Everyone lies or deceives every day, but few like to admit it. So important is the ability to lie that it probably had an impact on human evolution. Adults certainly lie, but research has also shown that children learn to lie in surprisingly subtle ways as soon as they begin to communicate.
So pervasive is the skill that it goes back to our primate ancestors, with chimpanzees and baboons exhibiting remarkable abilities to dissemble.
A series of lecturers discussed lying and deception yesterday on the closing day of the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual festival of science. One specialist provided a few tips on how to spot a liar.
Don't watch the eyes, listen to the voice if you want to pick up on a lie, suggested Dr Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire. People were pretty bad at identifying a liar, according to studies, he said.
There was a 50/50 possibility of spotting a lie by chance, but repeated studies showed that we usually got the liar no more than 60 per cent of the time, and in some studies this dipped to only 45 per cent.
Recent large studies involving people watching a liar on television, hearing him on radio and reading his words in a newspaper showed, however, that the radio and newspaper audiences did slightly better at identifying the lie, Dr Wiseman said.
He suggested that "visual noise" served to confuse our ability to identify candour. "We are not very good at lie-detecting because we don't pick up on the right signals."
But there were telltale clues available to improve the odds. Contrary to the common view, liars are more likely to look you in the eye, but they blink more often. Their speech, while lying, tends to be faster, at a slightly higher pitch and with more hesitation between phrases. They also actually say less, using fewer words.
In contrast, a truthful speaker usually gives much more detail in longer sentences, including specific, unasked-for detail. The ability to deceive was also seen in other primates, explained Prof Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrew's, who has studied deception skills in baboons and chimpanzees.
Their "social manipulation" could have come straight from Machiavelli, he argued. The skill had "evolutionary roots".
There was a link between their apparent intelligence and the complexity of their social behaviour, and the complexity of social behaviour was also a good indicator that the primate under study would also have more brain tissue in the areas linked to intelligence.
"Primates have flexible and quite subtle ways of deceiving their companions," he said. He described a juvenile baboon trying to get food from a larger troop member.
The juvenile cried out, pretending it had been attacked, which caused a larger baboon to attack an innocent animal, leaving the juvenile free to steal the food. Chimps and baboons which knew where hidden food could be found had been observed leading others away from the source, only to return to it later.
