It's the week after the holidays, and for the last month you and your significant other
have been going to friends’ holiday parties and family get togethers stretching back to
Thanksgiving.
As normal for the season, both of you have packed on a few pounds from all that goodness
being served up in heaping helpings, and now your partner is getting ready for work when
suddenly they stop.
Turning towards you, your panicked mind can already tell the words they’re about to
speak even before their lips form them: do you think I've put on weight?
You hesitate with your answer hoping that in the half-second between them asking and
you having to answer that the earth will suddenly swallow you up.
Maybe that 'big one' everybody's always talking about will finally hit the West coast and
rock the nation.
Maybe Yellowstone will finally blow up.
Maybe World War III will start.
But no, nothing happens except for the ever-lengthening stretch of silence and your partner’s growing
inquisitive look.
“Do you think I've put on weight?”, the words rattle in your head as you recall the
moment you fell in love together and vowed that you would always tell the truth to your
most important person in the world, because they deserve it, they’re worth it!
So, what do you do?
If you're like most people you tell one of the little white lies that we've all come
to accept as part of our social norms.
Honesty is a golden virtue, and nobody likes a dirty liar.
And yet, we grease the wheels of our social interactions every single day with a plethora
of little white lies, all meant to help smooth the daily interactions that our modern city-oriented
lifestyles besiege us with.
Sometimes telling the truth just isn't worth it.
We all lie, but how much we lie varies on individual morals- it turns out though that
how much we expect people to lie depends on their line of work.
One study showed that 94% of people expect politicians to lie in their line of work,
and we would really like to meet that other six percent who genuinely think they don’t.
That same study showed that only 27% of people expect their doctors to lie in the course
of their work.
This disparity is rather interesting when you consider that we probably don't expect
our doctors to lie because lives depend on their integrity, and yet for a politician
the fate of entire nations could rest on their own truthfulness as well.
So whether you're a polite little white liar, or a liar-liar with pants currently on fire,
what exactly goes on in your brain and your body when you tell a lie, and how can you
catch a would-be liar?
When we lie often we're given away by the fact that we're simply unable to cue up our
verbal and nonverbal behaviors.
Our facial expressions may not match the words we're saying, or our posture could be out
of sync with our voice.
These changes may seem subtle- because they are- but after hundreds of thousands of years
of communicating amongst each other we have become evolutionarily hardwired to detect
even minute changes in body language.
Some of us just happen to be better at it than others.
So one of the first things that happen when you lie is you start acting very artificial
and inauthentically, setting off the 'weird' alarm deep inside your victim's primitive
brain.
Their evolutionary training sets off an alarm that something is not quite right about the
way you're moving your body in relation to your voice, or that your face isn't quite
syncing up with the sadness you're supposed to feel when you're late to work because a
truck full of orphans overturned on the freeway and you had to help give CPR.
The act of lying involves a careful balancing act on the behalf of the liar which can leave
the overworked brain unable to sync up the proper physical movements or emotional displays.
That's because when you lie you are trying to keep track of several narratives all at
the same time: 1.
What you know is true: There was no truck full of orphans on the freeway and instead
you're late because you just had to squeeze in one more match of Fortnite before work.
2.
What you want to be true: I wish there really was a truckload of orphans on the freeway
that overturned because that would have been a really handy excuse for being late to work
and you'd get to look like a hero for giving them CPR.
3.
What you're presenting as true: A truckload of orphans in fact overturned on the freeway,
and then some stray kittens were caught in the accident, and you had to stop and give
CPR to all of them- and that's why you're late.
4.
All the proper emotions that are supposed to accompany your made-up narrative: fear
when the truck full of orphans overturned, sadness when they were injured, and determination
as you set about giving each orphan and stray kitten CPR.
It turns out that managing all of these thoughts at the same time, and then trying to fabricate
the proper physical reaction is pretty difficult, and can lead to inauthentic displays which
put people off your lies.
As you begin to weave your tragic tale of trucks, orphans, and kittens, your brain fires
up your frontal lobe which is directly involved in suppressing or inhibiting the truth.
The act of imagining things, which is in effect nothing but the exercise of creating lies,
is believed to involve activity that passes straight through the frontal lobe, and that's
no accident.
The limbic system is then activated due to a flood of stress hormones which are themselves
caused by the rising anxiety your brain starts to feel.
Fear of being caught in a lie and the mental gymnastics required to successfully pull a
lie off all take a huge toll on your brain, and your brain's electrical activity makes
it light up like a christmas tree due to all the frantic activity that takes place.
By contrast, telling the truth requires far less brain activity and keeps the brain relatively
quiet.
Because you're telling a giant whopper though your brain is practically doing somersaults
as it fires up the regions of the brain needed for imagination, the part of the brain that
accesses your memories so you can make sure your lie lines up somewhat with reality, and
the part of the brain that coordinates your body's physical reactions so it can sell the
lie.
Basically you're putting your poor brain through a triathlon and this causes a huge stress
response- this rise in stress signals throughout the body is exactly what a lie detector is
tuned to detect by the way.
With all that stress your heart starts beating just a little bit faster- the bigger the whopper
or the greater the consequences, the more your heart beats.
Many people will often experience a telltale reddening of the ears as well as the blood
rushes to the overworked brain, however this is not necessarily an accurate method of detecting
a lie as being part of a stressful situation can often produce the same effect.
If your ears suddenly start burning red in the middle of normal conversation though,
this can be a pretty good indicator to people around you that you're telling a fib.
Some people believe that you can tell if someone is lying by their eye movements- erratic movements
or an inability to meet your gauze is often considered a sign of lying, but the truth
is far more complicated than that.
Most people have normally very active eyes when they are in the midst of conversation,
but it’s hypothesized by some that you can tell what a person is thinking about by simply
observing how they move their eyes as they talk to you.
If someone looks up and to the left they are typically thinking about an image that they
had to construct themselves, something they are being asked to imagine.
Moving up and to the right on the other hand typically signifies that someone is thinking
of an image that they have previously seen and are trying to remember.
This could be a handy way of spotting a liar, if the question you are asking is something
visually centered.
For example, asking someone if they really did see something they claim to have seen
would likely have the person either looking up and left because they are trying to imagine
what it is that they claimed to have seen so they can answer follow-on questions, or
up and to the right because they are genuinely recalling a visual memory of what they saw.
But this connection between eye movement and cognitive function has been called into question
by many and has yet to be conclusively proven one way or the other.
Lying and the physical stress it causes also tends to manifest in the shoulders, and you
might see someone literally bending over slightly from the sheer weight of the mega-whopper
they've been telling.
A very slight crunch or roll in the shoulders could be indicative of the weight of someone's
untruth as it rests on their mind.
Often someone under the stress of a particularly big lie will engage in self-pacifying actions,
small gestures that bring comfort and help calm us in very stressful situations.
This can include things such as touching your face, licking your lips, or massaging your
neck- though again, these signs typically only manifest during large or stressful lies.
Overwhelmingly though the stress of a lie will lead to higher blood pressure, as well
as an increase in respiration.
If someone appears to be breathing just a tad bit faster than normal this could be a
strong indicator that they are telling you a lie.
The average person lies 1.5 times within the first minute of meeting someone.
The vast majority of this is of course the greasing of social wheels which makes our
daily lives livable, yet the stress of telling real lies is proven to be detrimental to your
health.
Lies force your brain to work overtime and your body to respond as if in a high-stress
situation.
The more you lie, and the more you have to keep up with old lies and pretend you're not
lying, the more stressed out your body and brain become.
So take a cue from us and learn to live telling the truth, because in the end it turns out
that honestly really is the best medicine in this case.
Sure, you might have to deal with a few awkward social situations, but as long as you're respectful
and polite, people will learn to value and even admire you for your unshakable integrity-
and anyone who doesn't, frankly isn't someone worth keeping in your life in the first place,
because they're probably a liar themselves.
How many lies a day do you think you tell?
What's the biggest whopper you ever told?
Let us know in the comments, and as always if you enjoyed this video don't forget to
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