Scientists Found Out How to Tell If Someone is Lying With 100% Accuracy
🎵Liar, liar, pants on...
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It kind of feels like everyone is lying lately, doesn’t it?
Populist leaders around the world cater to their base with false promises and ignore the rest. Prime Ministers hold secret parties while telling their populace to lock down for their own safety. Even elections, a sacred object in democracies, are being called into question when dollars and eyeballs make more business sense than truth (until they don’t).
But perhaps it’s more of a tale as old as time.
The Trojan War — a famous reference to deceit — was fought to reclaim Helen, the wife of the Greek king. After ten years of waiting for her return, the Greeks used the Trojan Horse to penetrate the city walls, conquer Troy by surprise, and secure victory.
And yet, even that tale is a lie.
The 300 soldiers of Sparta actually stood side-by-side with 4,000 other Greek soldiers, but we never hear about Achilles the Heel-Turner from Athens, do we?
Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first to discover America, yet we still teach this as fact every day in our schools.
Nor were witches ever burned at the stake in America, or we’d never have Marjorie Taylor Green representing us.
It’s simply hard to ignore the prevalence of lies throughout history, let alone today. Sometimes it feels like Pinocchio is the unsung mascot of our era.
Have you ever had a conversation with ChatGPT, the “AI” generative text tool?
As you can see, it’s still a bit of a work in progress.
But go look around the internet, and people left and right proclaim it to be the next coming of the Gutenberg press, albeit dressed in Jesus’s robes stuffed with sliced bread and peanut butter tuna sandwiches.
The thing is, its entire essence is programmatically designed to please the user.
According to
, AIs like ChatGPT have 3 main goals:
Provide helpful, clear, authoritative-sounding answers that satisfy human readers.
Tell the truth.
Don’t say offensive things.
And while those are lofty goals in themselves, they will inevitably clash and contradict the more the AI gets used. There’s also the pesky point that the latest version, ChatGPT-4, has a claimed accuracy rate of 85%+—but that’s debated.
Even if true, that means 15% of what it writes is made up.
As in…Big. Fat. User-pleasing lies.
Or as the company says,
"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."
Ask it to list historical events where Jim Carrey overcame his crippling social anxiety and dethroned an insane ruler, and it might give you five detailed instances where he joked his way to the top.
Ask it for famous studies and it will list them, they just won’t exist.
Scratch off your old Python programming skills and automate ChatGPT to produce 100s of daily fake news articles so 50 of your websites can get pounded with huge ad traffic, and we find out Biden died—as this investigation revealed.
The truth is, with many facets of our world being increasingly incentivized to earn more money by lying instead of truthing, the world needs a way to tell when people are lying more so than ever before.
Thankfully, one group of scientists has finally figured out how to tell if someone is lying 90% of the time, at least in one experiment.
And before we continue—as you may have just noticed—the headline of this article was another lie.
Sorry about that. I just needed to make sure you were paying attention.
Nothing quite grabs the attention like a juicy 100% claim, right? Let's say, I've borrowed a leaf from the “Art of the Unreal” from our aforementioned populists.
How to Tell If Someone Is Lying
Forget about any notion of the usual Hollywood crap about lying.
Lie detectors simply don’t work—even though they’re still used by the FBI and in courtrooms and job interviews around the world. You also can’t tell if people are lying based on how they look, despite what the TV show Lie to Me tried to tell us (a show unironically produced by Fox).
Even the famous psychologist Paul Ekman, who consulted on that show, found only 50 people who were good at detecting lies after testing 20,000 random souls!
Lying is simply another trait of our humanity.
But the good news is, there’s now thought to be at least one simple way to know if someone is lying to you or not.
Enter Bruno Verschuere and his team at the University of Amsterdam. They've got a "radical alternative" up their sleeves: just focus on one thing — the level of detail in a person's story.
Their findings?
In nine studies with over 1,400 participants, those who honed in on details alone had a 59-79% accuracy rate in detecting deception. Not too shabby.
So, what's the secret sauce?
According to the researchers, it's all about the "use-the-best, ignore-the-rest" rule of thumb.
The idea is that a detailed account can be a more reliable indicator of truthfulness than a bunch of other cues.
When people tell the truth about something they experienced, they might not remember everything perfectly, but they can still give lots of details—because they actually lived through it.
But when someone is lying, they have to make up information. They know there's a chance they could get caught if they say too much, so they often leave out details on purpose.
They actively avoid falling into the Liar’s Web. (Perhaps this should be the name for our ChatGPT-dominated future internet? Web 4.0 sounds too boring anyway.)
Keep in mind that this idea comes from a study and isn't always 100% accurate — it's right about 59-79% of the time. Not 100% nor 90% as I fibbed to you yet again. (Hey, if our leaders can do it, why can’t I?)
Nonetheless, it's a handy trick to remember if you're ever trying to figure out if Aunt Martha really did take your special silver forks.
This approach works even if participants don't know they're on a mission to uncover lies.
But before you go channeling your inner Sherlock, keep in mind that lie detection isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of deal. High-stakes situations might see fibbers adding extra details to boost their credibility, so context is key.
Just in case you wanted another way to digest the truth about lying, the researchers had a comic created to explain their findings…for some reason.
And it’s free to share!
Written by a truth-desiring-but-still-wrote-a-lie-twice J.J. Pryor.
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With 100% accuracy? Maybe scientists are lying 😃😃