Cassowary Crossing

LIAR, LIAR
Read this story about lying and you’ll lose 5 kilos, honest.

(c) David Astle

Ever thrown a sickie? Evaded a fare? Nibbled a grape in the checkout queue? Say, is that your natural hair colour? Your real nose? Ever made a racist remark? Ignored a road rule? Surfed the galleries of www.waikikilove.com? (Don’t bother – I made it up.)

We all lie. From Santa on, we fib. From small talk to pillow talk, from tall tales at Friday drinks to golf handicaps, we morph the truth. According to a survey cited by London’s Sunday Times last November – which I happen to believe – we tell 20 lies a day, from white lies to whoppers. As they say, those who say they never lie, are lying.

Not that apes can talk. A captive gorilla at Stanford University named Koko was schooled in a 1000 sign-words, from Foot to Hungry. One day, blind with rage, Koko ripped his sink from the wall. Who did this, signed his captors – who already knew. Rabbit done it, signed Koko, framing his stuffed toy.

Your daughter plays Frere Jacques in E Minor. The tune dwindles to its natural death. She puts the recorder down and says, “Did you like that?”

Instead of no, you say “I love how you did that first bit.” This is Lying by Evasion.

Your boss wants to know if you’ve finished the Carmichael Report – which you’ve never even heard about. Instead of looking the nong you say, “I’m all over it.” Lying by Deceit.

“Is there something I need to know?” asks your friend, whose husband you know is sleeping with the landscaper (male).

The best you can manage is Lying by Omission: “Have you seen Brokeback Mountain yet?”

Lies fall into four categories: the kind lie told out of empathy (“Your bum looks fine in that”), the self-enhancement lie (“I’m fluent in Quark”), the selfish lie said at the expense of another party (“I’d never get drunk like that damn vamp”) and the downright anti-social lie aimed at besmirching your stuffed rabbit for example.

Job interviews are almost skits devoted to deceit. In a 2001 British survey, nearly a third of applicants confessed to misleading their would-be employers. In China, a census of the same year revealed that the number of citizens claiming to carry recent diplomas was 600,000 higher than actual diplomas issued. To lie, it seems, is human. To plagiarise Maureen Dowd, our race seems survival of the fakest.

Kids learn the art of guile from three onwards, as soon as they twig that integrity lacks all the benefits. While traveling in a train, Steve van Aperen overheard a 6-year-old girl say to her Mum: “Look at that fat man over there.”

Van Aperen, 42, who isn’t fat, just happens to be this country’s best lie-spotter. He listened as the mother told the girl – in so many words – that saying what you really thin can get you into trouble.

“Most parents teach their kids to be up-front and truthful,” says van Aperen, an FBI-trained expert in polygraph testing and interview techniques, “until the kids practice honesty, and they’re maligned for it.”

I’m sitting in a blank room, central Melbourne, facing Steve van Aperen across a blank desk. He’s lean, attentive, unblinking; a red pen and notepad are his only props. Every week in the same neutral space the man quizzes alleged fraudsters, thieves and sex offenders to see if their stories have cracks.

“Up to 80 percent of communication is non-verbal,” says the former detective, co-author of The Truth About Lies. “I look for conflict and contradictions between what a person is saying, and what they’re doing. Too often we try to find fault with content (rather than delivery).”

Pity Saskia, his partner. “I’m probably a little more observant than the average person,” the bloke concedes, “but [socially] I have to let some lies go.” Nonetheless, years before, van Aperen caught a previous girlfriend lying about fidelity. “She couldn’t answer directly. She kept deflecting. It was so obvious. Eventually I said, look you know what job I do – and she opened up.”

Logically, liars are aware they’re lying. You can’t tell a deliberate falsehood without knowing the truth you’re trying to avoid. As a consequence, the brain works twice as hard when fibbing – with seven hotspots blipping in the skull versus the honest person’s four. (Lying, we tax the additional areas of inhibition, judgment and planning.) Such inner turmoil shows on the surface – at least to Steve van Aperen’s eye.

“The skin pales,” he says. “Sweat beads on the forehead. Speech patterns fluctuate, along with your normal tone. The fillers [ums and ahs] creep in. And there’s even a particular chemical that makes the tip of your nose itchy, so the Pinocchio theory’s not far from the truth.”

When a child breaks a window, the need to lie gnaws his conscience. Vincent van Gogh described conscience as our moral compass. Essayist HL Mencken dubbed the same property as “that wee inner voice that someone else is watching”. Even psychopaths, devoid of empathy, are fretful over consequence, loading their lies with as much psychic toll as yours and mine.

Glass everywhere, the child connives. A direct question is seen as a punishment in disguise. Hence their hands will travel to their mouths to “screen” the deceit of denial. While far more polished, grownups succumb to a similar impulse. Either we fidget with our hands or enter lockdown, where hands are banished to the side in case their movements draw attention to our codswallop.

Vaguing out is anther tack common to liars. (“Yeah…I guess you could kinda see it that way, but…”) Or we distance the truth as a means of disowning blame. Actor Sean Penn, on being accused of squirting piddle at reporters through a water pistol, produced this gem: “I’d like to see it happen to certain members of the press but I don’t know if I ever did it. I would like to think that I didn’t.”

Listen to Bill Clinton’s Monica speech of 1998, denying canoodles with his young intern – a defence we later learnt as false. When a finger wasn’t scratching the presidential nose, Clinton refused to use Monica Lewinsky’s name. She became “that woman” – a character in a piece of wishful fiction.

Both examples shine in their round-about-ness, just as the direct denials of Schapelle Corby – facing Channel 9 reporter Liz Hayes – do not:

Hayes: They’re not your drugs?
Corby: They’re not my drugs. I didn’t put them there.

Such clarity compares to the plain answers given by former federal defence adviser, Mike Scrafton, when challenged on the Children Overboard Scandal in 2004.

Wired to van Aperen’s own polygraph – an instrument devised to detect changes in a person’s physiology – the ex-advisor passed unscathed. Invited to supply the government’s version of events, PM John Howard replied, “I’m not getting into gimmicks like that.”

So who tells the best lies, and who’s the cream among the amateur spotters? People with the most to lose (think executives, politicians, upstarts) tend to out-fib others, mainly as a means of protecting their patch. “It’s seeing success at any cost,” explains Grant Brecht, a Sydney psychologist who specializes in moral intelligence.

“If leaders are too heavy into power, or being oppositional in order to maintain status, then it’s more likely they’ll feel the need to tell untruths.” Equivalent mischief thrives in social circles where self-enhancement fibs are rampant, most often told by those with the looks or loot to help parcel the baloney. Beware the blonde, or the McMansion resident: their tongues may be forked.

Yet lying as a two-way street, says Brecht. “People aren’t very good at accepting truth which is why people continue to lie. It’s a great disincentive to know that if you tell the truth others will beat you up or wrench away your self-esteem. Moral intelligence is
about being able to tell the truth, and having those around you who can accept it.”

As for picking out Pinocchio from among the puritans, men and women share the honours – though in different regards.

A 2005 study conducted by Hertfordshire University revealed men (no surprises) possess an inferior emotional range. While females are generally better at gauging the sincerity of human interaction, it is the same male deficit that allows His Shrewdness to filter out the warm-and-fuzzy and focus on the message – or lie. It’s like analyzing a chick-flick script without a distracted heart.

Deep in the Amazon jungle, a million miles from chick flicks, the Tariana people recognize the need for truth. “Their language comes with an evidence component,” explains Professor Sasha Aikhenvald of Monash University, who studied the tribe back in Brazil. The ancient grammar demands proof for all spoken statements: ‘a deer went past (visual)’, or ‘the river is cold (someone told me).’ Piranha aside, I say the West would last five minutes under that kind of rigour.

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HOW TO SPOT A LIAR

Every spoken message has three streams for us to focus on – each with potential to pick out the twaddle from the truth.

Verbal

Words often fail the liar. He’s prone to the pre-pause (concocting a reply) as well as the running space-fillers of um, er and ah. Details lose colour and precision. Tense patterns can skew, with a tendency to depersonalize the story. (“With parachuting, what you do is…”). Irrelevant details creep in, just as time sequences can loop to cover cracks.

Non-Verbal

With over 90 muscles in the face, we can display some 10,000 micro-expressions, many of these clear stress signals such as furrowed brow, fake smile, drawn mouth etc Eye contact, despite popular thinking, can increase via lying, as the speaker measures your response. Hands will fidget or freeze. As a distance ploy, most liars will drift back or angle their body to one side.

Paralingual

Police interviewers call it calibrating: listening to a suspect’s tone and pitch when telling the truth (responding to innocuous questions) versus his response to the core accusation. A liar’s voice is laden with suppressed emotion, as if the truth needs squashing. The tall tale is either slick (rehearsed) or staccato (ad hoc), and seldom delivered at natural pace.

[Sunday Life, October 2007]