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Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

> "The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars."

I'd love to learn more about this. How do you separate inconsequential details told by liars from inconsequential details told by excited people?

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Liars provide more details because they get bogged down in the story, whereas truth-tellers give you a broad overview and can still provide a coherent story when pressed for details.

One study found this by analyzing insurance claims [0]

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How-s...

i just finished Never Split The Difference (https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...) and they also tend use different pronouns (they do not use I as much, but use other pronouns more often)

This accords with a recent a high profile rape case in the UK involving rugby players where the defence barrister was questioning the alleged victim's account because she kept using 'you' rather than 'I' when describing her behaviour during the alleged rape. (The players were found not guilty in court but not on media and social media and were fired.)

Or perhaps she found the experience traumatic and wanted to disassociate herself when describing the events? It's dangerous to read too much into how people describe traumatic experiences.

I agree with you and yet people are convicted based on the basis of one person's word against another's all the time.

If you look into studies of lie detection training and efficiency, you will learn that it is mostly confirmation bias on the side of the lie detectors: humans cannot really be trained to be powerful lie detectors. There is some new research on using MRI's to detect the brain pattern of lies, but it is still nascent.

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