CHAPTER 3
Why We Believe Liars and Play into Their Hands
BERNARD MADOFF, MASTER MANIPULATOR AND WORLD-class fraud, bilked thousands of investors out of roughly $20 billion over a period of some 40 years.1 Have you ever wondered why so many people trusted him for so long?
The answer is simple, really: Like all master frauds, he was totally convincing. He had the right credentials, wore the right clothes, belonged to the right clubs, socialized with the right people, and dropped the right names at the right moments—without appearing to be doing anything more sinister than telling an anecdote about an old friend who just happened to be well positioned and well respected. But just as important as all that, people trusted Madoff because they wanted to trust him.
How do I know? Because that’s human nature. And anyone who thinks he or she is too sharp to be taken in by a con man like Bernie Madoff had better read this chapter with particular care.
Recognizing that we are being lied to is an important social and business skill. If it were only a matter of paying closer attention to verbal and nonverbal cues, all that we’d require to become polished deception-detectors is in the previous chapter. But it’s not that simple. Surprisingly small factors—where we meet people, what they wear, what their voices sound like, whether their posture mimics ours, if they mention the names of people we know or admire—can enhance their credibility to the extent that it actually nullifies our ability to make sound judgments about them. Our own unconscious biases, vanities, desires, and self-deceptions only add to the hijacking of our reason. When we put our faith in a co-worker we don’t really know, or hire someone we haven’t properly vetted, or give our life savings to a seemingly nice man on the basis of good vibes, we almost always do so for reasons of which we are completely unaware.
Did you know that there are facial features that we innately trust or mistrust? By studying people’s reactions to a range of artificially generated faces, researchers in Princeton’s Department of Psychology found that faces with high inner eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones, and a wide chin struck people as trustworthy.2 Conversely, faces with low inner brows, shallow cheekbones, and a thin chin were deemed untrustworthy. Of course, you and I realize that eyebrow shapes and cheekbones have no correlation to truth or deception, but unconsciously we override our rational minds and make an instant and instinctive judgment. We just can’t help ourselves.
In another series of experiments, researchers at the Kellogg School of Management used subliminal cues, such as mentioning the name of a good friend, to trigger feelings of trust for a stranger.3 These studies also showed that a potentially risky decision to trust someone could begin below an individual’s conscious awareness—before there has been time to evaluate or verify the subject’s track record, for example, or inquire about his reputation.
Lasting Impact of Snap Judgments
Two seconds—30 seconds, tops—is all the time it takes you to assess the confidence, competence, status, likeability, warmth, and, yes, trustworthiness of someone you’ve just met. In fact, it’s impossible not to make these snap judgments about people. Human beings are wired that way. Why? Blame it on the limbic brain.
According to the triune brain theory, our gray matter is actually three brains in one: The reptilian brain controls the body’s vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, temperature, and balance. The cortical brain handles activities such as language, analysis, and strategizing (the seat of our conscious thought is here in the prefrontal cortex). But it is the limbic brain that is most responsible for the value judgments that strongly influence our reactions and behaviors.
The limbic system, in particular the amygdala, is the first part of the brain to receive information and react to it. The amygdala takes in all incoming stimuli and decides instantly whether it is threatening. Before our conscious mind has had time to evaluate the truthfulness of someone’s statement, the limbic brain has already made a decision about the potential threat. Because these decisions are made without conscious deliberation, they affect us with the immediacy and the power of an old-brain survival imperative—unconsidered, unannounced, and in most cases impossible to resist.
We decide whether to trust someone almost immediately after meeting them, and although this first impression can, and often should, be revised, there are powerful psychological forces that prevent us from doing so. Once we are convinced that someone is honest or deceptive, we will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to reinforce our initial judgment.
We’re All Biased
Biases result from the mental shortcuts we unconsciously revert to when facing otherwise overwhelming information-processing demands. For example, in a negotiation we need to carry on a conversation while simultaneously evaluating the risks and the payoffs of the offers coming across the table and making judgments about the person making those offers.
Because few of us have the mental agility to consciously perceive and process all of the factors needed to make such calculations, we rely on estimates—or guesses—based on our past experiences, preconceptions, and biases. While these mental shortcuts work reasonably well most of the time, they also leave us vulnerable to a variety of judgment traps. When faced with a practiced liar, for instance, our usually reliable biases lead us to misidentify or ignore even obvious deception cues—which is precisely what the liar wants us to do.
Whenever we meet new people, our brain automatically and immediately begins to categorize them in some way—male or female, same or different, friend or foe—to predict what is likely to happen next. In 1998 a trio of researchers at the University of Washington introduced a computerized assessment called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has become one of the standard tools for measuring the degree to which an individual’s unconscious mind categorizes people and automatically assigns certain traits to those categories. The IAT has revolutionized the way social scientists look at stereotyping—as the rule rather than the exception.4
When we are deciding whether or not to believe someone, the category we’ve assigned them to—and our past experiences with others from that group—influences our judgment of deception or truthfulness. So, if we previously worked for a female boss who couldn’t be trusted, we are more likely to be suspicious of our current female boss and to look for signs of deception.
Even more insidious, our categories are informed (or misinformed) by what we view in the media. For example, if we are meeting a new team member from a different race or ethnic background than our own, our evaluation of his or her honesty is influenced by the way people from that race or ethnicity are portrayed in the movies or on television and the type of media coverage most associated with them. Research shows that we will react to this influence even when we harbor no conscious prejudice. In fact, one telling finding from the IAT is that there is little correlation between a person’s implicit biases and his or her explicit or conscious bias. In fact, some participants told me they were appalled when they viewed their test results—which were diametrically opposed to beliefs they consciously hold.
Biases That Affect Our Ability to Detect Liars
Some of our biases give people the benefit of the doubt. Other biases lead us to be more skeptical of some people and more trusting of others. Here are a few of the biases that can color our perception and cloud our judgment.
Ingroup/outgroup bias. It is far easier for a deception to be successful when the liar and the person being lied to come from the same background or have similar interests. Even relatively small similarities, like rooting for the same sports team or attending the same seminar, can create a bond. That’s because of a well-known principle in social psychology that people define themselves in terms of social groupings: any group that people feel part of is an ingroup, and any group that excludes them is an outgroup. We think differently about members in each group and behave differently toward them. Similarities make us feel comfortable. We assume we know what ingroup people are like: they’re good people—like us! Differences make us a little wary. When we see people as part of an outgroup—especially if we are also prejudiced against that group—we are more likely to judge any negative act as typical of their character and to attribute any positive actions as the exception.
One of the most significant “experiments” on ingroup/outgroup bias was carried out not in a psychology lab but in the schoolroom of an Iowa teacher, Jane Elliot. In 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Elliot decided to address the issue of racial prejudice by dividing her all-white third-grade class into groups on the basis of eye color. As profiled in the PBS Frontline documentary “A Class Divided,”5 Elliot showed how easy it was to turn some of her seven-year-old pupils into a privileged ingroup by telling them that blue-eyed children were “better.” Within minutes the blue-eyed children began to ridicule their unfortunate classmates, calling them “stupid” and shunning them on the playground during recess. And when Elliot then flipped the situation and said that the brown-eyed children were superior, they exacted the same punishments on the blue-eyed students.
Truth bias. The expectation of honesty is another mental shortcut used to bypass the huge clutter of verbal and nonverbal signals that bombard us throughout every conversation. Unless deception is obvious from the start (or unless we have instantly labeled someone as untrustworthy), we focus and fixate on early signs of sincerity and effectively seal ourselves off from conflicting indicators. People who know and like each other are particularly resistant to doubting each other’s truthfulness. Often it seems better to accept what we are told by those we trust and depend on than to challenge their truthfulness. We therefore overlook or explain away statements and nonverbal cues that others would automatically find suspicious.
Appropriate-behavior bias. We all have a tendency to make judgments about another person’s integrity based on our ideas of appropriate behavior. This shows up in lie detection when we believe that we know how we’d act if we were telling the truth—and that other truthful people would or should behave in the same way. In reality, as discussed in chapter 2, there is no universal behavior that signals deception or honesty. People are individuals with their own unique set of verbal and nonverbal behaviors, which, again, is why establishing a clear baseline is so important when trying to separate truthfulness from deceit.
Confirmation bias. There is a magician’s trick called the vanishing-ball illusion, in which a ball tossed in the air seems to disappear—but in reality is never actually thrown. The trick depends on the magician’s skill in creating such a strong expectation of the throw that the audience actually hallucinates having seen it. The trick works because we are psychologically programmed to see what we expect to see.
The popular CBS television show 60 Minutes dramatized confirmation bias with polygraph examiners in a program aired in 1986.6 The show’s staff set up a mock situation in which four polygraph examiners chosen at random from the New York telephone directory were asked to administer polygraph examinations to four different employees of the CBS-owned magazine Popular Photography, regarding the theft of camera equipment (when in fact no theft had occurred).
Each of the four examiners was subtly led to believe that one of the people they were going to test was the likely thief. The examiners found the identified candidates—a different one in each case—to be guilty simply because that’s what they expected would happen.
Attractiveness bias. Unfair though it may be, and even if we proclaim otherwise, we judge people by their appearance. We automatically assign favorable traits to good-looking people, judging them to be more likeable, competent, and honest than unattractive people.
Baby-face bias. There is one set of facial features—large eyes, plump lips, a round face, and a high, smooth forehead—that make an adult face resemble a young child or baby. Baby-face bias is our innate evaluation of people with these features as being more childlike, submissive, naïve, and trustworthy.
Gender bias. Stanford University communication professor Clifford Nass conducted research to see if students would apply gender stereotypes to computerized voices.7 In one study, half the subjects were tutored by computers with male voices and half by computers with female voices. When the material being taught was about love and relationships, students rated their female-voiced tutors as having more sophisticated knowledge of the subject than those who had the male-voiced tutors—even though both voices had given identical lessons.
This particular gender bias would make it easier for females to falsify expertise in topics like social psychology and the arts and for males to fake knowledge about subjects like finance and science.
Dominant-side bias. Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at The New School for Social Research, found that not only did right-handed people associate right with good and left with bad but also that left-handers make the reverse associations.8 His research also demonstrated that we are actually biased in favor of objects and people located on our preferred side. So, as a right-handed person, when liars sit to my right I may be inclined to view their opinions more favorably.
Techniques of Successful Liars
Lying is interactive. The liar is not speaking into a vacuum but rather to us—intelligent, educated listeners. So why are we so easily fooled? Con men and women are successful because of what they know about human nature—and how they use that knowledge to influence us. While there is nothing sinister about understanding human nature and exerting influence (in fact, it’s a business skill worth cultivating), liars use this knowledge to manipulate and deceive. The following are seven techniques used by highly successful deceivers.
Seven Habits of Highly Successful Liars
They mimic us. The extent to which we feel that individuals are similar to ourselves, even on a superficial physical level, has a huge impact on our attitude toward them.
In a recent experiment, volunteers were ostensibly asked for their opinions about a series of advertisements.9 In some cases, a member of the research team mimicked the body language of the participant, taking care not to be too obvious. (Mimicking—or mirroring—is a matter of assuming the same postures, gestures, and facial expressions as the person we’re conversing with.) A few minutes later, the researcher “accidentally” dropped six pens on the floor. Participants who had been mimicked were two to three times more likely to pick up the pens. The study showed that mimicry increased goodwill toward the researcher in a matter of minutes.
People naturally mimic when they are talking with someone they like or are interested in, subconsciously signaling that they are connected and engaged. When done for the purpose of developing genuine rapport, mirroring can be a powerful lever for positive business relationships. Successful liars, however, use mirroring to trick us into believing they are empathetic when in fact they are anything but. Just remember that regardless of legitimate or deceptive intentions, when a person mirrors us we perceive him or her as significantly more persuasive and honest.
They tell us what we want to hear. “Invest with me and get rich.” “If you serve on this committee, you’ll hobnob with the company’s top executives.” “This project will give you the experience and the exposure you need for that next promotion.” “You’ll only have to work overtime on rare occasions.”
Maybe.
Or maybe it’s just a less-than-truthful come-on from people who understand that when they tell us exactly what we want to hear, we are more likely to believe them. Consider the following classic story that has become part of American advertising folklore.10
Shirley Polykoff was an advertising executive in the 1950s. One of her early accounts was Clairol. To turn the image of dyed blonde hair from its association with brassy, “loose” gals to fresh and confident women, she created a campaign using the girl-next-door type of models and the slogan Does she or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural, only her hairdresser knows for sure.
The campaign proved to be a big success. But initially the client wasn’t sure it would be right for Clairol—that is, until the letters came pouring in. One letter in particular caught the client’s attention and was circulated throughout the company: “Thank you for changing my life. My boyfriend, Harold, and I were keeping company for five years but he never wanted to set a date. This made me very nervous. I am 28 and my mother kept saying soon it would be too late for me. Then, I saw a Clairol ad in the subway. I decided to take a chance and dyed my hair blonde, and that is how I am in Bermuda now on my honeymoon with Harold.”
When Polykoff retired in 1973, she was one of the highest-paid talents in the industry and a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame. At her retirement party, she reminisced with the assembled executives about the mountain of mail received after the launch of that first campaign, nearly 20 years earlier. “Remember the letter from the girl who got a Bermuda honeymoon by becoming a blonde?” Polykoff asked. Of course they all did. “Well,” she said, “I wrote it.”
The liar in this example was charming and creative, and the lie was a success story for both Polykoff and Clairol. But that’s not always the case. The most destructive liars—those who steal our money or our hearts—also realize that it’s easier for us to unquestioningly believe them when they tell us exactly what we hope to hear.
They flatter us. Our susceptibility to flattery stems from a simple desire to feel good about ourselves. Whether we realize it or not, we can be unduly influenced by liars who butter us up with compliments about our intellect, taste in clothing, sense of humor, or personal charm. After all, we reason, they are right about those things, so they are probably just as accurate about everything else they tell us.
They charm us. The term halo effect, coined by psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, is a cognitive bias in which our perception of one desirable trait in a person can cause us to judge that person more positively overall.11 When a con artist is charming (and most of them are), we tend to automatically believe that he or she is also perceptive, candid, and totally on our side.
They do favors for us. In July 2012 GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3 billion for promoting drugs for unapproved uses (an illegal practice called off-label marketing) and for failing to report safety data about a diabetes drug to the Food and Drug Administration. In addition, the company was found guilty of paying kickbacks (or sweeteners, as the British call them) to physicians—including Hawaiian vacations, tickets to high-priced concerts, and millions of dollars for speaking tours. While never stated so bluntly, the kickbacks were to entice doctors to prescribe the company’s products.12
But it doesn’t take an unethical favor or expensive bribe to make us feel indebted to someone. And the payback doesn’t have to be stated overtly. A close look at the psychology of relationships reveals that most individuals automatically attempt to keep a mental balance between what they contribute to a relationship and what they get back from it. When someone does even a small favor for us, we feel obligated to reciprocate in some way.
They touch us. Touch is the most primitive and powerful nonverbal signal we experience. Infants deprived of touch have developmental problems physically, psychologically, and emotionally. With adults touch retains its power to affect our feelings. Casual and brief touches on the shoulder, arm, or hand have a much bigger impact than you might guess.
The expression That person is an easy touch refers to the persuasive power of touch. In what has been labeled the compliance effect, a number of research studies have found that touch increases the likelihood that people will do what you request. It’s also been shown that a subject being touched feels increased trust in and connection with the person who initiates the touch.13
They dress the part. Liars realize that their appearance plays a huge role in creating an impression of authority and credibility. The better dressed someone is, the more apt we are to follow their suggestions, even if those suggestions are visual and subtle. One research study shows that a jaywalking man in a business suit will have passersby follow him as he crosses the street—but not so if the same man jaywalks wearing casual attire.14
How We Deceive Ourselves
In his book Why We Lie, David Livingstone Smith theorizes that the unconscious mind frequently scrambles messages before they reach the conscious mind—and it is this manipulation of information before it reaches awareness that makes self-deception possible.15
Unconscious Self-Interest
Brain-imaging studies show that when we have a personal stake in the outcome of any event, our brains automatically include our desires and aspirations in our assessments. The process is called motivated reasoning,16 and it utilizes a different physical pathway in the brain (one that includes parts of the limbic system) than the pathway used when we are objectively analyzing data.
Subliminally, we are all highly susceptible to the power of self-interest. But because motivated reasoning is unconscious, we may sincerely believe that we are making unbiased choices when in fact we are making decisions that are self-serving. So your decision to accept someone at face value may have as much to do with your unconscious self-interest as it does with his or her skill at deception.
Above-Average Syndrome
Many of us hold ourselves in such high esteem that if I ask a group of managers to rate themselves on leadership ability, it’s likely they will all consider themselves to be well above the norm. This may be accurate, but more likely it is evidence of a very human phenomenon known as the above-average syndrome.
This illusion of superiority causes us to overestimate our positive qualities and abilities and underestimate our negative qualities, relative to others. It makes it easier for us to believe that we are more honest, trustworthy, and candid than most of our co-workers and to believe that our deceptions are relatively minor fibs, misstatements, or honest mistakes.
Impostor Syndrome
The flip side of the above-average syndrome is the imposter syndrome. First identified in the late 1970s by researchers at Georgia State University, the condition was attributed primarily (but not exclusively) to smart, capable, high-performing women who suffered from chronic self-doubt.17
When I speak at women’s conferences, and even when I’m coaching female leaders in their organizations, I notice that most women are reluctant to claim their accomplishments (“Anyone could have done it”), and I see how their body language condenses rather than expands, to nonverbally display a lack of status and confidence.
But for both women and men, the impostor syndrome goes beyond lack of confidence. People feel like frauds—attributing their success to luck, timing, or circumstance; and the fear that others will discover that they have been bluffing through their entire career is very real. When we suffer from this syndrome, we’ll give more credence to statements about our shortcomings than about our strengths because we “know” we’ve deceived others into seeing us as more intelligent and competent than we are.
Disguised Biases
Not only are we all biased but we are so unconscious of the process that our biases often appear in a disguised form. In one study participants evaluated résumés of male and female candidates for the job of police chief (a job which figured to trigger a male preference).18 The résumés were written so that male applicants excelled in some categories and ranked lower in others. In those cases the evaluators assigned a higher significance to the male applicants’ areas of strength and a lower priority to those areas in which the males were weak.
But then the résumés were reversed—written so that the female applicants excelled in the areas where the men previously had. And when the genders’ strong and weak areas were reversed, the evaluators’ opinion of the importance of those areas was also reversed. The evaluators were clearly making their choices on the basis of gender but were totally unaware of having done so.
The Sting of Rejection
Naomi Eisenberger, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, designed an experiment to find out what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others.19 She had volunteers play a computer game, after which their brains were scanned by fMRI machines. Subjects thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people.
About halfway through this game of catch, each subject stopped receiving the ball and the two other players threw the ball only to each other (in reality there were no other human players, only a computer program designed to exclude the test subjects at some point). The neuroscientists then looked to see what was happening in the subjects’ brains. When people felt excluded, there was corresponding activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex—the neural region involved in the “suffering” component of pain. In other words, the feeling of being excluded provoked the same sort of reaction in the brain that physical pain might cause.
The particular relevance of this study to the issue of self-deception is this: When we’re working in a group, the mere presence of other participating personalities often makes it difficult to keep a grip on what we truly think as individuals. We’re such social beings that just as we instinctively mirror other people’s body language, we also mimic their valid and invalid opinions—often without realizing we’re doing so—to avoid the sting of social rejection. To combat this natural tendency to mimic and prematurely agree with others, I advise leaders to encourage constructive conflict in their team meetings, which makes positive disagreement feel more comfortable and safe.
The Ultimate Question:
How Much Truth Can We Really Handle?
If we’re honest with ourselves, the answer to this question is probably not that much. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is often too hard to take—and just as often not even wanted. You might think things would be much better if every conversation you ever had were conducted in perfect candor and honesty on both sides. But if that actually happened, I think you’d change your mind fairly quickly. Do you really want to hear a full and truthful answer to “How are you?” from every person you meet? Would it help to know that the receptionist who wishes you a good day actually thinks you’re a pompous jerk? The considerate, kindly, or encouraging falsehood delivered for well-intentioned reasons is in fact one of the essential oils in the balm that helps work—and life—move forward a little more smoothly. So too, anthropologists believe, is the instinct for self-deception that has probably been part of our mental makeup since the dawn of history.
It isn’t deception as such that we have to combat in our working lives; it’s destructive deception. In chapter 4 I address some strategies that you can use to do just that.