Why I don’t trust people who think they can tell when you’re lying.
I’ve watched a lot of videos and stuff, including TED talks, by people who think they can tell when people are lying. They often have a list of things people do when they’re lying. And I do believe that in many instances, those things really happen when someone is lying.
The problem is that those same things? They’re what a person looks like when they are desperately trying to look as if they are telling the truth, but are afraid they won’t be believed. That’s the underlying thing people are seeing. Not lying specifically, but a whole range of scenarios, of which lying is only one possibility.
I have a friend who has a problem, and I’m not able to explain it to hir because sie would take it badly. But basically, whenever sie wants to sound sincere, sie writes in the most purple prose imaginable. It looks completely fake and insincere and exaggerated, even though sie is telling the truth.
Similarly, when I want to make sure that people know I am telling the truth, I add in a lot of detail. I put in as much detail as I can possibly remember. Because I assume that people will realize that a lie would have trouble being that detailed. But it turns out that these ‘human lie detector’ people say that giving a lot of details is a sign you’re lying. No, it’s a sign you’re trying to sound truthful. It happens when you’re lying, but it also happens when you want people to believe you but aren’t sure they will.
And that’s what it seems like 90% of these “how to tell when someone’s lying” attributes are: They’re either what happens when you’re trying really hard to sound like you’re telling the truth when you don’t think people are likely to believe you. Or else they’re signs of nervousness about whether people can tell you’re telling the truth or not. Or they’re some combination of the two.
And those combinations, yes, they happen when you’re lying. But they also happen for a lot of other reasons. Like if you’re the sort of person who isn't used to being believed. Or if you aren’t usually believed about a particular topic. Or if a particular topic makes you emotional and nervous in certain ways. Or if you’ve been told that you’re a liar so often you almost believe it. Or... there’s so many possibilities.
So I think these human lie detector people need to be more honest, themselves: Instead of saying “I can tell when someone is lying,” they should be saying, “I can tell when someone is anything from anxious to desperate to be seen as if they are telling the truth, and for many possible reasons believes they will not be seen that way.”
And they also need to get real about body language. Being autistic or otherwise neurodivergent can completely mess up normal body language. Sometimes to our favor with these people -- they say steady eye contact can be as much a sign of lying as anything else. Sometimes to our disfavor -- they say that an obvious display of certain emotions means someone is likely telling the truth... and many neurodivergent people know all about how our emotions get misread time and time again.(1)
TL;DR: People who think they are experts on lying and can tell when other people are lying, frequently are picking up on something. But at best, they’re picking up on people who don’t expect others to believe them, and are trying to look, act, or sound believable. Which is a good description of someone who’s lying, but it’s also a good description of a number of people who are telling the truth but don’t expect to be believed. And at worst, they’re picking up on things like neurodivergence, which can cause people’s words and emotional reactions to be more unpredictable than these “experts” seem to be able to handle. So I worry for all the people who will be wrongly judged, whenever I see anyone talking about how to “spot liars easily” or some such nonsense.
(1) I laughed when my hamster died, not because I was happy or amused, but because I was horrified at this animal turning cold in my hands and blood coming out her nose. My (also autistic) brother and I started referring to this sort of thing as the dead hamster laugh.(2) And while autistic people and some other neurodivergent people (schizophrenic people are the best known for it but it happens to others) are more likely to laugh or smile in “inappropriate” situations.
It’s long been known, for instance, that even neurotypical people laugh in situations causing extreme stress. People have been known to collapse into hysterical laughter at funerals. When nothing about the funeral is funny, they’ve just lost a loved one, and they feel terrible. If they don’t know about the dead hamster laugh, they then feel even more terrible, like something is wrong with them for laughing when they “should be” crying.
In reality, there is very little “should” when it comes to grief. The stages of grief don’t even apply to most people, or people do go through them but in the “wrong” order, or mixing them up and mixing in other things. In fact, the stages of grief were never meant to be the stages the living went through after someone died, they were meant to be about the stages the dying go through as they are trying to come to terms with their own mortality. But even then, people get it wrong.
At any rate, people often laugh when they lose a loved one. Or smile uncontrollably, which really should be termed a grimace. And neurodivergent people are even more likely to have “inappropriate” displays of emotion. It’s considered inappropriate if it’s not what a neurotypical person would be expected to do under the circumstances. (Sometimes it is something neurotypicals would do, but they’re just presumed not to do it.)
It can be considered inappropriate due to the degree of emotion we show -- ”too little” or “too much” compared to some arbitrary cultural standard. For instance, I helped my therapist pick out a fish, and I started dancing around the pet store flapping my hands with excitement and exclaiming “A fish!” over and over. When we got back to the facility I was living at, he gave me a long lecture on why this display of emotion was “socially inappropriate to the circumstances” or something like that.
Or it can also be considered inappropriate due to the kind of emotion we show -- smiling or laughing because we are highly upset or disturbed by something, for instance. I’ve already mentioned the dead hamster laugh many times, because it’s a good example, and the situation is famous, or infamous, with certain types of neurodivergent people.
And either of these types of “inappropriate” emotions can be used against us. Even my writing about the dead hamster laugh, explicitly saying that it happened because I’m upset and not because I’m happy, has caused some people to say I’m a sociopath who enjoys the suffering and death of other people.
And there are a million ways that these human lie detectors think they can tell when someone is lying by what emotion they are displaying. For instance, one woman said that a person who is telling the truth and accused of lying will be visibly outraged. But this isn’t true. Not everyone’s outrage is visible in any typical sense -- some people simply don’t show anger in a visible way, and other people show it in ways that don't look like anger. Jane Meyerding, an autistic woman, describes looking angry when frustrated and crying when angry. The crying when angry is frequently misinterpreted, much to her frustration. And other people just don’t get angry in that situation, especially people who have been made to feel their experience of the world is not valid -- which goes for a large amount of neurodivergent people, other oppressed people, as well as people who have been subject to abuse for a long time. You get the idea.
(2) Yes, that’s a link to an entire post I made about the dead hamster laugh. It was written a long time ago but it’s still worth a look. Just please understand, especially now that I had to add that introduction: I am writing about laughing because something is horribly upsetting to me. I am not writing about laughing because I secretly enjoy watching horrible things happen to people. If I enjoyed watching horrible things happen to people, I sure as hell wouldn’t write a post drawing attention to ‘evidence’ of that fact. But then making sense was never these people’s strong suit, they just fling shit to see if it will stick.
