of film in his possession that might offer some clues. Several years earlier, he had filmed forty psychiatric patients being interviewed by doctors. At least one of them, ‘Mary', a forty-two-year-old housewife, had been captured in the act of lying.

Mary had attempted suicide three times, and only survived her last attempt after being rushed to hospital. At the end of a three-week stay she seemed happier, and asked for a weekend pass to see her family. After interviewing Mary and being convinced by her account of her frame of mind, her doctor agreed. Just before leaving, however, Mary confessed to the real reason she wanted to go: to make another attempt on her own life.

Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen played the tape of Mary's exit interview over and over, searching for the signs of deceit that had escaped her doctor. They slowed the tape down and scrutinised Mary's face as she explained how well she was feeling. Finally, they saw it: when Mary was asked about her plans for the future, a look of despair flashed across her face, so quickly that it was almost imperceptible at normal speed and difficult to catch even at quarter-speed. Mary's face had betrayed her real feelings, perhaps before she even knew they existed.

The psychiatrists had come to Ekman in the first place because of his reputation as an expert on the expressive capacity of the human face. As a young psychologist in the early 1960s, he had set out to find evidence for a theory that was prevalent at the time amongst social scientists: that what people thought of as universal facial expressions were actually culturally constructed masks with no direct connection to human emotions. Indeed, according to the dominant school of psychology at the time, emotions themselves were of negligible importance to human behaviour, and unworthy of serious study.

Ekman travelled to a remote village in Papua New Guinea to meet the people of South Fore, a tribe who had very little contact with the people or culture of the West. With the help of a translator, he told them very simple stories that ended with somebody being happy, sad, or angry, and asked them to choose, from a selection of two or three different pictures, the facial expression that best suited what the person in the story was feeling. If Ekman could show that the villagers of Fore had a different facial repertoire to Americans, he would have found valuable empirical evidence for the theory.

But the tribespeople of Fore didn't give Ekman what he expected. They recognised the expressions he showed them, identifying them just as an American or a German would, and they used the same expressions themselves. When acting out a humorous story, they flashed cheesy grins; when describing frightening hunting tales, they adopted Hitchcockian poses. Ekman's hypothesis was turned on its head. As he said forty years later, ‘I was dead wrong, and it was the most exciting discovery of my life.'

Back home, the academic establishment didn't embrace Ekman's findings, and he found himself gravitating towards an unconventional mentor: Silvan Tomkins. Born in Pennsylvania in 1911, Tomkins was the brilliant, charismatic, intellectually voracious son of a Russian dentist. He studied playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania but soon became absorbed by the young science of psychology. He left Philadelphia in 1934 and, unable to find scholarly employment in the midst of the Great Depression, spent the next two years working as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate. Tomkins's system was based on his reading of the horses' emotional relationship with each other. For instance, if a male horse had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be unsettled if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the line-up. Nobody was quite sure whether or how it worked, but somehow he seemed to get results.

Unlike his contemporaries, Tomkins was interested in the emotions of human beings, too. While teaching psychology at Princeton and Rutgers he produced a comprehensive theory of the emotions in a four-volume work called
Affect, Imagery, Consciousness
. His greatest preoccupation was with how the human face displayed emotion, a subject that had also fascinated Charles Darwin. In 1872 Darwin published
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, in which he noted that ‘the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.' Darwin was the first to ask whether facial expressions of emotion are innate – biologically determined; or learnt – culturally determined. Twentieth-century social scientists were firmly of the latter view – except for Tomkins, and now Ekman.

One day, towards the end of the Sixties, Ekman came across a treasure: a hundred-thousand feet of film, shot by a virologist in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of the South Fore tribe he had visited; the rest was of the Kukukuku. The Fore were a peaceful and friendly people; the Kukukuku had a reputation for being hostile and murderous. For six months, Ekman sorted through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes and focusing on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen. When a final cut was ready, he called in Tomkins. The two men watched the film in silence. Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved, and all identifying context had been edited out. At the end, Tomkins went up to the screen and pointed at the faces of the South Fore. ‘These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful,' he said. Then, pointing to the Kukukuku, he said, ‘This group is violent.' Ekman was stunned. ‘How on earth are you doing that?' he asked. As they played the film backwards in slow motion, Tomkins pointed out the particular wrinkles and bulges in the faces that he was using to make his judgements.

Ekman started to see the face as a gold mine of information about the human condition. Together with his collaborator Wallace Friesen, he embarked on a vast, quixotic undertaking: to create a comprehensive taxonomy of human expressions. The two men combed through medical textbooks, outlining each of the forty-three facial muscles and identifying every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. Then they made faces at each other across a desk, systematically manipulating their facial muscles into different combinations, checking each one in a mirror, and videotaping themselves for the record. If they found a particular movement impossible to execute they went next door to the anatomy department where a friendly surgeon would jumpstart the dormant muscle with a needle. They called each distinct muscular movement an ‘action unit'.

In time, the two researchers discovered and codified ten thousand facial expressions, all made up of different combinations of action units. Most of the expressions were meaningless – the kind of face a child might make in play. But about three thousand of them seemed to mean something. After seven years of research, Ekman and Friesen had catalogued the emotional repertoire of the human face, which they published in a document called the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, still used by psychologists today. Each expression the human face is capable of is numbered, its movement described muscle by muscle, its emotional ‘meaning' labelled. Action unit (AU) 12, which activates the zygomatic major, is a smile. Combine it with AU 6, which contracts the muscles that raise the cheek, and you have an expression of happiness. Sadness is defined as: AU 1+4+6+11, which means, ‘the inner corners of the brows drawn together and upward, cheeks raised, slight deepening of the nasolabial fold, and slight depression of the lip corners.' Ekman points out that Woody Allen will raise the inner corner of his eyebrows whilst drawing his eyebrows down and together (AU1+4), in an expression of sadness that somehow makes his punchlines more poignant.

Thanks to Ekman's research, the universality of facial expression is now generally accepted by social scientists. Outside academia, he is best known for his insights into deception. The nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume Duchenne was the first to note how difficult it is to fake a facial expression. An authentic smile, he said, ‘does not obey the will'; its absence ‘unmasks the false friend'. Ekman's intricate mapping of the facial repertoire enabled him to define precisely why it is that even when we make a good effort at putting on our best or our worst face, we can't quite convince the careful observer. If we activate our zygomatic major without contracting our cheek muscles or scrunch-ing our eyes, our smile seems lifeless. A ‘felt happy smile' typically features ‘apex coordination', with the eye closure reaching its maximum intensity at the same time the grin is at its broadest. Real smiles are also shorter and smoother in execution than anxious or faked varieties. Authentic expressions of anger are even harder to create voluntarily (Adolf Hitler was unusually good at faking rage) and the negative emotions are generally tougher to fake than the positive ones. We might bare our teeth, but we rarely remember to narrow the red margin of the lips – or even if we remember, we can't do it. Unless we're truly angry.

After watching the tape of Mary's exit interview, Ekman realised something even more remarkable: emotional expressions aren't just hard to fake; they are almost impossible to conceal. This was the revelation that stimulated his interest in lying and lie detection. Liars need to put on what Macbeth calls a ‘false face' consistent with the lie, and good liars can do this without much difficulty. But even the most skilful liars, Ekman came to believe, can exhibit a ‘leakage' of emotional truth, by unconsciously making a facial expression incongruous with the story they are telling. For a fraction of a second, the honest face disrupts the false face. Ekman terms these fleeting expressions of involuntary emotion ‘microexpressions'. He frequently reminds people that a microexpression, even if you can spot it, is not necessarily the sign of a lie. It simply signals an emotional incongruity: you still have to figure out what it means, and whether it's significant.