Here is a snippet of another of the videos Levine showed me. It’s of a young woman—let’s call her Sally. Levine walked her through the straightforward questions without incident. Then came the crucial moment:
Interviewer: Now, did any cheating occur when Rachel left the room?
Sally: No.
Interviewer: Are you telling me the truth?
Sally: Yeah.
Interviewer: When I interview your partner, I’m going to ask her the same question. What is she going to say?
Sally pauses, looks uncertain.
Sally: Probably…the same answer.
Interviewer: Okay.
The moment Levine asks the question “Did any cheating occur?” Sally’s arms and face begin to turn a bright red. Calling it an embarrassed blush doesn’t quite do it justice. Sally gives a whole new meaning to the expression “caught red-handed.” Then comes the critical question: What will your partner say? Blushing Sally can’t even come up with a convincing “She’ll agree with me.” She hems and haws and says, weakly, “Probably…the same answer.” Probably? Blushing Sally is lying, and everyone called in to judge the tape realizes she’s lying.
Here’s the next tape Levine showed me. It’s of a woman who spent the entire interview obsessively playing with her hair. Let’s call her Nervous Nelly.
Interviewer: Now, Rachel had to get called out of the room. Did any cheating occur when she was gone?
Nervous Nelly: Actually my partner did want to look at the scores, and I said no—was like, “I want to see how many we got right”—because I don’t cheat. I think it’s wrong, so I didn’t. I told her no. I was like, “I don’t want to do that.” But she did say, “Well, we’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I don’t know if that was part of it or not, but no, we didn’t do that.
Interviewer: OK, so are you telling me the truth about the cheating?
Nervous Nelly: Yeah, we didn’t—she wanted…my partner honestly said, “We’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, that’s not cool, I don’t want to do that.” The only thing I said was, “I’m surprised they left all the money in here.” I honestly don’t steal or cheat, I’m a good person like that. I was just kind of surprised, because normally when people leave money behind, you are going to take it—that’s just what everybody does. But no, we didn’t cheat. We didn’t steal anything.
The twirling of the hair never stops. Nor do the halting, overly defensive, repetitive explanations, nor the fidgeting and the low-level agitation.
Interviewer: OK, so when I call in your partner for an interview, what is she going to say to that question?
Nervous Nelly: I think she’ll say that she wanted to look.
Interviewer: OK.
Nervous Nelly: If she says otherwise, then that’s not cool at all, because I said, “No, I don’t want to cheat at all.” She just said, “Why not just look at one?” She said, “Well, the answers are right there,” and I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am. It’s not what I do.”
I was convinced Nervous Nelly was lying. You would conclude the same, if you saw her in action. Everybody thought Nervous Nelly was lying. But she wasn’t! When her partner reported back to Levine, he confirmed everything Nervous Nelly said.
Levine found this pattern again and again. In one experiment, for instance, there was a group of interviewees whom 80 percent of the judges got wrong. And another group whom more than 80 percent got right.
So what’s the explanation? Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.
This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like our stereotype of how a liar acts. And she also happens to be lying. That’s why we all get her right. In the Friends episode, when Monica finally breaks the news to her brother Ross about her relationship, she takes Ross’s hand and says, “I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. I’m sorry. But it’s true, I love him too.” We believe her in that moment—that she is genuinely sorry and genuinely in love, because she’s perfectly matched. She’s being sincere and she looks sincere.
When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed. Nervous Nelly is mismatched. She looks like she’s lying, but she’s not. She’s just nervous! In other words, human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.
At one point in his pursuit of Bernie Madoff, Harry Markopolos approached a seasoned financial journalist named Michael Ocrant. Markopolos persuaded Ocrant to take Madoff seriously as a potential fraud, to the point that Ocrant made an appointment to interview Madoff in person. But what happened?
“It wasn’t so much his answers that impressed me, but rather it was his entire demeanor,” Ocrant said years later.
It was almost impossible to sit there with him and believe he was a complete fraud. I remember thinking to myself, If [Markopolos’s team] is right and he’s running a Ponzi scheme, he’s either the best actor I’ve ever seen or a total sociopath. There wasn’t even a hint of guilt or shame or remorse. He was very low-key, almost as if he found the interview amusing. His attitude was sort of “Who in their right mind could doubt me? I can’t believe people care about this.”
Madoff was mismatched. He was a liar with the demeanor of an honest man. And Ocrant—who knew, on an intellectual level, that something was not right—was so swayed by meeting Madoff that he dropped the story. Can you blame him? First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it’s not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.
And why did so many of the British politicians who met with Hitler misread him so badly? Because Hitler was mismatched as well. Remember Chamberlain’s remark about how Hitler greeted him with a double-handed handshake, which Chamberlain believed Hitler reserved for people he liked and trusted? For many of us, a warm and enthusiastic handshake does mean that we feel warm and enthusiastic about the person we’re meeting. But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts honest.1