The Ways We Lie

In this article, I intend to pose and offer answers to a series of questions that are of the utmost importance to the person tasked with interview and interrogation. What is a lie? What should we do when we are lied to? How can we spot a lie? How can we get better at spotting lies? 

What is a lie? Lies are statements or actions intended to mislead another. Lies can range from inconspicuous, to subtle, to obvious. When the layperson thinks about a lie, they usually think of the obvious: a lie by fabrication. “I’m not cheating on you (but I am).” “My grandma died so I need time away from work (but grandma is alive and well).” In fact, most lies fall into a trickier category of lying. Lies by evasion: omission, distraction, or deliberately misleading statements. These are lies told deliberately in a way that, if caught, the person can theoretically save face by denying that such was their intent.¹

Lies have different levels of stress associated with them, correlated with likelihood of being found out. 

Omission: low stress, hard to spot

Evasion: moderate stress, observable but easy to miss

Fabrication: high stress, easy to spot

What should we do when we are lied to? Let’s review Don Rabon’s writing on lies, which I think answers this well. He says that the easiest lie to tell and the hardest to detect is the lie by omission. 

Omission: The robber talks all about cruising around town with his friends, but he neglects to mention (omits) that he robbed a convenience store. 

The hardest lie to tell and the easiest to detect is by fabrication (making something up entirely).

Fabrication: The robber makes up an alibi rife with details of things that never happened. 

Between omission and fabrication is what Rabon calls the “portal of refuge.” These are three tricky techniques to avoid fabrication if possible. These are:

1. Taking the interviewer down a rabbit hole (excessive detail on barely related topics).

2. The interviewee may respond minimally in relation to other answers (1 minute answer, 1 minute answer, 18 second answer, 1 minute answer).

3. The interviewee may respond evasively.

In terms of what to do about being lied to: Rabon recommends maneuvering the deceptive interviewee from the easy lies to the harder lies in order to place them in a more vulnerable position.

The convenience store robber first tells you all about that day, but he omits the robbery. He’s pretty safe here because he hasn’t really lied yet. Through careful questions about his timeline, the robber opts to take you down a rabbit hole and tell you all about his tough childhood (which you didn’t ask about). When you, being the dogged interviewer you are, guide him back to the subject, he becomes evasive. 

Example: Q: “Were you ever in a convenience store that night?” A: “I hardly ever go into convenience stores.” 

These stratagems draw the attention of the attentive interviewer. That interviewer will continue to direct questions into those topic areas. Ask it again: “Okay, but were you in a convenience store that night?” The robber is resisting, but he still has a thin layer of plausible deniability because he hasn’t exactly lied.

Finally, the interviewer leads the robber to where he is forced to declare he didn’t do it, which is a falsifiable statement, a fabrication. Now the robber is exposed. He has told a lie and there is no denying it. 

We can see some elements of Rabon’s interviewing process in the interview I did with a mother that (accidentally?) smothered her baby. In this case, a wandering homeless person found a backpack on a wooded path. When he opened it, he found a dead (human) newborn baby inside. He carried it to a nearby hotel, and he called the police. When we responded to the scene, other items in the backpack led us back to a woman I’ll call Amanda. 

A witness told us that Amanda was flying a sign on the side of the highway, begging for money. When I approached Amanda as she held her sign, I asked, “Do you know why we’re here?” To which she responded, “Because of the sign? I can move.” My partner saw how scared Amanda was. She said, “Amanda. Hey. It’s ok. It’s ok now.” Amanda began to cry. She said, “I didn’t mean to!” 

What was Amanda’s reflexive strategy for lying? Omission. She didn’t fabricate anything, but she still lied. She knew why we were there. When you had your baby die within the last 48 hours, and you left him in the woods in a backpack, the whole truth when police ask if you know why they are talking to you is, “probably about my baby.” 

Upon questioning, Amanda told us that she was homeless. A few days before, she fell asleep at a bus stop holding her newborn child. When she woke up, her baby was gone. Her boyfriend told her that it was in the backpack at her feet. When she looked inside the backpack, she saw that her baby was dead. Not knowing what to do, she left the backpack there so she could walk across the street, charge her phone, and look for a place to bury her baby. While they were gone, somebody stole the backpack with her baby inside. 

I wanted to explore the possibility that she had been on drugs at the time.

Me: “Were you using heroin?”

Amanda: “No.”

Me: “Marijuana?”

Amanda: “No.”

Me: “Crack?”

Amanda: “I don’t like the smell of crack.”

Me: (thinking: so it’s crack)

Her answer was evasive. I asked if she was using crack at the time her baby died, and she told me that she doesn’t like the smell of crack. Those aren’t the same things. 

So, is Amanda telling the truth about how her baby died? I don’t know. The best way to distinguish between truth and a lie is what we know to be true. In Amanda’s case, at the time I interviewed her, there were still too many things I didn’t know at all. As a general rule, your first formal interview with a suspect should happen when you know everything you can hope to know about your case. Sometimes it doesn’t happen that way, though. If you find yourself in an earlier-than-ideal interview with a suspect, focus on gathering the story. 

In Amanda’s case, I didn’t accuse her of anything during this interview. I gathered a careful account. I pointed out discrepancies and asked her to explain them. I suspected that Amanda was lying to me about some things (drugs, leaving the backpack but intending to come back, etc.), but I didn’t know which things. If I had chosen to accuse her of purposefully causing the death of her child in this first interview, I would have ruined the chance for a second interview, the interview where I’d actually have evidence to back up my hunches. By the time we finished, I had a detailed story and a good rapport with Amanda. Should we ever need to talk further, I have no doubt that she would agree to speak with me.

How can we spot a lie? If I had a definitive answer for you, I’d be very rich. I have some ideas, though. 

Over Christmas break, I asked different people, “Tell me all about what you did last night, but lie about everything.” It was surprising how different each person approached this unplanned, forced fabrication. A lie by fabrication is the hardest to tell. Because they didn’t have a chance to plan for it, I think that their natural lying tendencies, which would otherwise be more subtle, were highlighted.

One person gripped the side of the chair, opened her eyes wider than I thought they could go, and stared unblinking at me as she told me her story. Another person made big, illustrative gestures with her hands that she hadn’t done at any other time during the evening. 

I had a lot of fun acting like an expert in body language, which I am not. I was probably right about the tells on how those people lied, but the way they were forced to lie isn’t a realistic scenario you’d encounter. If they really wanted to lie to me about last night, they’d probably choose to omit, evade, and minimize before fabricating a single fact much less all of the facts. 

We can still learn from this exercise. For example: people lie differently and unplanned lies of pure fabrication appear to be very stressful. This is an exercise I’ll continue to try because I want to see more and more ways that people lie. I think that the more ways we can observe people lying, the better chance we will have to spot the lie in the moment that we are interviewing a suspect. 

I think of the movie Rounders. This is a movie about underground, high stakes poker games. The Matt Damon character realizes that the John Malkovich character’s “tell” is when he lifts his Oreo cookies to his ear. Once Damon’s character knew the tell, he was quick to spot it.  

How can we get better at spotting lies? Again, I don’t have the final answer, but I’d like to share with you something that I do that I think helps me get better at spotting lies. I pay attention to how I lie.  

Most of us don't want to admit to being liars. But, truthfully? We all do it. All of us are liars. We lie, consistently, in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of reasons. “The average adult tells between .59 and 1.56 lies daily.”² Even if you think of yourself as an honest person, odds are that you lie regularly. 

If you don’t know how you lie, I recommend that you start paying attention. No matter how often we may suspect others of lying, we rarely know they are lying. Because it is hard to know, we can think lots of things about lying that may be based on bad input (we thought they were lying but they weren’t). Ourselves on the other hand? We always know when we are lying. This means that analyzing how we lie pulls from that unicorn of deception research: situations where we know the ground truth of the matter. 

Aldert Vrij is one of the most cited persons on the topic of detecting deception. He uses the phrase “ground truth” to refer to what is actually true.2 He writes extensively about how the weaknesses in many of the attempts to detect deception is that the ground truth isn’t known. In Detecting Lies and Deceit he writes, “Establishing the ground truth, however, is crucial in field deception research. Only when ground truth is established can researchers conclude with certainty that all the alleged truth tellers in their study were actually telling the truth and that all the alleged liars were actually lying. Certainty about truth status of all the examinees in a study is essential for drawing any conclusions or for being able to trust the outcomes.”3 Here you are, a walking talking laboratory, lying .59 - 1.56 times per day and not collecting any of the research. Shame. 

Let’s look at a situation that I know the ground truth of. I know it because I did it. Recently, I sold a nice watch to a friend. My kids were with me, and they saw the transaction. When my wife came home, she asked me about our day. I listed off all the things we did without mentioning meeting my friend for lunch or selling him the watch. Later, the kids told my wife about daddy selling his watch. She turned to look at me. One of the kids chimed in, “How much did you sell it for, dad?” “None of your business.” Then my wife asked. I told her how much I sold it for. She said, “You didn’t mention selling the watch.” I said, “I didn’t not mention selling the watch.” When the opportunity came up, I gladly switched the subject. I had other plans for the money that might not have been plans we both would have agreed on.

So what strategies did I use here? First, I omitted the information when discussing our activities that day. Second, once we started talking about the watch I “attacked” the interviewer by saying it was none of their business what I sold it for. Third, I changed the subject to avoid talking more about what was going to happen with the money. Every single one of these strategies is used by people you will be interviewing.

If you can really tune into yourself, you can also pay attention to nonverbal things that you do when you lie. When I was caught in #watchgate, I felt my heart rate increase, the heat in my face increase, and increased rate of speech. As much as the scientists like Vrij (cited above) hate nonverbals, they are a real thing. They aren’t easy to interpret, but, maybe as you continue to pay attention to how you lie, you’ll be more interested in directing follow up questions to the topics under discussion when you notice them. I guarantee that I’ll be suspicious if those family members from Christmas talk to me all wide-eyed or wavey-handey like they did when they were fabricating their stories.

If you can learn how you lie, you’ll be better able to spot how other people lie. How did you approach that omission? How might you gain insight into a suspect doing the same with that knowledge? How could you counteract it? What crafty language do you use when you want to mislead? Is that something you could spot in another person? How do you feel when you are confronted about a lie? If the interviewee felt like you felt, what would be the key to get them to open up? 

As a bonus, being real with yourself about misleading statements and other tricky lies might make you wonder if you should just … tell the truth? Until that day of radical honesty comes, though, you might as well learn from yourself.

Lying is such a complex topic. I hope that this article helps shed some light on spotting lies in the interview room and what to do about them. Your best guide to the truth are your case facts, things you know to be true. Expect people to lie by omission as much as possible. Be alert for evasiveness. Stick with the questioning until the liar has no choice but to fabricate. Gain insight into how others lie by paying attention to how you lie. As always, experience is the best teacher. Prepare. Call that suspect. Get in the room.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to buy me a coffee. No pressure at all.

1.  Our court system knows a thing or two about how people lie, which is why, when we are sworn in, we are usually asked to swear, “To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Demanding that we swear to tell the truth addresses those that might have ideas of lying by fabrication. To tell the whole truth addresses those that might have ideas of lying by omission. To tell nothing but the truth addresses those that might have ideas of lying by distractions and other stratagems. It’s a well-crafted oath that anticipates all of the varied ways people lie. 

2. Dopamine Nation p.171 Dr. Anna Lembke