Why don't we catch liars? - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

Social Research, Fall, 1996 by Paul Ekman

Granting that our evidence is not conclusive, nevertheless, our videotapes do contain behavioral clues to deceit, which some people can recognize accurately but most do not. For the purpose of this discussion, let us consider this evidence as suggesting that in actual life most people, the overwhelming majority of people, do not detect high stake lies from demeanor. The question I pose is why not, why can we not all do better at this? It is not that we do not care. Public opinion polls time and again show that honesty is among the top five characteristics people want in a leader, friend, or lover. And the world of entertainment is full of stories, films, and songs which describe the tragic consequences of betrayal.

My first explanation of why we may be such poor lie catchers is that we are not prepared by our evolutionary history to be either very good lie catchers or lie perpetrators.[1] I suspect that our ancestral environment was not one in which there were many opportunities to lie and get away with it, and the costs for being caught in a lie might have been severe. If this speculation is correct, there would not have been any selection for those people who were unusually adept in catching or perpetrating lies. The fossil record does not tell us much about social life, so one must speculate about what life as hunter-gatherers might have been like. I add to that my experience thirty years ago working in what was then a stone-age preliterate culture in what is now called Papua New Guinea.

There were no rooms with doors, little privacy in this group living, small village, in which everyone knew and saw everyone else every day. Lies would most often be betrayed by the target or someone else observing actions which contradicted the lie or by other physical evidence. Adultery was an activity which lying often attempted to conceal in the village where I lived. Such lies were uncovered not by reading the betrayer's demeanor when proclaiming fidelity, but by stumbling over him or her in the bush.

Perhaps lies about beliefs, emotions, and plans could have better avoided detection in such an environment.[2] But some of those lies would eventually lead to one or another action, and then my argument about how hard it is to conceal or falsify actions in a setting in which there is no privacy would apply.

In a society in which an individual's survival depended on cooperative efforts with other members of their village, the reputational loss for being caught in a high stake lie might well be deadly. No one might cooperate with someone known to have engaged in serious lies. One could not change spouses, jobs, or villages with any ease.

Cheney and Seyfarth ( 1990), in their chapter on animal deception, make very similar points. An important constraint against lying

. . . arises from a species social structure. Animals that live in

stable social groups face special problems in any attempt at

deceptive communication.... Among socially living animals deceptive

signals will probably have to be more subtle and occur at lower