welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. Grande today I have a few different questions related to deception and personality what are the characteristics of a credible liar what are some strategies that can be used to figure out if somebody is a liar and what personality profile is associated with deception and detecting deception so kind of an interesting thing happened as I was considering how to structure this video in terms of
the questions some of the questions I received were how can I be an incredible liar and how can I be an unbelievable liar right so this gets into an interesting area because incredible means not credible but another definition would be amazing and in a sense the same thing happens with the word unbelievable unbelievabl means something that cannot be believed and it also means amazing so there are a lot of words that mean amazing so in terms of how to be an amazing liar that question has a clear direction to it but how to be an
incredible liar or an unbelievable liar really depends on what you mean by incredible or unbelievable of course I assume that most people mean amazing and that's how I took the question but it's just interesting to think about those two definitions of like incredible for example and how in this situation they kind of mean the opposite thing right you have not credible a not believable liar versus a proficient liar so either way I found that interesting but moving one we see research has repeatedly demonstrated that people are not good at detecting lies even though members of
certain professions overestimate their ability to detect lies on a regular basis for example research indicates that police officers judges and mental health professionals believe they have superior abilities for detecting lives even though their ability level is the same as a general population the overall accuracy of lie detecting is only slightly better than chance fifty-four percent compared to of course 50 percent some studies show that people aren't even that accurate in detecting lies not even up to be 54 percent level as it turns out the ability to detect lies actually has little to do with the
person trying to detect lies it has much more to do with the quality of the person who is lying now the average number of Lies told per person per day is between 1 and 2 but the average doesn't really give you a good idea of the distribution the majority of lies are told by a small number of prolific deceivers so a very few people tell the vast majority of lies another issue when it comes to deception is the nature of the lie itself lies rest on a continuum in a sense from less severe to more
severe on the less severe side we see the white light used to facilitate social situations like telling somebody their hideous shoes look good on them or you think their recent purchase of an expensive automobile was a smart move even though their financial situation doesn't warrant that type of purchase moving across the continuum over to the more severe end we see exaggerations concealments embedded lies and then fabrications the most serious type of lie fabrications are typically designed to protect the liar although some of the other types of lies can do that same thing an example of
a fabrication would be if somebody told a story about how they went on a vacation to an exotic place even though they never went at all right so the whole thing's just made up usually the most interest in the area of research is in this fabrication type of lie as opposed to the other types of Lies I talked about so we can think of the liar as the sender and every time the sender lies there's going to be a receiver someone's proficiency at lying as well as their frequency may vary based on who they're lying
to we know that people tend to lie more to casual acquaintances as opposed to people with whom they are close every time a person lies there's also going to be a medium there's going to be a way that they transfer that untruth for example some Liars prefer to send messages online as opposed to face-to-face conversations or talking over the phone and this brings us to strategy liars also tend to use a variety of techniques for example not communicating too much information saying only what somebody needs to say and not adding a lot of extra material
staying close to the truth so only deviating a little bit from the truth when crafting the lie and embellishing stories with unverifiable information so making it so somebody really can't falsify their narrative so we see this one particular study was published that really looked to explore the areas that I just talked about now put the references to all the articles I used in the description for this video but talking about this one study we see they sampled 194 participants to get an idea about sender strategies the types of Lies told the frequency of Lies and
other information the participants told an average of 1.6 lies during the last 24 hours but the six most prolific Liars told about 38% of the lies 39 percent of the participants reported that they didn't lie at all in the past 24 hours now we see higher reported self-deception ability was associated with telling more lies and it predicted telling lies to friends and colleagues but it did not predict telling lies to authority figures employers or family members so again we're talking about self-reported deception ability people who are saying that they believe they're good at telling lies
but they're proficient at it now the preferred medium of lying for those who thought themselves as effective at deception was face-to-face so that's a little surprising in one sense because there's always this concern about nonverbals being picked up in a face-to-face conversation but either way those that believed they were good at lying preferred face-to-face now looking at the strategies we see certain strategies were much more frequently used than others the most frequently used was keeping the statement clear and simple about 18% of participants did this then we see telling a plausible story being vague about
details embedding a lie into an otherwise truthful story and by the time we get down to a complete fabrication we're looking at about 7 percent other participants again who this type of lie in the past 24 hours so what are the characteristics of these self-reported good Liars they tend to tell less severe lies they mostly rely on three strategies keeping the statement clear simple and possible and betting the lies and the truthful stories and providing unverifiable details they also typically lie face to face as I mentioned and they tend to lie to colleagues friends and
romantic partners in general good Liars seem to be careful who they lie to poor Liars tended to lie to casual acquaintances and strangers poor Liars were also more likely to rely on being intentionally vague as a lying strategy interestingly both good and poor Liars believed that their behavioral strategies were important to successful line so again we see a lot of people buying into the idea that nonverbal communication is important in terms of detecting lies so what am i thoughts about how people will become very good at lying I think the people who are most effective
at lying believe their own lies right self-deception this is a key feature of narcissism I also think that people are more effective in lying when they need their lives to be true again something associated with narcissism practice tends to help people to be effective at lying one of the findings we see in the research is that individuals who practice a lot at lying notice their lies less so in some cases they may not even notice their lying at all we see that effective Liars tend to tell the same lie repeatedly for example if somebody has
a lie about how they did something heroic they might tell that exact same narrative over and over again they get the benefit of practice and the benefit of memorizing that story they're not making it up as they go they have a narrative already set that they simply need to recall in the same manner over and over also some people are good at feigning the appropriate feeling during a lie for example looking sad while telling an untrue depressing story so acting experience may play a role here as well so how can somebody tell if somebody else
is a liar well if somebody's trying to evaluate a specific lie this is actually very difficult I'm not convinced there's any valid method to detect lies simply by talking to somebody there are some ideas however that we see in the research we see this idea that words and phrases that leave options open are connected to lying like using the words may or might or the phrases I think so or if I remember correctly so the idea here is that the individual is keeping their options open so if they get caught in a lie they can
pivot and get away from that another area we see a lot of research in is body language body language is essentially useless for detecting lies there are so many mixed findings in the research it's hard to know what the reality is gaze aversion is a popular type of body language that we see talked about this idea that if you're talking to somebody and they look away they must be lying or this indicates deception as it turns out the research on this area is fairly definitive gaze aversion has nothing to do with lying because there is
no physiological profile to lying so we wouldn't expect some sort of stable response when somebody lies another area really related to body language is the idea of the microexpression so this isn't really body language in the same way these are very quick muscle movements in somebody's face like something that would take a fraction of a second that in theory can indicate deception now I think this area is more hopeful in terms of lie detection but there are a few problems we see in consistent findings so nobody can be really sure about what types of micro-expressions
are tied to deception and we also see it's very difficult to detect these micro expressions even when you're intently looking for them another method we see talked about is the baseline method right so the ideas you talk to somebody about things where you know they're telling the truth kinda like we see in a polygraph which is also nonsense they don't work either but either way I won't get started on that either way so you're talking to somebody and they are saying things that you have no reason to believe are untruthful and in theory you can
get their baseline from this like okay I can see how they're behaving when I believe they're telling the truth so then if they start lying you can see some sort of deviation from that baseline behavior the difficulty here is that there are many reasons to deviate from baseline other than lying also pathological liars lie all the time so their baseline behavior is the same as they're lying behavior so an interesting theory but it's just not supported by the research does anything reliably help with lie detection I've talked about a lot of areas I think have
failed in terms of detecting lies but what about something that would really work well I think you really need to understand the context you need to understand the person and I'll talk about that at a moment like the personality you could also look for low probability or impossible events like if somebody's claiming that they did something that's impossible that's a good indication that they're lying or if the probability is extremely low that could be as well although sometimes people tell stories about low probability events right that's why they tell the story in the first place
because it was unlikely to happen to a person right so it's special to them another area would be inconsistency this is by the best method if somebody delivers a narrative and then they deliver it again and it's different or if their narrative is inconsistent with what you know happened those are pretty good indicators we see this idea around this method of repeating the story so if somebody tells you a narrative you ask them to say it again and you may not say why so that's kind of suggesting that you didn't hear or didn't understand which
of course gets into an ethical issue depending on the profession that's using this method but that's still one area that some people could use asking somebody to repeat the story and seeing if it's the same that's really tied in with the inconsistency idea I talked about before and then we see this idea of asking somebody to tell the story in Reverse this can actually be somewhat helpful for detecting lies but of course now you're clearly looking for a lie so now the person is going to be on guard they know that you're looking to detect
deception another method for detecting a specific lie like in a situation where you don't really know somebody would be asking for more detail so this might not help in that mo but it can help later on with the inconsistency method so really getting them to lock into a narrative with a lot of details and then checking in later so really getting a good story for comparison now in a more general sense so not so much can I detect a lie but can I detect the liar well a history of lying is an indication somebody is
being untruthful in a moment if we see a pattern of unlikely events so I talked about this a little bit before these low probability events might have somebody questioning that there's deception going on but if you see a pattern of them like if there's less than a one in 1,000 chance that something could happen to somebody and they have that happening 10 or 15 times like over a period of time when you know them that gets into the area of almost impossible right so again if you see a pattern of low probability events and then
of course we have personality and that was one of the questions I was asked what is the personality of someone who lies and who can detect lies so I answer this question by looking at the five factor model but first I'll take a quick look at the dark triad traits these are some clinical manifestations of psychopathy narcissism and Machiavellianism we see the dark triad traits do have a connection to lying psychopathy and Machiavellianism are associated with telling more lies psychopathy is associated with telling lies for no reason this is often called pathological lying so somebody's
lying but there doesn't seem to be any clear gain for them machiavellianism is associated with telling white lies and narcissism is associated with lying for self game and a self-reported skill at lying so narcissists believe they're more effective at lying than other people it's now taking a look at this from the perspective of the five factor model of personality theory I remember the five traits through the acronym ocean the openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism and here we see an interesting study and again the reference will be in the description for this video
that looks at four tendencies related to the five factor model when it comes to lying the Tennessee to tell lies the Tennessee to detect lies the tendency to tell the truth convincingly now this isn't talked about much some people look like they're lying even when they're telling the truth so this is an interesting area and the last Tennessee is the tendency to believe lies so in terms of the tendency to tell lies the personality profile associated with that behavior is high openness to experience low conscientiousness high extraversion low agreeableness and Load eroticism one of the
theories around the high extraversion is that extroverts have more opportunities to socialize therefore more opportunities to tell lies and they learn more about social interactions because that experience in terms of detecting lies the personality profile associated with this is high openness to experience high extraversion low agreeableness and we see it's unrelated to conscientiousness and neuroticism so really not that different from the profile for telling lies which is interesting in terms of telling the truth convincingly we see high extraversion low agreeableness and this is unrelated to openness to experience conscientiousness and neuroticism and then in terms
of believing lies we see only high agreeableness we see it's not related to any of the other traits so what really stands out here is that agreeableness is an important factor in all four of the tennessee's and extraversion is important for three of them so there's my analysis of these different items related to deception I know whenever I talk about topics like deception there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic
to be interesting thanks for watching
