March 12, 2025 • 33 mins
Is your feline friend fibbing? Is your dog duplicitous? Jorge dives into the world of animal lying and finds out if they have the same tells as humans. Special guest: science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everyone, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio.
My name is horthe Cham and today in the program,
we'll be asking the question do our pets lie to us?
It's a question that pet owners have been asking themselves
for centuries. Is my feline friend fibbing? Is my dog
duping me with deceit? We're gonna tackle the general question
(00:22):
of whether animals can lie, and we're gonna ask if
they have the same tells that humans do, can you
catch them in the act. We're going to talk with
a biologist and also a brain scientist to get to
the bottom of this. Now, this is a special episode
because today's question comes from a friend of mine, and
not just a friend, a famous friend. Mary Robinette Kowal
(00:45):
is a well known science fiction writer. She's only one
of eighteen people in history to have won all three
major science fiction awards, that's the Hugo, the Nebula, and
the Locusts. And she's asking this question for a very
peculiar reason. She's taught her cat to talk, but now
she's wondering if her cat is lying to her. So
(01:07):
here is my chat with science fiction author Mary Robinett Kowal,
answering her question of whether our pets are being perfidious
that means they're lying anyways, enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
My question is I want to know about animals lying
and if they have the same kind of tells that
humans have.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, that's a great question. What made you think of
this question?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What made me think of it is I have a
cat who uses buttons to talk. Were part of a study.
There's thousands of animals in this study out of University
of San Diego. But we're also part of this very
large movement of people whose animals use buttons to talk.
It's called augmentative inner species communication. It started with a
(01:56):
woman named Christina Hunger in twenty nineteen. She was a
speech language therapist who basically thought, what happens if I
use the same techniques that I use with my nonverbal
patients if I use them with my new puppy. And
she spawns this global movement. So, Elsie, my cat, has
one hundred and twenty word vocabulary, and she, to all appearances,
(02:18):
will lie to me. For instance, I had just given
her the button for sleepy, and you model it for
them the same way you'd model for a child. And
then she said bedroom lie down, sleepy, and you know,
I'd been in the kitchen. I was making my lunch.
But I'm like, I'm going to abandon lunch. I'm going
to model this. Let's go lie down. And so I
walk into the bedroom and I lie down. I'm like,
(02:39):
why is my cat not here? And I go in
and she's eating my lunch.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
She fooled you, she fooled me to the bedroom to
leave the room. I feel like you're living in a
science fiction world.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I am.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I am, yes for that story from up the Pixar
movie with the dog with the speaker.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah, it is like the way I describe it is,
I am living with a non he an intelligence who
is an el toddler covered in fur and an alien.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh man, I feel like I could spend the rest
at the end of you just asking you about this
movement and your pet. Yeah, but if I'm going to
try to answer your question.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
We should get to it.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, please do Okay?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And now I'm not an animal expert or psychologist, so
I didn't know the answer. But fortunately I do know
someone who happens to be both of those things. So
I reached out to my friend Katie Golden, and Katie
is a podcaster. She's a host of a podcast called
Creature Feature, and she's a trained behavioral biologist and a
trained psychologist. I thought perfect person to ask this question. Okay,
(03:39):
so here is her first part of the answer.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
There's obviously a ton of deception in nature. You look
at a leaf insect or stickbug, it's being deceptive, right,
It's disguised.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
As a leaf or stick camouflage.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Yeah, it's camouflage. So like, there's there's so much deception
in the natural world. You know, there's even deception on
the microbial level, like viral DNA tricking the immune system
into allowing it to go through the body. You know,
there's so many levels of deception. But I feel like
what your question and what Mary's question is kind of
(04:14):
getting at is lying, which to me feels different from
like passive deception. Like if you're born as a leaf
insect and you look like a leaf, you're not trying
to trick anyone necessarily, that's just how you are. But
evolution has pushed you into this state. When you look
more and more like this leaf or like the stick,
(04:34):
you tend to survive more. So it's a type of deception.
But to me, it doesn't feel like lying. Lying feels
like I am communicating something to you directly that is
false and intentionally, so like I am intentionally misleading you
to get what I want or to avoid consequences.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So I think you're saying the concept of lying in
this context of the question, it's more about playing mind games.
You're not just like wearing some sort of suit to
help you hide. If you're you're intentionally aware of the
other organism or person out there, and you're intentionally doing
something to mess with their minds.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yeah. One of my favorite examples of lying without any
vocalization is in squirrels, where squirrels will bury a ton
of nuts and they have to do this to survive
the winter, so that they have these nut caches, and
so once things are barren and there's not as much food,
then they can dig them up and eat them. And
(05:31):
one thing that squirrels will do is they'll try to
steal each other's nut cases, because why spend all this
time looking for nuts when you can just see another
squirrel bearing a nut, remember where they buried the nut,
and then steal it. And so squirrels have come up
with a way to combat the thieves, and that is
by deceiving them intentionally with a behavior which is pretending
(05:56):
to bury a nut while a thief is watching and
then leaving the area, and as the thief is busy
sort of trying to dig up that nut for itself,
then it buries the nut for real. So it's this
intentional perception of like, look, I'm bearing a nut, and
then the thief goes there and looks for it and then.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Doesn't find anything, and then it gets ah nuts eggs.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
That's the one squirrel joke that they make.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yes, So then a squirrel will pretend to hide a
nut because it knows that it's being watched by another squirrel.
Now is that proven would only do this fake hiding
nut behavior if it knows it's being watched.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
I believe they've found that they do more of the
hiding behavior when they think they're being observed.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
When we come back, Katie will tell us an example
of animals actually telling a lie, and then she'll tell
us how she thinks her dog is lying to her.
You're listening to sign stuff. Welcome back to science stuff.
Katie had another interesting example, and this one does involve
(07:08):
telling a lot.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
There's another animal, which is maybe one of my favorite liars,
and this one is actually lying verbally, so we're getting
really close to kind of human lies. Right. So, alarm
calls are done by an animal to warn its family
that a predator is about. And sometimes it's really specific.
Sometimes they're like they'll have a call that's lookout. It's
a hawk, look out, it's a snake, look out, it's
(07:31):
like a coyote, you know, different calls for different predators.
So there's this animal called the fork tailed drongo, which
sounds kind of like an insult, like, does not sound nice.
There are a species of bird that lives in South Africa.
They look kind of like a blackbird, but they have
a little bit of a thicker beak and a forked tail.
And so these birds will watch other animals handling a
(07:54):
food item and then issue an alarm call. But this
is a false alarm. They're crying, they're saying, I see something,
uh oh, And it's either mimicking the alarm call of
that species, like say a meer cat alarm call, or
they're using their own alarm call. And something that's kind
of interesting about alarm calls is animals learn the alarm
(08:15):
calls of other species because that helps them. Right, if
you hear some other animal using an alarm call, you're like, oh,
well they think something's up, so I should also run.
And so these birds, these drongos, learn that they can
either mimic an alarm call or use their own type
of alarm call and animals will run away. And they
(08:36):
do this when they are observing their targets, they're victims
eating food or handling food. And then once their victims
have run away because basically they've been lied to, they've
been told there's a predator, then the drangle goes in
and eats the food. And in this case, I know
for a fact that they have done research where they've
found that they do more of these false alarm calls
(08:58):
when they are watching an animal handling food directly. So
it is very linked to an awareness of like, look
that's food I want. I can get it to run
away if I fake an alarm call.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Wow, that is amazing. It makes me sort of have
any immediate humanizing reaction. It makes me not trust this animal,
or it makes me think of this animal as being
deceptive or not a good person.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, we make a moral judgment.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So birds lie too, Mary, that's so cool. They literally
cry wolf.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yes, that is amazing. This is a surprise to maybe
and also a moment of like, well, of course some
bird would have gone like, oh, that worked, well, let's
do that again.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And I like this example because it's sort of like
the classic hey, look behind you, or like well there's
a tiger coming for you to fool somebody you're trying
to take advantage of.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, oh no gods.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
In terms of verbal lying. So I don't have a
study here, but I do have an anecdote of my dog.
She will verbally lie to me about danger when she
sees something outside the window. She does her job as
a little guard dog, even though I didn't hire her.
I don't know who did. But she barks at pigeons,
at whatever, like any birds, any activity, another dog barking.
(10:14):
She has a certain sound, a certain tone to that bark.
Her hackles raise, her tail is stiff. It's alertness, right,
like I am in a protective mode and there is
something out there and I am alerting you, which again
is not something you see in wolves. This is a
dog specific trait that we've bred into them. And so
she'll do this right, But if I'm about to leave
(10:34):
the apartment, she'll bark, but her tone's very different. She's relaxed,
her tail's down, but she's looking out the window, and
her body language is otherwise very like relaxed and calm,
but she barks, and her tone is different when she's
barking and she's staring out and there's nothing there, right,
there's nothing out the window. And I think she's doing
this every time I'm about to leave, to basically say like,
(10:56):
don't leave. There's something weird, there's something interesting or weird
over here. You should stay. So she's trying to lie
to me about there being something at the window.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
What are you doing, Katies, there's a pigeon out there.
Pigeons are dangerous.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Stay in exactly, which I find is so interesting. And
the fact that her tone kind of is different, so
it's like she's trying to make it sound convincing, but
I can kind of tell the difference. She has a
different sort of tone, a different sort of like body language.
Everything's a little bit different when she's lying and I
see there's like literally nothing out there, versus when she
(11:31):
actually sees something. I look out and there's like a pigeon,
which you know, big deal, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Cookie, meaning Cookie is not good at lying, Like she
tells that you can tell she's.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Lying, right, which I only know because I know her
baseline behavior, and I also know dog body language, right,
like tail being stiff and the hackles being raised. There's
a lot like the stiffness in the body can show
you like how anxious or alert a dog is, and
whereas if the tail's lower and they seem more relaxed,
but then they're barking and like running around in a circle,
(12:02):
you're like, hmmm, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
It's like smart enough to think about lying to you
so that you don't go out, but not smart enough
to notice her own tails.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Well, it's probably hard to control those too, because like
a lot of those tells are not something that she
has executive control over, right, Like the same thing with humans.
We can't control everything we do. Maybe with practice, we
can control our heart rate and our sweating or something,
but it is really difficult for a human to control everything, right,
(12:34):
Like you can't. If you're like I is twitching a
little bit, you can't turn that off necessarily. So we
don't have complete control over our body language, nor do
I think dogs don't have complete control, but they have
some control, and sometimes they'll manipulate that to get what
they want.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Wow, what if you put Cookie in like acting lessons,
you never leave the house.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Yeah, you know, if Cookie got an oscar, I would
stay home with her all day.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
One of the reasons I was curious about this is
that there are self soothing actions that humans will do
when they're lying. Not always, but often people will fidget
a little bit more, or they will fidget less because
they're aware that they need to look super calm. So
there are these things that people will do. There's a
study that people tend to look up into the left
a little bit when they are telling a lie versus
(13:25):
when they're accessing a memory that really happened.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
The part of your question was do animals lie? Do
they have tells? And do they correlate to tells in humans?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Right, If there is something common we have with animals
when we lie, does that mean that it's genetic and
we can fight it or is it just cultural? Part
of your question was or tells cultural or not?
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Okay, Yeah, So I got really interested in this question also,
and so I reached out to a psychologist at the
University of Oslo who's been publishing a lot recently on
the kind of neuroscience of lying.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Oh, I'm so excited by this.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Okay, this is Tim's description what he does.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yes, I'm a psychologist. In my area is cognitive psychology,
so memory and mental processes, how we think, And more
recent years I have spent time doing research on how
cognitive processes link up to emotional processes, more recently specifically
(14:28):
looking at light detection, which is pretty important task or
job throughout the legal system. You know, from the time
a crime is committed, when the police turn up and
they want to look for witnesses or victims or perpetrators.
You know, the task of deciding, well, you know, is
this person telling me the truth or art is quite
(14:50):
important all the way through the detective work into the
court system. You know, you have witnesses there and the
jury or the judges have to decide, you know, well
they can't both be telling the truth, so which one
is it? So it's an important topic, you know, obviously
important in a practical sense.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, so Tim, doctor Brennans are as a psychologists. But
then when the lawyer approached him and said Hey, you're
someone who knows about emotions and things like that, can
you come and be an expert on this case? And
that's how he got a really interesting idea of lying,
because it's so crucial in a legal case, right, like
two people are saying different things. Who's telling the truth?
(15:30):
How do you determine who is guilty? In some cases
a matter of life and death? Right, Yeah, although he
says in Norway they don't have death penalty, so it's
a matter of life in prison.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
I guess does he talk to you about ways he
can tell?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
The basic question I asked him was what's going on
in your body when you're telling a lie? Neuroscience psychology
point of view, what's your body doing?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
So, what's happening in our body and brains when we're
telling a lie? We're deliberately trying to deceive. Most of
us on a daily basis, we know how it feels
to tell a lie, and so from the inside you
can feel a bit of stress and you're wondering, is
this person understanding that I'm not quite telling the truth here?
(16:14):
And so on. That's one of the main things is
that the stress is associated with lying and mental effort,
because it's much easier just to tell the truth and
retrieve from memory rather than having to keep track of
what you've said to whom and which details you've made
(16:34):
up and so on. There's more mental effort involved. One
line of research it hopes to be able to pinpoint,
for example, where in the brain this extra effort is
being expended. And generally people are looking at the cognitive
load hypothesis and to say, okay, is there a way
for measuring cognitive load or rather imposing cognitive load. So
(16:59):
if you're telling the truth, you should be all right,
but if you're lying, you've already got the extra cognitive
blowed and this will tip you over the edge so
that it all collapses. And there's some research in favor
of that sort of idea that you can distinguish between
liars and truth tellers by imposing cognitive blow to a
(17:19):
certain extent.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Wow, that's cool. And then there's another part of my
brain that's like every ADHD person is just going to
look like a liar if you're just putting more targahiveload
on us.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, yeah, it seems like you know the way he
looks at it, And I guess scientists look at it
is that this idea of tells, it kind of boils
down to what your brain is trying to do. Right,
You're trying to tell a story that you know is
not true, and so therefore there's two things associated with that.
One is stress. One is that he might be worried
about the consequences of lying. You might be worried about
what if I get caught? How is it going to look?
(17:55):
And you also have to think more than you would
if you were telling the truth, because when you telling
the truth, you're just maybe recalling and then spitting it out.
When you're trying to lie, you have to think about
what is the lie? What was the actual thing that happened?
Might be self consistent? How do I make sure that
I'm telling the right lie? Yeah, And so that can
then manifest as some of these things that we call tells.
(18:17):
If you're thinking extra hard telling you lie, you might
stammer more, or you might say oh more, or you
might feel the stress, and so you avoid the other
person's gaze.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So that because the information that I have about lying
comes from reading about basically spies, cia interrogators and things
like that, where they're looking at the external behaviors, whereas
doctor Brennan is looking at the root causes of those behaviors,
which is so interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You can talk about tells, but
really it's helpful to just think about what is your
brain trying to do when you're trying to lie? Right?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Oh yeah, I'm so excited. This is very cool.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Now, an interesting thing about that is if you offer
people around the world and there's this big study being
done a few years ago asking people from seventy five
different countries and people agree around the planet that if
you don't look me in the eyes and you're looking
a bit shifty and possibly lying, you know, this is
(19:17):
deemed to be a q to deception. And in all
these different countries, over all these different languages, was finding
huge similarities.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
This is this international constortium of basically lying scientists or
scientist that's dirty lying. And they did this huge survey
where they send the questionnaires to like forty people in
each of seventy five countries and across the world there
are a lot of similar answers, meaning like this thing
cuts across cultures in South America and North America, Europe, Africa, Asia,
(19:50):
and so The number one thing that most people say
that is a tell is that you're avoiding eye contact.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
That's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah, you're verting gaze. And so something like seventy percent
of all cultures in the world mentioned this as a
clear sign that you're lying, which I think makes me
wonder is it easier to lie over zoom?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Then right?
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Nobody expects you to the eye.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yeah, oh, that is interesting.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
A lot of these cultures mentioned nervousness. You're a little incoherent,
You're not making a lot of sense, you're making too
many body movements, too many facial expressions, you're sort of
inconsistent in your story. You're saying um a lot or uh,
you're pausing a lot. There was another one of the
signs that people mentioned.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Interesting. Do you know if in that study that's seventy
percent with the eye contact and being important, do you
know how that relates to the culture's overall relationship with
eye contact.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, that's a great question. An interesting fact about the
study that they found was that it was very universal
except in cultures for which direct eye contact is considered
maybe rude. So, for example, some parts in the Middle East,
I think it's considered rude to look someone directly in
the eye, maybe if you don't know them, or if
you're supposed to be showing some respect to them. And
so in those countries, eye contact was not high on
(21:03):
the telltale signs of line.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Interesting. So it's something that crosses a lot of different cultures.
But if you have a culture where people are socialized
to think that eye contact is impolite, then that que
becomes not a meaningful queue, right.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Because they know that if you're not looking in the
eye just means something else where. I imagine like if there's
a culture where people move their arms allot when they talk,
or they say oh a lot, or they take a
lot of pauses while they talk, then definitely those are
not going to be things that people say are clues
about lying. Don't go anywhere you're listening to science stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
So this makes me think that dogs, which are an
evolutionary bye product of humans being like, let's tinker with
this wolf, but bread to cohabitate with us, and eye
contact is very important for dogs, that dogs would also
have eye contact as a potential tell, but that cats,
which are not as interested in eye contact might not
(22:01):
have eye contact as a tell.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Well, There's an interesting study that I found related to dogs,
which is that, you know, dogs didn't evolve out their
nature like elephants or lions. What we call dogs really
kind of evolve from walls with us. Yeah, they wouldn't
be dogs without humans kind of basically. Yeah, And so
dogs evolve ways to gain our sympathy, and one of
them for those ways is to look at us in
the eye. But more importantly, some scientists think this ability
(22:24):
to kind of shed tears on sort of on cue
whenever they need to get something from me or gain
your sympathy.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So if they want to connect with you or they
have connected with you, it will trigger some hormone and
then that hormone will trigger them to shed extra tear
or so there at least to have sort of like
watery Wow, I know the way they're sort of lying
to you when they with puppy eyes. I don't know's
I know, a blurry line.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah. Like I had read that dogs had developed eyebrows
basically to be more appealing to humans. Wow.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, that they have significantly more muscles around their eyes
to create the iron show more white as well than wolves.
And the speculation is that it is something that happened
specifically because it makes them more appealing, right right, yeah,
not expressive, whereas cats who did not do that. Having
a conversation with a cat is like talking to someone
whose entire face has been botoxed.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Like they don't care.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, they would be good poker players, right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
There's a CTV these commonalities between animals and humans just
from the idea of what lying is, which is that
you're pretending that to do something, or to say something,
or just state something that you know it's not true.
So there's a common base and we sort of see
that with Katie and her dog and how she can
tell that the dog is maybe lying because the dog
is not a good actor. Yeah, and we see that also.
(23:45):
It seems in humans. It appears that there are common adalytes,
even among cultures. However, the plot to us here is
that Tim doesn't believe in tells at all. Oh wow, yeah,
here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
So there's really dissociation between what people believe and what
the research shows. So we have solid research showing that
nonverbal cues are at best faint, you know, faint cues
to deception. Can't there so far from being usable in
the forensic context, the sort of figure that we would
(24:21):
normally throw around is fifty four percent, where fifty to
fifty is the chance level. Right, So it's as if
we humans can pick something up, but just very little,
you know. And the research has been done in a
whole wide variety of situations, also situations that are really
meaningful for people, where it turns out some people have
(24:44):
been lying in a press conference about whether they knew
anything about the disappearance of one of their loved ones,
you know. And then afterwards you can when you've got
a set of those press conferences, and you can determine, Okay,
this group of people, well, they have nothing to do
with it, this group of people, they turn out to
be the perpetrator. The question can then be asked of
(25:07):
independent observers participants in experiments, what can you tell which
of these people are lying? You know? And we just can't.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Wow. Yeah huh, But like I hear that, and I
understand it, and I don't question it. And also I
think everyone has experienced a thing where you've been talking
to someone and you know that they're lying to you,
and you're right about it.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, there's sort of this conundrum right where intuitively we
know that tells exist and sometimes you can tell if
someone's lying, and yet people like Tim are saying these
non verbal cues, this idea of being able to tell
someone's lying is not true. Like at best, he said,
we can guess if someone's lying fifty four percent of
the time.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I wonder this is such a semantic split. It is
a difference between lying and acting.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
So there's a really famous quote by Marlon Brando when
people ask him, you know, what the secret to acting was,
and he's like, I'm just lying. That's all I'm doing.
And when you think about it, that is what an
actor's job is. An actor's job is to fake an
emotion in order to convince you that they are experiencing
the things that they're experiencing, but none of it's true.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, So I talked to Tim for quite a bit,
and I think that's his main point.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
The idea is that when we're telling a lie, we
do have this connective break in our heads that might
manifest itself in your body doing things that you can't control.
But the problem is is that liars are also very smart,
and basically, if you're a liar. You've learned very early
on in your lying career, perhaps that if you don't
look at people in the eye, then they're going to
(26:50):
know you're lying. Right, So good liars know to look
people in the eye when they lie, or you know,
they're smart enough, unlike Katie's dog, to pick up on
the fact that they have these tells, and so good
liars they're good at hiding these tells. Basically what actors
do to just kind of convince their bodies that they're
not in a stressful situation. And so what the translations
to the data is that basically you can't really rely
(27:13):
on these tells, or that if you do, you're going
to be fooled by good.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Lifety four percent.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, yeah, and it's not just tells that Tim also
has looked into things like polygraph tests. Oh and so
his general perspective is this.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
But the question is to what extent can people adjust
these and compensate and hide the fact that they're lying
and they play the system, And the empirical evidence as
it stands would suggest that sort of machine is not
reliable enough to what would one want in the legal system.
Ninety nine points something percent you know, but we're just
(27:52):
not there, partly because of the issue of what it
called countermeasures that you can take when taking a polygraph,
so you can confuse the machine. You can trigger your
own physiology either by thinking something if you just at
random moment start thinking something horrible or exciting, or if
(28:13):
you have a stone in your shoe that you press
your big toe on every now and then you get
the same sort of activation. You know, so I'll be ooh,
there's something here, but you'd just be confusing, adding noise
to the whole system, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Interesting, So then what's the average accuracy of something like
a polygraph test?
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean there are different variants of it, different uses,
but to put one figure on it, it's around seventy percent.
So it's higher than you and me observing people and guessing.
So it's obviously picking something up. But like I mentioned
about the brain data, it's pretty messy data and there's
lots of loopholes in there.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, so I think that's where it stands. It's like
tells do exist if someone is it a novel liar,
Like kids are not good liars because they don't have
a lot of experience lying for you, know the kinds
of things that Tim looks at, which is like ego cases,
These things are basically useless in a courtroom to say
that someone didn't pass a polygraph test, or to say
they look to the right or they look to the lab.
(29:15):
Basically you can't really use that because even though you
might have statistical data that says, oh, you know, sixty
percent of the time that someone looks at the right,
they're lying, that's not going to fly in a corner. Right,
Or even I guess with your cat, right, your cat
could also be becoming a better liar as you interact
with your cat, right, Like, if your cat tries to
(29:35):
lie and sees that you didn't buy it, then the
cat might be learning like, oh wait, maybe it's because
I press it too hard or went too quickly to
press it or something, and your cat maybe is intelligent
enough to figure out that, oh, if I do this,
then Mary robin Att is going to believe me.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah that's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, I mean that's basically Tim's point is that there's
really no way to tell someone's lie. I mean, you
might get a sense of, well, I'm fifty four percent
sure they're lying, but really, if you need to make
an important decision based on that you can.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Huh, So I guess then the answer to my question
is that animals do lie, but that tells just don't exist.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, basically, animals lie. They might have tells. There is
a sort of physiological connection between line and some sort
of non verbal cue or some sort of things that
you do. But it's so easily hackable, especially for humans
who are really smart and can learn after the first
lie what works and what doesn't work, that you probably
don't want to bet the house on thinking that someone
(30:39):
is lying based on the tell.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
This is amazing to me. I am absolutely in love
with all of this.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Well, there is a little bit of hope. So Tim
has been thinking about this a lot, and so his
basic solution, or the thing that he proposes is basically
the only way you can really tell that someone is
lying is by catching them in a lie. So he thinks,
you don't waste time with polygraph tests in the court system,
just do good detective work. Yeah, ask the person what happened,
and then hide some of the information that you have,
(31:07):
Like you know, you have cameras that were pointing at
him when that person did it. But don't tell me.
I have the footage and then ask them what happened,
and then you can catch them in a line, and
then that can then tell you if they're lying about
other things.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Oh interesting, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Like data, basically have data or try to outsmart the
liar in some way.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, Like Elsie has tried to send me out of
the room on a couple of other occasions to go
after my cheese sandwiches. And so now I know that
if I am preparing food and she suggests that I
need to leave the room, that I need to put
whatever food I'm preparing in the microwave so she can't
get to.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It, right right, Yeah, yes, I'm sorry to say, Mary Robinette,
you can't trust your cat.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
No, No, I can trust her on a lot of things,
but unfortunately nothing involving food.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
All right, Well, thank you so much, Mary Robinette. It's
been a pleasure to explore the idea of not telling
the truth.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, thank you so much for doing all of the
research on that. That was fascinating and I have a
feeling that it is going to turn up in a
novel at some point.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
All right, Hey, that's cool. Which part the cat or
the squirrel, the.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Squirrel, the school cat, the cat has already turned up,
and so many things.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Well, that's fascinating to see process that in real time
and to see that seed being planted for maybe a
future novel.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
So interesting. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Oh, thank you for joining us. Thanks to Mary Robinett
Kwal for being on the show. You can find her
award winning book The Cut Collating Stars wherever books are sold.
You've been listening to Science Stuff, the production of iHeartRadio,
written and produced by me Or hitch Ham, executive producer
Jerry Rowland, an audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. Can
(32:49):
follow me on social media. Just search for PhD comics
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast
or wherever you get your podcast, and please tell your
friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, everyone, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio.
My name is horthe Cham and today in the program,
we'll be asking the question do our pets lie to us?
It's a question that pet owners have been asking themselves
for centuries. Is my feline friend fibbing? Is my dog
duping me with deceit? We're gonna tackle the general question
(00:22):
of whether animals can lie, and we're gonna ask if
they have the same tells that humans do, can you
catch them in the act. We're going to talk with
a biologist and also a brain scientist to get to
the bottom of this. Now, this is a special episode
because today's question comes from a friend of mine, and
not just a friend, a famous friend. Mary Robinette Kowal
(00:45):
is a well known science fiction writer. She's only one
of eighteen people in history to have won all three
major science fiction awards, that's the Hugo, the Nebula, and
the Locusts. And she's asking this question for a very
peculiar reason. She's taught her cat to talk, but now
she's wondering if her cat is lying to her. So
(01:07):
here is my chat with science fiction author Mary Robinett Kowal,
answering her question of whether our pets are being perfidious
that means they're lying anyways, enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
My question is I want to know about animals lying
and if they have the same kind of tells that
humans have.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, that's a great question. What made you think of
this question?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What made me think of it is I have a
cat who uses buttons to talk. Were part of a study.
There's thousands of animals in this study out of University
of San Diego. But we're also part of this very
large movement of people whose animals use buttons to talk.
It's called augmentative inner species communication. It started with a
(01:56):
woman named Christina Hunger in twenty nineteen. She was a
speech language therapist who basically thought, what happens if I
use the same techniques that I use with my nonverbal
patients if I use them with my new puppy. And
she spawns this global movement. So, Elsie, my cat, has
one hundred and twenty word vocabulary, and she, to all appearances,
(02:18):
will lie to me. For instance, I had just given
her the button for sleepy, and you model it for
them the same way you'd model for a child. And
then she said bedroom lie down, sleepy, and you know,
I'd been in the kitchen. I was making my lunch.
But I'm like, I'm going to abandon lunch. I'm going
to model this. Let's go lie down. And so I
walk into the bedroom and I lie down. I'm like,
(02:39):
why is my cat not here? And I go in
and she's eating my lunch.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
She fooled you, she fooled me to the bedroom to
leave the room. I feel like you're living in a
science fiction world.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I am.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I am, yes for that story from up the Pixar
movie with the dog with the speaker.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah, it is like the way I describe it is,
I am living with a non he an intelligence who
is an el toddler covered in fur and an alien.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh man, I feel like I could spend the rest
at the end of you just asking you about this
movement and your pet. Yeah, but if I'm going to
try to answer your question.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
We should get to it.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, please do Okay?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And now I'm not an animal expert or psychologist, so
I didn't know the answer. But fortunately I do know
someone who happens to be both of those things. So
I reached out to my friend Katie Golden, and Katie
is a podcaster. She's a host of a podcast called
Creature Feature, and she's a trained behavioral biologist and a
trained psychologist. I thought perfect person to ask this question. Okay,
(03:39):
so here is her first part of the answer.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
There's obviously a ton of deception in nature. You look
at a leaf insect or stickbug, it's being deceptive, right,
It's disguised.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
As a leaf or stick camouflage.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Yeah, it's camouflage. So like, there's there's so much deception
in the natural world. You know, there's even deception on
the microbial level, like viral DNA tricking the immune system
into allowing it to go through the body. You know,
there's so many levels of deception. But I feel like
what your question and what Mary's question is kind of
(04:14):
getting at is lying, which to me feels different from
like passive deception. Like if you're born as a leaf
insect and you look like a leaf, you're not trying
to trick anyone necessarily, that's just how you are. But
evolution has pushed you into this state. When you look
more and more like this leaf or like the stick,
(04:34):
you tend to survive more. So it's a type of deception.
But to me, it doesn't feel like lying. Lying feels
like I am communicating something to you directly that is
false and intentionally, so like I am intentionally misleading you
to get what I want or to avoid consequences.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So I think you're saying the concept of lying in
this context of the question, it's more about playing mind games.
You're not just like wearing some sort of suit to
help you hide. If you're you're intentionally aware of the
other organism or person out there, and you're intentionally doing
something to mess with their minds.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yeah. One of my favorite examples of lying without any
vocalization is in squirrels, where squirrels will bury a ton
of nuts and they have to do this to survive
the winter, so that they have these nut caches, and
so once things are barren and there's not as much food,
then they can dig them up and eat them. And
(05:31):
one thing that squirrels will do is they'll try to
steal each other's nut cases, because why spend all this
time looking for nuts when you can just see another
squirrel bearing a nut, remember where they buried the nut,
and then steal it. And so squirrels have come up
with a way to combat the thieves, and that is
by deceiving them intentionally with a behavior which is pretending
(05:56):
to bury a nut while a thief is watching and
then leaving the area, and as the thief is busy
sort of trying to dig up that nut for itself,
then it buries the nut for real. So it's this
intentional perception of like, look, I'm bearing a nut, and
then the thief goes there and looks for it and then.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Doesn't find anything, and then it gets ah nuts eggs.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
That's the one squirrel joke that they make.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yes, So then a squirrel will pretend to hide a
nut because it knows that it's being watched by another squirrel.
Now is that proven would only do this fake hiding
nut behavior if it knows it's being watched.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
I believe they've found that they do more of the
hiding behavior when they think they're being observed.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
When we come back, Katie will tell us an example
of animals actually telling a lie, and then she'll tell
us how she thinks her dog is lying to her.
You're listening to sign stuff. Welcome back to science stuff.
Katie had another interesting example, and this one does involve
(07:08):
telling a lot.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
There's another animal, which is maybe one of my favorite liars,
and this one is actually lying verbally, so we're getting
really close to kind of human lies. Right. So, alarm
calls are done by an animal to warn its family
that a predator is about. And sometimes it's really specific.
Sometimes they're like they'll have a call that's lookout. It's
a hawk, look out, it's a snake, look out, it's
(07:31):
like a coyote, you know, different calls for different predators.
So there's this animal called the fork tailed drongo, which
sounds kind of like an insult, like, does not sound nice.
There are a species of bird that lives in South Africa.
They look kind of like a blackbird, but they have
a little bit of a thicker beak and a forked tail.
And so these birds will watch other animals handling a
(07:54):
food item and then issue an alarm call. But this
is a false alarm. They're crying, they're saying, I see something,
uh oh, And it's either mimicking the alarm call of
that species, like say a meer cat alarm call, or
they're using their own alarm call. And something that's kind
of interesting about alarm calls is animals learn the alarm
(08:15):
calls of other species because that helps them. Right, if
you hear some other animal using an alarm call, you're like, oh,
well they think something's up, so I should also run.
And so these birds, these drongos, learn that they can
either mimic an alarm call or use their own type
of alarm call and animals will run away. And they
(08:36):
do this when they are observing their targets, they're victims
eating food or handling food. And then once their victims
have run away because basically they've been lied to, they've
been told there's a predator, then the drangle goes in
and eats the food. And in this case, I know
for a fact that they have done research where they've
found that they do more of these false alarm calls
(08:58):
when they are watching an animal handling food directly. So
it is very linked to an awareness of like, look
that's food I want. I can get it to run
away if I fake an alarm call.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Wow, that is amazing. It makes me sort of have
any immediate humanizing reaction. It makes me not trust this animal,
or it makes me think of this animal as being
deceptive or not a good person.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, we make a moral judgment.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So birds lie too, Mary, that's so cool. They literally
cry wolf.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yes, that is amazing. This is a surprise to maybe
and also a moment of like, well, of course some
bird would have gone like, oh, that worked, well, let's
do that again.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And I like this example because it's sort of like
the classic hey, look behind you, or like well there's
a tiger coming for you to fool somebody you're trying
to take advantage of.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, oh no gods.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
In terms of verbal lying. So I don't have a
study here, but I do have an anecdote of my dog.
She will verbally lie to me about danger when she
sees something outside the window. She does her job as
a little guard dog, even though I didn't hire her.
I don't know who did. But she barks at pigeons,
at whatever, like any birds, any activity, another dog barking.
(10:14):
She has a certain sound, a certain tone to that bark.
Her hackles raise, her tail is stiff. It's alertness, right,
like I am in a protective mode and there is
something out there and I am alerting you, which again
is not something you see in wolves. This is a
dog specific trait that we've bred into them. And so
she'll do this right, But if I'm about to leave
(10:34):
the apartment, she'll bark, but her tone's very different. She's relaxed,
her tail's down, but she's looking out the window, and
her body language is otherwise very like relaxed and calm,
but she barks, and her tone is different when she's
barking and she's staring out and there's nothing there, right,
there's nothing out the window. And I think she's doing
this every time I'm about to leave, to basically say like,
(10:56):
don't leave. There's something weird, there's something interesting or weird
over here. You should stay. So she's trying to lie
to me about there being something at the window.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
What are you doing, Katies, there's a pigeon out there.
Pigeons are dangerous.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Stay in exactly, which I find is so interesting. And
the fact that her tone kind of is different, so
it's like she's trying to make it sound convincing, but
I can kind of tell the difference. She has a
different sort of tone, a different sort of like body language.
Everything's a little bit different when she's lying and I
see there's like literally nothing out there, versus when she
(11:31):
actually sees something. I look out and there's like a pigeon,
which you know, big deal, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Cookie, meaning Cookie is not good at lying, Like she
tells that you can tell she's.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Lying, right, which I only know because I know her
baseline behavior, and I also know dog body language, right,
like tail being stiff and the hackles being raised. There's
a lot like the stiffness in the body can show
you like how anxious or alert a dog is, and
whereas if the tail's lower and they seem more relaxed,
but then they're barking and like running around in a circle,
(12:02):
you're like, hmmm, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
It's like smart enough to think about lying to you
so that you don't go out, but not smart enough
to notice her own tails.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Well, it's probably hard to control those too, because like
a lot of those tells are not something that she
has executive control over, right, Like the same thing with humans.
We can't control everything we do. Maybe with practice, we
can control our heart rate and our sweating or something,
but it is really difficult for a human to control everything, right,
(12:34):
Like you can't. If you're like I is twitching a
little bit, you can't turn that off necessarily. So we
don't have complete control over our body language, nor do
I think dogs don't have complete control, but they have
some control, and sometimes they'll manipulate that to get what
they want.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Wow, what if you put Cookie in like acting lessons,
you never leave the house.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Yeah, you know, if Cookie got an oscar, I would
stay home with her all day.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
One of the reasons I was curious about this is
that there are self soothing actions that humans will do
when they're lying. Not always, but often people will fidget
a little bit more, or they will fidget less because
they're aware that they need to look super calm. So
there are these things that people will do. There's a
study that people tend to look up into the left
a little bit when they are telling a lie versus
(13:25):
when they're accessing a memory that really happened.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
The part of your question was do animals lie? Do
they have tells? And do they correlate to tells in humans?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Right, If there is something common we have with animals
when we lie, does that mean that it's genetic and
we can fight it or is it just cultural? Part
of your question was or tells cultural or not?
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Okay, Yeah, So I got really interested in this question also,
and so I reached out to a psychologist at the
University of Oslo who's been publishing a lot recently on
the kind of neuroscience of lying.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Oh, I'm so excited by this.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Okay, this is Tim's description what he does.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yes, I'm a psychologist. In my area is cognitive psychology,
so memory and mental processes, how we think, And more
recent years I have spent time doing research on how
cognitive processes link up to emotional processes, more recently specifically
(14:28):
looking at light detection, which is pretty important task or
job throughout the legal system. You know, from the time
a crime is committed, when the police turn up and
they want to look for witnesses or victims or perpetrators.
You know, the task of deciding, well, you know, is
this person telling me the truth or art is quite
(14:50):
important all the way through the detective work into the
court system. You know, you have witnesses there and the
jury or the judges have to decide, you know, well
they can't both be telling the truth, so which one
is it? So it's an important topic, you know, obviously
important in a practical sense.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, so Tim, doctor Brennans are as a psychologists. But
then when the lawyer approached him and said Hey, you're
someone who knows about emotions and things like that, can
you come and be an expert on this case? And
that's how he got a really interesting idea of lying,
because it's so crucial in a legal case, right, like
two people are saying different things. Who's telling the truth?
(15:30):
How do you determine who is guilty? In some cases
a matter of life and death? Right, Yeah, although he
says in Norway they don't have death penalty, so it's
a matter of life in prison.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
I guess does he talk to you about ways he
can tell?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
The basic question I asked him was what's going on
in your body when you're telling a lie? Neuroscience psychology
point of view, what's your body doing?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
So, what's happening in our body and brains when we're
telling a lie? We're deliberately trying to deceive. Most of
us on a daily basis, we know how it feels
to tell a lie, and so from the inside you
can feel a bit of stress and you're wondering, is
this person understanding that I'm not quite telling the truth here?
(16:14):
And so on. That's one of the main things is
that the stress is associated with lying and mental effort,
because it's much easier just to tell the truth and
retrieve from memory rather than having to keep track of
what you've said to whom and which details you've made
(16:34):
up and so on. There's more mental effort involved. One
line of research it hopes to be able to pinpoint,
for example, where in the brain this extra effort is
being expended. And generally people are looking at the cognitive
load hypothesis and to say, okay, is there a way
for measuring cognitive load or rather imposing cognitive load. So
(16:59):
if you're telling the truth, you should be all right,
but if you're lying, you've already got the extra cognitive
blowed and this will tip you over the edge so
that it all collapses. And there's some research in favor
of that sort of idea that you can distinguish between
liars and truth tellers by imposing cognitive blow to a
(17:19):
certain extent.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Wow, that's cool. And then there's another part of my
brain that's like every ADHD person is just going to
look like a liar if you're just putting more targahiveload
on us.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, yeah, it seems like you know the way he
looks at it, And I guess scientists look at it
is that this idea of tells, it kind of boils
down to what your brain is trying to do. Right,
You're trying to tell a story that you know is
not true, and so therefore there's two things associated with that.
One is stress. One is that he might be worried
about the consequences of lying. You might be worried about
what if I get caught? How is it going to look?
(17:55):
And you also have to think more than you would
if you were telling the truth, because when you telling
the truth, you're just maybe recalling and then spitting it out.
When you're trying to lie, you have to think about
what is the lie? What was the actual thing that happened?
Might be self consistent? How do I make sure that
I'm telling the right lie? Yeah, And so that can
then manifest as some of these things that we call tells.
(18:17):
If you're thinking extra hard telling you lie, you might
stammer more, or you might say oh more, or you
might feel the stress, and so you avoid the other
person's gaze.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So that because the information that I have about lying
comes from reading about basically spies, cia interrogators and things
like that, where they're looking at the external behaviors, whereas
doctor Brennan is looking at the root causes of those behaviors,
which is so interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You can talk about tells, but
really it's helpful to just think about what is your
brain trying to do when you're trying to lie? Right?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Oh yeah, I'm so excited. This is very cool.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Now, an interesting thing about that is if you offer
people around the world and there's this big study being
done a few years ago asking people from seventy five
different countries and people agree around the planet that if
you don't look me in the eyes and you're looking
a bit shifty and possibly lying, you know, this is
(19:17):
deemed to be a q to deception. And in all
these different countries, over all these different languages, was finding
huge similarities.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
This is this international constortium of basically lying scientists or
scientist that's dirty lying. And they did this huge survey
where they send the questionnaires to like forty people in
each of seventy five countries and across the world there
are a lot of similar answers, meaning like this thing
cuts across cultures in South America and North America, Europe, Africa, Asia,
(19:50):
and so The number one thing that most people say
that is a tell is that you're avoiding eye contact.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
That's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah, you're verting gaze. And so something like seventy percent
of all cultures in the world mentioned this as a
clear sign that you're lying, which I think makes me
wonder is it easier to lie over zoom?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Then right?
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Nobody expects you to the eye.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yeah, oh, that is interesting.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
A lot of these cultures mentioned nervousness. You're a little incoherent,
You're not making a lot of sense, you're making too
many body movements, too many facial expressions, you're sort of
inconsistent in your story. You're saying um a lot or uh,
you're pausing a lot. There was another one of the
signs that people mentioned.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Interesting. Do you know if in that study that's seventy
percent with the eye contact and being important, do you
know how that relates to the culture's overall relationship with
eye contact.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, that's a great question. An interesting fact about the
study that they found was that it was very universal
except in cultures for which direct eye contact is considered
maybe rude. So, for example, some parts in the Middle East,
I think it's considered rude to look someone directly in
the eye, maybe if you don't know them, or if
you're supposed to be showing some respect to them. And
so in those countries, eye contact was not high on
(21:03):
the telltale signs of line.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Interesting. So it's something that crosses a lot of different cultures.
But if you have a culture where people are socialized
to think that eye contact is impolite, then that que
becomes not a meaningful queue, right.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Because they know that if you're not looking in the
eye just means something else where. I imagine like if there's
a culture where people move their arms allot when they talk,
or they say oh a lot, or they take a
lot of pauses while they talk, then definitely those are
not going to be things that people say are clues
about lying. Don't go anywhere you're listening to science stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
So this makes me think that dogs, which are an
evolutionary bye product of humans being like, let's tinker with
this wolf, but bread to cohabitate with us, and eye
contact is very important for dogs, that dogs would also
have eye contact as a potential tell, but that cats,
which are not as interested in eye contact might not
(22:01):
have eye contact as a tell.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Well, There's an interesting study that I found related to dogs,
which is that, you know, dogs didn't evolve out their
nature like elephants or lions. What we call dogs really
kind of evolve from walls with us. Yeah, they wouldn't
be dogs without humans kind of basically. Yeah, And so
dogs evolve ways to gain our sympathy, and one of
them for those ways is to look at us in
the eye. But more importantly, some scientists think this ability
(22:24):
to kind of shed tears on sort of on cue
whenever they need to get something from me or gain
your sympathy.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So if they want to connect with you or they
have connected with you, it will trigger some hormone and
then that hormone will trigger them to shed extra tear
or so there at least to have sort of like
watery Wow, I know the way they're sort of lying
to you when they with puppy eyes. I don't know's
I know, a blurry line.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah. Like I had read that dogs had developed eyebrows
basically to be more appealing to humans. Wow.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, that they have significantly more muscles around their eyes
to create the iron show more white as well than wolves.
And the speculation is that it is something that happened
specifically because it makes them more appealing, right right, yeah,
not expressive, whereas cats who did not do that. Having
a conversation with a cat is like talking to someone
whose entire face has been botoxed.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Like they don't care.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, they would be good poker players, right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
There's a CTV these commonalities between animals and humans just
from the idea of what lying is, which is that
you're pretending that to do something, or to say something,
or just state something that you know it's not true.
So there's a common base and we sort of see
that with Katie and her dog and how she can
tell that the dog is maybe lying because the dog
is not a good actor. Yeah, and we see that also.
(23:45):
It seems in humans. It appears that there are common adalytes,
even among cultures. However, the plot to us here is
that Tim doesn't believe in tells at all. Oh wow, yeah,
here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
So there's really dissociation between what people believe and what
the research shows. So we have solid research showing that
nonverbal cues are at best faint, you know, faint cues
to deception. Can't there so far from being usable in
the forensic context, the sort of figure that we would
(24:21):
normally throw around is fifty four percent, where fifty to
fifty is the chance level. Right, So it's as if
we humans can pick something up, but just very little,
you know. And the research has been done in a
whole wide variety of situations, also situations that are really
meaningful for people, where it turns out some people have
(24:44):
been lying in a press conference about whether they knew
anything about the disappearance of one of their loved ones,
you know. And then afterwards you can when you've got
a set of those press conferences, and you can determine, Okay,
this group of people, well, they have nothing to do
with it, this group of people, they turn out to
be the perpetrator. The question can then be asked of
(25:07):
independent observers participants in experiments, what can you tell which
of these people are lying? You know? And we just can't.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Wow. Yeah huh, But like I hear that, and I
understand it, and I don't question it. And also I
think everyone has experienced a thing where you've been talking
to someone and you know that they're lying to you,
and you're right about it.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, there's sort of this conundrum right where intuitively we
know that tells exist and sometimes you can tell if
someone's lying, and yet people like Tim are saying these
non verbal cues, this idea of being able to tell
someone's lying is not true. Like at best, he said,
we can guess if someone's lying fifty four percent of
the time.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I wonder this is such a semantic split. It is
a difference between lying and acting.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
So there's a really famous quote by Marlon Brando when
people ask him, you know, what the secret to acting was,
and he's like, I'm just lying. That's all I'm doing.
And when you think about it, that is what an
actor's job is. An actor's job is to fake an
emotion in order to convince you that they are experiencing
the things that they're experiencing, but none of it's true.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, So I talked to Tim for quite a bit,
and I think that's his main point.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
The idea is that when we're telling a lie, we
do have this connective break in our heads that might
manifest itself in your body doing things that you can't control.
But the problem is is that liars are also very smart,
and basically, if you're a liar. You've learned very early
on in your lying career, perhaps that if you don't
look at people in the eye, then they're going to
(26:50):
know you're lying. Right, So good liars know to look
people in the eye when they lie, or you know,
they're smart enough, unlike Katie's dog, to pick up on
the fact that they have these tells, and so good
liars they're good at hiding these tells. Basically what actors
do to just kind of convince their bodies that they're
not in a stressful situation. And so what the translations
to the data is that basically you can't really rely
(27:13):
on these tells, or that if you do, you're going
to be fooled by good.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Lifety four percent.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, yeah, and it's not just tells that Tim also
has looked into things like polygraph tests. Oh and so
his general perspective is this.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
But the question is to what extent can people adjust
these and compensate and hide the fact that they're lying
and they play the system, And the empirical evidence as
it stands would suggest that sort of machine is not
reliable enough to what would one want in the legal system.
Ninety nine points something percent you know, but we're just
(27:52):
not there, partly because of the issue of what it
called countermeasures that you can take when taking a polygraph,
so you can confuse the machine. You can trigger your
own physiology either by thinking something if you just at
random moment start thinking something horrible or exciting, or if
(28:13):
you have a stone in your shoe that you press
your big toe on every now and then you get
the same sort of activation. You know, so I'll be ooh,
there's something here, but you'd just be confusing, adding noise
to the whole system, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Interesting, So then what's the average accuracy of something like
a polygraph test?
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean there are different variants of it, different uses,
but to put one figure on it, it's around seventy percent.
So it's higher than you and me observing people and guessing.
So it's obviously picking something up. But like I mentioned
about the brain data, it's pretty messy data and there's
lots of loopholes in there.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, so I think that's where it stands. It's like
tells do exist if someone is it a novel liar,
Like kids are not good liars because they don't have
a lot of experience lying for you, know the kinds
of things that Tim looks at, which is like ego cases,
These things are basically useless in a courtroom to say
that someone didn't pass a polygraph test, or to say
they look to the right or they look to the lab.
(29:15):
Basically you can't really use that because even though you
might have statistical data that says, oh, you know, sixty
percent of the time that someone looks at the right,
they're lying, that's not going to fly in a corner. Right,
Or even I guess with your cat, right, your cat
could also be becoming a better liar as you interact
with your cat, right, Like, if your cat tries to
(29:35):
lie and sees that you didn't buy it, then the
cat might be learning like, oh wait, maybe it's because
I press it too hard or went too quickly to
press it or something, and your cat maybe is intelligent
enough to figure out that, oh, if I do this,
then Mary robin Att is going to believe me.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah that's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, I mean that's basically Tim's point is that there's
really no way to tell someone's lie. I mean, you
might get a sense of, well, I'm fifty four percent
sure they're lying, but really, if you need to make
an important decision based on that you can.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Huh, So I guess then the answer to my question
is that animals do lie, but that tells just don't exist.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, basically, animals lie. They might have tells. There is
a sort of physiological connection between line and some sort
of non verbal cue or some sort of things that
you do. But it's so easily hackable, especially for humans
who are really smart and can learn after the first
lie what works and what doesn't work, that you probably
don't want to bet the house on thinking that someone
(30:39):
is lying based on the tell.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
This is amazing to me. I am absolutely in love
with all of this.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Well, there is a little bit of hope. So Tim
has been thinking about this a lot, and so his
basic solution, or the thing that he proposes is basically
the only way you can really tell that someone is
lying is by catching them in a lie. So he thinks,
you don't waste time with polygraph tests in the court system,
just do good detective work. Yeah, ask the person what happened,
and then hide some of the information that you have,
(31:07):
Like you know, you have cameras that were pointing at
him when that person did it. But don't tell me.
I have the footage and then ask them what happened,
and then you can catch them in a line, and
then that can then tell you if they're lying about
other things.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Oh interesting, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Like data, basically have data or try to outsmart the
liar in some way.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, Like Elsie has tried to send me out of
the room on a couple of other occasions to go
after my cheese sandwiches. And so now I know that
if I am preparing food and she suggests that I
need to leave the room, that I need to put
whatever food I'm preparing in the microwave so she can't
get to.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It, right right, Yeah, yes, I'm sorry to say, Mary Robinette,
you can't trust your cat.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
No, No, I can trust her on a lot of things,
but unfortunately nothing involving food.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
All right, Well, thank you so much, Mary Robinette. It's
been a pleasure to explore the idea of not telling
the truth.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, thank you so much for doing all of the
research on that. That was fascinating and I have a
feeling that it is going to turn up in a
novel at some point.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
All right, Hey, that's cool. Which part the cat or
the squirrel, the.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Squirrel, the school cat, the cat has already turned up,
and so many things.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Well, that's fascinating to see process that in real time
and to see that seed being planted for maybe a
future novel.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
So interesting. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Oh, thank you for joining us. Thanks to Mary Robinett
Kwal for being on the show. You can find her
award winning book The Cut Collating Stars wherever books are sold.
You've been listening to Science Stuff, the production of iHeartRadio,
written and produced by me Or hitch Ham, executive producer
Jerry Rowland, an audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. Can
(32:49):
follow me on social media. Just search for PhD comics
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast
or wherever you get your podcast, and please tell your
friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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