How to Spot a Liar: Kate White on the Techniques of Deception in Mysteries | Hacker News Reader

How to Spot a Liar: Kate White on the Techniques of Deception in Mysteries

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19 pointsohjeez15 comments

While I understand the importance of "trusting your gut", I feel uneasy about telling people to just go with it because that's how you entrench confirmation biases: you don't know what's driving your judgement, you don't need evidence (in fact, you can now disregard it), and you have no way to assess the accuracy of that feeling except in those rare cases when you find out you were right.

Sometimes your brain picks up that a person is dangerous in ways your rational mind cannot explain and you'd be thankful that you follow that feeling. But also sometimes your brain dislikes minorities in ways you're not comfortable accepting and now you're actively being part of the problem.

After watching a few seasons of traitors (UK) I feel none of these techniques work and may even end up accusing the wrong person.

The show had former detectives and police folks failing miserably. It just boils down to evidence.

I think this is what makes traitors such a popular series - absolutely everyone things they can tell when someone is lying, but the truth is it's really difficult. Especially if someone is a stranger, it's next to impossible to separate what might be possible tells from what might just be their personality.

But that's what this article argues. People changing their story IS evidence.

All "reality" shows are scripted.

you only see what the production staff want you to see, things are staged and composited to keep you hooked.

In my experience, an indicator that my interlocutor is (possibly) lying/BSing, when challenged for an explanation for something they did, is that they provide a list of reasons. The person who's telling the truth just gives one.

Good liars are able to avoid these tells and I reckon no system is perfect but the last point, trusting your gut, is probably the best as it combines a lot of conscious and subconscious observations into a judgement. I'm often unable to articulate why I trust or distrust a person but feedback from my close friends is that they'll look to me for signs about a new person we meet. You do also need to be willing to constant reevaluate and change opinions as more evidence is gathered.

I find that it's like telling twins apart. If you don't know them they may be very similar, but once you spend some time with them it can become very obvious as to who is who.

We all have our own rules that we've built up over our lifetime and some of us have definitely spent more time watching people and/or are just better at the subtle clues.

But having said that, there are often people that just break all the conventional rules or just doesn't trigger any of the things that you are looking for. Like most things you can probably draw a bell curve where we can easily spot the people in the middle, but then it becomes geometrically more difficult as you move to the sides.

OK but most liars don’t fabricate an entire story.

In the startup world they might claim to have 1.5x the rev they have, or that an impressive logo is trialling their product when really they’re in early talks, etc…

Then it’s much easier to tell the “truth” with one twist and these methods fail.

These don't work for very good liars. They know all these tricks, often intuitively, and purposefully avoid them. The only strategy that works is listening to your gut and extending trust slowly. Keeping up a ruse is tiring and the more time you give them, the more chance they have to make a mistake. Combine that with listening to the brain in your gut that has evolved for millions of years to sense danger. In the early stages, the mistakes are often subtle and you will usually only get a feeling that something is "off".

On the contrary, relying on your gut is unreliable because they know how to play your gut, if they're experienced liars. They have the same tools as you when it comes to "sensing danger".

But what this article focuses on, is that it's hard to be consistent when you're lying. That's my experience from social deduction type games too: don't focus on gut or "tells", focus on the "world they're building" in these games' in-speak, and how well it holds up compared to other worlds.

I don't know.

Culturally from a young age we're told to not trust our guts and a lot of people shut them off.

"Don't judge a book by the cover", "you don't even know him". We're told to ignore our gut feeling especially if that feeling is consistent with negative stereotypes.

The middle path is best:

Your gut is not a liar. Give it real credence.

Your gut is not psychic. Don't rely on it solely. Skilled con artists know how to trigger "trust reactions".

Can't help but notice that Musk uses all of the techniques.

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