Why lie sometimes fails

This happens for many reasons. A victim of deception may accidentally stumble upon evidence, finding hidden documents or a traitorous stain from lipstick on a handkerchief. Trickster can someone give out. An envious colleague, an abandoned spouse, a paid informant - they all contribute to the disclosure of deception. However, we are only interested in errors that occur directly in the process of deception, errors made by a liar against his will; we are interested in the lies issued by the deceiver's behavior. Signs of deception may be manifested in facial expressions, body movements, voice modulations, swallowing movements, too deep or, conversely, shallow breathing, long pauses between words, reservations, micro-expressions of the face, inaccurate gestures. Why do liars make such behavioral slips? After all, sometimes this does not happen. And then the liar looks flawless; nothing betrays him. But why all the same it happens not always? First of all, for two reasons: one of them concerns the mind, the other - the senses.

Bad behavior

A liar does not always know in advance what and where he will have to lie. He also does not always have time to develop a line of conduct, to rehearse and memorize it. Ruth, in the episode quoted from Updike's Let's Get Married, was not expecting her husband to accidentally hear her telephone conversation with her lover. The invented on the go excuse about the call from the Sunday school betrayed her, because she didn’t quite match what her husband heard.
But even in the case of a sufficiently successful deception, when the line of conduct is well thought out, the liar may not be so smart as to envisage all possible questions and prepare answers to them. And sometimes, when circumstances change in an unforeseen manner, even exceptional dexterity is not enough, and the previously effective line of conduct becomes useless. During a jury investigation of the Watergate case, federal judge John J. Syrik, explaining his reaction to the testimony of Fred Bazhart, an adviser to President Nixon, described the following incident: “The first problem that Fred Bazhart encountered when trying to explain the gaps in tape recordings was to make your version as believable as possible. At first, he said that the recording of the meeting of the President with Dean on April 15 is missing due to the timer’s malfunction ... But then he changed his initial explanation. [Bazhart found out that there was evidence that the timers actually worked.] He stated that the meeting with Dean on April 15 ... was not recorded due to lack of space on the two tapes available, as the day was very eventful. " ^[32] .
But it happens that a liar changes the course of behavior even without any pressure of circumstances, but simply because of his own anxiety, and then he cannot quickly and consistently answer the emerging questions.
Any of these blunders (inability to foresee the necessity of lying, to prepare the necessary course of conduct and to respond adequately to changing circumstances, to adhere to the originally accepted course of conduct) gives easily recognizable signs of deception. What a person says contradicts either to himself, or to the facts that are already known or later. But even such obvious signs of deception are not always as simple and reliable as it may seem at first glance. On the contrary, sometimes a too smooth line of conduct can be a sign of a fraudster who has rehearsed his role well, and some crooks make some minor mistakes on purpose so that the deception looks more authentic. Crime chronicle reporter James Phelan gives a charming example of such a stunt.
Billionaire Hughes, who played an important role in the movie business, the owner of the airline and the largest gambling house in Las Vegas, has not been seen for years, which has heated up the public interest. Hughes did not appear in public for so long that some already doubted his real existence. What was the general surprise when a certain Clifford Irving said that such a recluse suddenly allowed him to write his biography. The McGraw-Hill publishing house paid Irving $ 750,000 for the possibility of publishing this biography, and Life magazine paid $ 250,000 for the possibility of publishing three excerpts from it. And it turned out to be a bluff! Clifford Irving was “a great con artist, one of the best. For example, when we talked to him, trying to split him, he did not make a single mistake and told his story the same way every time. There were only minor contradictions, but when we caught him at that, he easily recognized them. A middle-handed rogue always has some excellently composed story that he can tell as much as he wants and will never get off. An honest person usually makes small mistakes, especially in such long and complex stories as that of Cliff. And Cliff was smart enough to know that - he played the role of an honest man perfectly. When we tried to catch him in anything that could catch him lying, he calmly said: “Yes. I suppose now that they are thinking about me. Well, nothing can be done, that was, that was. " He looked absolutely sincere, sometimes not afraid to speak even to the detriment of himself, but in fact simply lied as a gray gelding ” ^[33] .
Against such tricks there is no means, and many crooks succeed in deception. But most liars are not so artificial.
The lack of preparation or the inability to adhere to the initially chosen line of conduct, as a rule, give signs of deception, which consist not in what the cheater says, but in how he does it. The need to think about each word (to weigh the possibilities and carefully choose expressions) reveals itself in pauses or in more subtle signs, such as eyelid and eyebrow stresses, as well as changes in gestures (this is described in more detail in Chapters 3 " , voice and plastic "and 4" Mimic signs of deception "). The thoroughness of the selection of words is not always a sign of deception, although sometimes it is so. For example, when Jerry asked Ruth with whom she spoke on the phone, her caution in the selection of words testified to lies.