How You Lie Depends on Where You Are From

The headline oversells this a bit. At the end of the day, we have very little ability to detect lies even in a monocultural environment and it doesn't seem like we have all that much insight into cultural variations (how could we when we haven't isolated the signs in any one culture?).

What's interesting to me is the following result:

Say you're in a situation with two people, where one is making a statement—it might be true, it might be false—and the other person is trying to determine if that person is lying. The likelihood that you're going to make the right choice is around 54 percent —just above what you'd get if you guessed randomly

What strikes me is that being successfully lied to would appear to be a huge evolutionary disadvantage for the individual. One would think that humans would have immensely attuned bullshit detectors, but that doesn't appear to be the case: we instead appear to be built to trust, at least most of us.

One can easily construct arguments why this is: for example, smaller groups with high trust can specialize with much lower risk. But one wonders if, in modern society, this leads to the "idiots lead by sociopaths" situations we so often find ourselves in.