Psychology of lies. Introduction

September 15, 1938. One of the most shameful and deadly deceptions is being prepared. For the first time, Adolf Hitler, the German Reich Chancellor, and Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, meet. The whole world froze in anticipation - perhaps in the last hope of avoiding another world war. (Only six months have passed since Hitler's troops entered Austria, annexing it to Germany. England and France limited themselves to expressing their protest.) And on September 12, three days before the meeting with Chamberlain, Hitler demands joining Germany parts of Czechoslovakia and provoking unrest in this country. Hitler had already conducted a secret mobilization of the German army to attack Czechoslovakia, but it could only be brought to full alert by the end of September.
If Hitler had managed to delay the mobilization of the Czechoslovak army for at least a few weeks, he would have the advantage of a surprise attack. To gain time, Hitler hides his military plans from Chamberlain, giving him the word that peace can be saved if the Czechs agree with his demands. Chamberlain is fooled; he is trying to convince the Czechs not to mobilize, while there is hope to reach an agreement with Hitler. After this meeting, Chamberlain wrote to his sister: “Despite the harshness and cruelty of his face, which I have noticed, I got the impression that this is a person you can rely on if he has given his word” ^[2] .
Defending his point of view before those who doubted Hitler’s truthfulness, Chamberlain five days later, in her parliamentary speech, explains, referring to a personal meeting with Hitler, that the latter “says exactly what he thinks” ^[3] .
Fifteen years ago, when I began to study the phenomenon of lies, I didn’t even think that my research would involve deceptions of this kind. I thought they would be useful only in working with the mentally ill. My research in this area began after one incident. Once at a training session with therapists, I shared my thoughts on the fact that if gestures in each culture have their meaning, facial expression is always universal. I was asked a question: is it possible, by non-verbal behavior of the patient, to expose him in a lie? ^[four]
Usually this is not necessary, but it occurs when patients who have been admitted to hospital due to a suicide attempt begin to assert that they have become much better. In this case, each doctor risks being deceived, and the patient may make another suicidal attempt when leaving the hospital. Behind such simple practical tasks is one of the main issues of human communication: can a person fully control his reactions, especially in a state of great shock, or will his non-verbal behavior still reveal what is hidden behind words?
I researched videotapes of conversations with patients of a psychiatric clinic in search of examples of the manifestation of lies in their behavior. These recordings were made with a different purpose - to highlight facial expressions and gestures that could help in determining the severity and type of mental disorder. Now, when I focused on deceptions, it seemed to me that many of them show signs of deception. However, it was not so easy to prove it. Only one case did not cause any doubts - thanks to what happened after the conversation.
Mary is a housewife, she is 42 years old. Of the three suicide attempts, the latter was very serious; by sheer chance she was discovered before she died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Her story is no different from the many stories of other women experiencing a midlife crisis. The children grew up and no longer needed her. The husband seemed immersed in his work. Mary felt that nobody wanted her. At the time of her admission to the clinic, she suffered from insomnia, could not do domestic work anymore and cried most of the time. In the first three weeks, she was prescribed medication and group psychotherapy. After that, she seemed to look better: she became animated, did not speak more about suicide. In one of the conversations we took, Mary told the doctor that she was feeling much better, and asked to let her go home for the weekend.
However, when she was about to be released, she unexpectedly admitted that she had lied with the intention of leaving the hospital, since she still desperately wanted to commit suicide. After three months in the clinic, Mary's condition really improved, although a year later there was another relapse. However, she no longer needed inpatient treatment and, apparently, in the following years she felt well.
The video of the conversation with Mary was deceived by most of the young and even many experienced psychiatrists and psychologists to whom I showed her ^[5] .
We studied the film for hundreds of hours, scrolling it over and over, looking at each gesture and facial expression at slow speed in order to identify all the possible signs of deception. And in the short pause that arose before answering the doctor's question about her future plans, we noticed a glimmer of despair on the patient's face, so fleeting that we missed it when we watched the film for the first few times. We had the idea that the hidden feelings can manifest themselves in such short microexpressions, and we began to look for them and found many other microexpressions, usually covered up with an instant smile. We also managed to identify the microdests. Talking to the doctor about how well she copes with her problems, Mary sometimes shrugged her shoulder slightly, it was just a fragment of a gesture, his part: she lifted one hand slightly, unfolding it a little. Or her hands were calm, but for an instant one shoulder lifted.
It seemed to us that we had found other non-verbal signs of deception, but we were not completely sure that they were not a figment of our imagination. After all, even completely innocent behavior seems suspicious if you know that a person is lying. Only with the help of objective observations, which are not affected in any way by knowing whether a person is lying or not, one can be sure of the correctness of our conclusions. Of course, for those who want to discover a lie, for a verifier ^[6] it would be easier if the behavior that betrays a lie to one person would allow to reveal it to any other; however, signs of deception may be individual for each person. It was necessary to investigate a lot of people in order to make sure that the signs of deception that we found are not specific features of only those people with whom we worked. We built an experiment on the type of deception used by Mary, in which the subjects were strictly required to hide their intense negative emotions in those moments when they directly lie. They were shown a very unpleasant film, in which there were scenes of surgical operations with an abundance of blood, and the subjects did not have to discover their true feelings, moreover, they had to convince an interlocutor who did not know the content of the film that they were enjoying magnificent pictures of nature. (Our findings are described in Chapters 3 "Detection of deception by words, voice and plastic" and 4 "Mimic signs of deception").
Less than a year later - we were still at the initial stage of our experiments - as people interested in identifying other types of lies found me, and in subsequent years, as our scientific journals published articles about behavioral signs of deception in the “doctor-patient” situation. , The field of study has expanded. Can my findings and methods be used when exposing people suspected of espionage? Is it possible to train security officers to figure out a terrorist who is going to commit a murder, by his walk and gestures? Can we provide the FBI with methods to teach the police to accurately distinguish between liars and truthful ones? And I was no longer surprised by the requests to help our diplomats during the negotiations to avoid fraud on the part of their foreign colleagues or to determine from a photo of Patricia Hirst made during a bank robbery, she was voluntary or unwitting participant in the robbery ^[7] .
Over the past five years, this interest has already become international. Representatives of the friendly powers approached me with questions, and when I was giving lectures in the USSR ^[8] , officials from a certain “electrotechnical institute” even spoke to me.
I did not enjoy this rush, because I was afraid of the unscrupulous or too zealous and uncritical use of my discoveries. It seemed to me that my research on nonverbal signs of deception should have nothing to do with forensic science, politics or diplomacy. However, it was just a sensation that has no rational explanation. In order to substantiate it, I needed to find out why people always make mistakes, telling lies. After all, not every lie is unsuccessful. Sometimes the deception is done flawlessly. And yet, although such obvious signs of deception as a frozen expression of the face, an involuntary gesture, fleeting changes in the voice, are not inevitable, despite their perfect non-binding character, I am sure that there are objective signs of deception. And most often, fraudsters expose themselves by their very behavior. But, in my deep conviction, to know when a lie will be successful and when not, how to detect signs of deception, and in what cases you should not even try to do it, is to understand very well the differences in types of lies, in types of liars and in approaches verifiers.
For example, in the case of Hitler with Chamberlain, and in the case of Mary with the doctor, life itself was at stake. Both used imitation of feelings that they did not experience as a basis for covering their plans for the future. But the difference between them is huge. Hitler, in my opinion, is an excellent example of a born actor. In addition, in addition to the nature of his talent, Hitler, compared with Mary, had much more practical experience in the field of cheating.
The advantage of Hitler was also that he lied to someone who wanted to be deceived. Chamberlain was a voluntary victim who was eager to believe that Hitler would not attack Czechoslovakia if his demands for the revision of borders were met. Otherwise, Chamberlain would have been forced to admit that his reconciliation policy had failed, and this would have weakened his country's position. A political analyst, Robert Wolstetter, focused her attention on the same case, analyzing fraud in an arms race. Discussing the violation by Germany of the Anglo-German Maritime Agreement of 1936, she noted: “... both deceiving and deceiving ... relied on the adversary's possible delusion. Both sides needed to maintain the illusion that the agreement could not be broken. Britain’s fears of an arms race were successfully used by Hitler and led to the Anglo-German Maritime Pact, in which Great Britain (without discussion with France and Italy) revised the Versailles Treaty. These fears prevented London from envisaging the possibility of violating the new agreement ” ^[9] .
In many cases, the victim does not notice the miscalculations of the liar, preferring to interpret the ambiguities of behavior in a favorable light for him, secretly condoning lies, wanting to avoid the unpleasant situation of exposing deception. Ignoring the obvious signs that the wife has a lover, the deceived husband, at least, can avoid the derogatory nickname of the "cuckold" and the prospect of a possible divorce. Even if the husband finds out about his wife’s infidelity, he can condone her lies, avoiding the possibility of verifying adultery and putting all the dots on i . Until everything is expressed, he still has hope, no matter how small she is, that he was mistaken in his suspicions and his wife did not betray him at all.
Of course, not every victim is so willing to deceive himself. At times there is no need to ignore lies or condone deception. It is more profitable for some people to expose fraud, they even benefit from it. Both the investigator and the bank officer in charge of issuing credits will only lose if they are deceived; both do a good job only if they know how to distinguish truth from falsehood. However, often a person, deceiving (or) exposing a deception, either gains or loses something. Although, of course, always outweighs anything. The doctor who treated Mary did little to risk believing her. Suppose Mary got rid of depression - he can congratulate himself on the choice of an effective therapy. In the case of her lies, the doctor lost much less than he gained in the case of the truthfulness of the patient. Unlike Chamberlain, he did not risk his whole career; he had no need to report to the public and to seek, in spite of everything, agreement with his decision. And if Chamberlain revealed a deception, it could be considered a political mistake; It was too late to do this in 1938 — if Hitler’s word cannot be relied upon, if there is no way to prevent his surprise attack, then Chamberlain’s career can be considered finished: the war he hopes to prevent will start.
In addition to the fact that it was beneficial for Chamberlain to believe Hitler, the deception was also a success because Hitler did not experience particularly strong emotions. After all, most often it is not possible to deceive precisely because the signs of hidden emotions still break through. And the stronger and more varied emotions you have to hide a deceiving person, the more likely it is that a lie will be detected. Of course, Hitler didn’t feel guilty — emotions that have a double problem for a lying one. will lead to his exposure. But Hitler, deceiving the representative of the state that won an insulting military victory over Germany ^[10] , did not feel any guilt behind him. Unlike Mary, Hitler did not share the social values ​​of his victim. He did not respect Chamberlain and did not admire him. Mary, on the other hand, had to hide strong emotions in order for her lies to succeed. She needed to suppress despair and longing, pushing her to commit suicide. And Mary had enough reasons to feel guilty about her lies to the doctors: she loved them, believed them and knew that they really wanted to help her.
In connection with all this, it is usually much easier to notice the signs of deception in the behavior of suicidal patients or unfaithful spouses than in the behavior of diplomats or double agents. But not every diplomat, criminal or intelligence agent is an excellent deceiver. They sometimes make mistakes. And the research I conducted allows to hope for the possibility of obtaining objective signs of deception. The essence of my work, addressed to all who are interested in exposing lies, especially in the field of forensic science or politics, is not to teach how to expose lies even in the absence of obvious behavioral signs, but to help be more careful, that is, to give more clearly aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
Although there is already some evidence of behavioral signs of deception, they are not yet firmly established. The results of my research on lies and the fact that deception fails do not contradict the experimental data of other researchers, as well as historical and artistic descriptions. True, not enough time has passed to understand whether all these theories will stand the test of criticism and subsequent experiments. However, I decided not to wait until all the answers were found, and to write this book, since life does not stand still, and where the price of a mistake is high, there is an urgent need for reliable signs of deception. Some "experts" who are generally unfamiliar with all the principles of this theory already offer their services in determining lie in the selection of jurors and in hiring. Some police officers and professional lie detector operators have already developed their methods of detecting cheating. Customs officers have a special course on the definition of non-verbal signs of smuggling. I was even told that my work is used in this training, but in response to repeated requests to see the materials, I heard only the infinite: “Somehow we will certainly arrange it,” while about half of all the teaching aids that I saw just wrong. It is also impossible to find out what methods intelligence agents use, since in general any of their activities is under the strictest secret. And I know that they were interested in my work only because six years ago I was invited to the Ministry of Defense and were interested in more detailed information about my research, about their possibilities and shortcomings. Subsequently, I heard rumors that they continue to work with my materials;I’ve been able to find out how to be connected. However, I’m very concerned about this society, and usually so much as I’m thinking about these "specialists". For those who are interested in disclosing deception.
This book is addressed not only to those who have life itself at stake. I can not understand. There is a possibility that there will be very few areas. For children, they are not ready. In the same way, it was inaccessible to parental understanding. Friends, parents, doctors, patients, doctors, patients, jurors, lawyers, lawyers and buyers.
It can be easily attributed to almost all spheres of human activity. Some may be worthy of every condemnation. I do not share this opinion. The human being is not primitive. I must not be exposed. It is a rule of inflicting severe pain. A lie can also be cruel, but not always. Sometimes a lie is human-loving, sometimes even regardless of the intentions of the one who lies. And it’s a lot of social relationships. However, it’s not liar that you should be deceived.It should not be possible to disclose any deception. Cheating can be harmless, and sometimes even humane. Sometimes the disclosure of fraud can offend the victim or a third party. However, it should be discussed in more detail only after discussing many other issues. There are two types of signs of deception.