I BEGAN THIS BOOK by describing the first meeting in 1938 between Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Nazi Germany, and Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. I chose this event because it was one of the most deadly deceits in history, containing an important lesson about why lies succeed. Recall that Hitler had already secretly ordered the German Army to attack Czechoslovakia. It would take some weeks, however, for his army to fully mobilize for the attack. Wanting the advantage of a surprise attack, Hitler concealed his decision to go to war. Instead he told Chamberlain that he was willing to live in peace if the Czechs would consider his demands about redrawing the borders between their countries. Chamberlain believed Hitler’s lie and tried to persuade the Czechs not to mobilize their army while there was still a chance for peace.
In a sense Chamberlain was a willing victim who wanted to be misled. Otherwise he would have had to confront the failure of his entire policy towards Germany and how he had jeopardized his country’s safety. The lesson about lying is that some victims unwittingly cooperate in being misled. Critical judgment is suspended, contradictory information ignored, because knowing the truth is more painful, at least in the short run, than believing the lie.
While I still believe this is an important lesson that applies to many other lies, not just ones between heads of nations, now, seven years after having written this book, I worry that the meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain may imply two other incorrect lessons about lying. It might appear that if Chamberlain had not wanted to be misled Hitler’s lie would have failed. Our research since the original 1985 publication of Telling Lies suggests that even Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s rival who had warned against Hitler, might well have been unable to spot Hitler’s lie. If Chamberlain had brought experts on spotting lies—from Scotland Yard or from British Intelligence—they too probably would not have done much better.
This chapter explains our new research findings which led me to these new conclusions. I describe what we have learned about who can catch liars, and some new evidence on how to catch lies. I will add also some tips I have learned about how to apply our experimental research to real-life lies, based on my experience over the last five years teaching those who daily deal with people suspected of lying.
Because Hitler was so evil, this example may also imply that it is always wrong for a national leader to lie. Such a conclusion is too simple. The next chapter explores the arguments about when lying is justified in public life, considering a number of famous incidents in recent American political history. Considering former president Lyndon Johnson’s false claims about American military successes during the Viet Nam war, and also the decisions by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to launch the space shuttle Challenger when there was a considerable risk it might explode, I will raise the question of whether these were cases of self-deceit. And, if they were, should those who lied to themselves still be held responsible for their actions?
Who Can Catch Liars?
When I wrote Telling Lies I thought that the type of lie I had been studying—deceptions undertaken to conceal strong emotions felt at the very moment of the lie—had little relevance to the lies told by diplomats, politicians, criminals, or spies. I feared that professional lie catchers—police, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents, judges, and psychological or psychiatric experts who worked for the government—might be overly optimistic about their ability to tell when someone is lying from behavioral clues. I wanted to warn those whose job requires that they make judgments about lying and truthfulness to distrust anyone who claims to be able to detect deceit from behavioral clues, what the criminal justice system calls demeanor. I wanted to caution them to be less confident themselves about their own ability to spot a liar.
There is now strong evidence that I was right in warning professional lie catchers that most of them should be more cautious about their ability. But I also found that I may have overstated the case. To my surprise I found some professional lie catchers are very good in spotting lies from behavioral clues. I have learned something about who they are and why they are good at it. And I have reason now to think that what I have learned about lies about emotions can apply to some lies in a political, criminal, or counter-intelligence context.
I would probably never have learned this if I had not already written Telling Lies. A psychology professor who does experimental laboratory research on lying and on emotions does not usually meet people who work in the criminal justice system or the world of the spy and counterspy. These professional lie catchers learned about me not from my scientific publications, which have appeared for the last thirty years, but through the media accounts of my work coincident with the publication of Telling Lies. I soon was invited to give workshops to city, state and federal judges, trial attorneys, police, and those who give polygraph examinations for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the United States Secret Service, and the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Lying is not an academic matter to these people. They take their job and what I have to say with deadly seriousness. They are not students who accept a professor’s word because he gives the grade and is the authority who wrote the book. If anything my academic credentials are a disadvantage with these groups. They demand real-life examples, that I confront their experience, meet their challenges, and give them something they can use the next day. I might tell them how hard it is to spot a liar, but they have to make those judgments tomorrow and cannot wait for more research. They want any help I can give, beyond just the warning to be more cautious, but they are very skeptical and critical.
Amazingly, they were also a lot more flexible than I have found the academic world to be. They were more willing to consider changing how they go about their business than most university curriculum committees. One judge asked me during the lunch break whether he should rearrange his courtroom so that he could see the witness’s face rather than the back of the head. I had never considered such a simple idea. From there on I always made that suggestion when I talked to judges, and many have rearranged their courtrooms.
A Secret Service agent told me how hard it is to tell whether a person who has made a threat against the president is lying when he or she says the threat was not serious, it was just said to impress a friend. There was a terrible look on this agent’s face when he recounted how they had decided that Sarah Jane Moore was a “wacko,” not a real assassin, mistakenly releasing her just a few hours before she fired a shot at President Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975. I told the agent that the workshop I could offer might give them only a very slight additional edge, probably adding no more than 1 percent to their accuracy level. “Great,” he said, “let’s do it.”
My colleague Maureen O’Sullivan1 and I always started our workshops with a brief test of how well each participant could tell from demeanor if someone was lying. Our lie-catching test shows ten different people, the student nurses, who were part of the experiment I described in chapter 2 (pages 52–55). Each person says she is having pleasant feelings as she watches a film showing nature scenes and playful animals. Five of the ten women are telling the truth; the other five are lying. The liars were actually seeing some terrible, gruesome, medical films, but they tried to conceal their upset feelings and convince the interviewer they were seeing the pleasant films.
I had two reasons for giving our lie-catching test. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to learn how accurately these people who deal with the most deadly deceits can actually spot when someone is lying. I was also convinced that taking a lie-catching test would be a good opener. It would directly face my audience with how difficult it is to tell when someone is lying. I enticed them by saying, “You are going to have a unique opportunity to learn the truth about your ability to catch lies. You make such judgments all the time, but how often do you find out, for certain, if your judgments are right or wrong? Here is your chance. In just fifteen minutes you will know the answer!” Immediately after taking the test I would give the correct answers. Then I asked them to raise their hands if they got all ten correct, nine correct, and so forth. I tallied the results on a blackboard so they could evaluate their own performance against that of their group. Although it was not my purpose, I knew this procedure also exposed how well each person had done.
I expected that most would not do very well on my test. Having them learn that sad lesson fit with my mission to make such people more cautious about when they can tell whether someone is lying. During the first few workshops I worried that my “students” would object, not wanting to risk being publicly exposed if it turned out they were not able to spot liars. When they found out how badly most of them had done, I expected they would challenge me, questioning the validity of my test, arguing that the lies I showed were not relevant to the lies they dealt with. That never happened. These men and women in the criminal justice and intelligence communities were willing to have their ability to catch lies exposed in public before their peers. They were more courageous than my academic colleagues when I have offered them the same opportunity to learn, in front of their students and colleagues, how well they could do.
Learning how badly they did forced these professional lie catchers to give up the rules-of-thumb many of them had been relying on. They became a lot more cautious about judging deception from demeanor. I further cautioned them about the many stereotypes people have about how to tell whether someone is lying—such as the idea that people who fidget or look away when they talk are always lying.
On the more positive side I showed them how to use the lie-checking list described in chapter 8 (page 241) on some real-life examples. And I gave a lot of emphasis, as I do in earlier chapters, on how emotions can betray a lie, and how to spot the signs of those emotions. I showed them dozens of facial expressions very briefly, at one-hundredth of a second, so they could learn to spot micro facial expressions easily. I used videotaped examples of various lies on which they could practice their newly learned skills.
In September 1991, our findings on these professional lie catchers were published.2 It turned out that only one occupational group did better than chance—the U.S. Secret Service. A little more than half of them scored at or above 70 percent level accuracy, nearly a third reached 80 percent or more. Although I cannot be certain why the Secret Service did so much better than the other groups, my bet is that it is because many of them had done protection work—watching crowds for any sign of someone who might menace the person they were protecting. That kind of vigilance should be very good preparation for spotting the subtle behavioral clues to deceit.
It is amazing to many people when they learn that all of the other professional groups concerned with lying—judges, trial attorneys, police, polygraphers who work for the CIA, FBI, or NSA (National Security Agency), the military services, and psychiatrists who do forensic work—did no better than chance. Equally astonishing, most of them didn’t know they could not detect deceit from demeanor. Their answer to the question we asked before they took our test about how well they thought they would do was unrelated to how well or poorly they actually did, as was their answer to the same question asked immediately after they completed the test.
I was surprised that any of these professional lie catchers would be very accurate in spotting lies, since none of them had any prior experience with the particular situation nor with the characteristics of the liars they saw. I had designed the situation shown in the video to approximate the plight of the mental hospital patient who is concealing her plans to take her life, to win freedom from medical supervision so she can carry out her act. She must conceal her anguish and convincingly act as if she is no longer depressed. (See discussion in pages 16-17 and 54-56.) Strong negative emotions felt at the moment were covered with a veneer of positive emotion. Only the psychiatrists and psychologists should have had much experience with that situation, and they as a group were no better than chance. Why should the U.S. Secret Service do so well in spotting this type of deceit?*
It was not obvious to me ahead of time, but thinking about our findings suggested a new idea about when it will be possible to detect deceit from behavioral clues. The lie catcher does not need to know as much about either the suspect or the situation if strong emotions are aroused. When someone looks or sounds afraid, guilty, or excited and those expressions don’t fit what the words say, it is a good bet the person is lying. When there are many speech disruptions (pauses, “umhh,” and so on), and there is no reason why the suspect should not know what to say, and the suspect usually does not talk that way, the suspect is probably lying. Such behavioral clues to deceit will be sparser whenever emotions are not aroused. If the liar is not concealing strong emotions, successful lie detection should require that the lie catcher be better versed in the specifics of the situation and the characteristics of the liar.
Whenever the stakes are high, there is a chance that the fear of being caught or the challenge of beating the lie catcher (what I call duping delight, page 76) will allow accurate lie detection without the need for the lie catcher to have much knowledge about the specifics of either the situation or the suspect. But, and it is an important but, high stakes will not make every liar afraid of being caught. Criminals with experience in getting away with it won’t have such fear, nor will the philanderer who has succeeded many times in concealing his past affairs, nor the practiced negotiator. And high-stakes lies may make some innocent suspects who fear being disbelieved appear to be lying, even when they are not. (See the discussion of Othello’s error on pages 170–73.)
If the liar shares values with and respects the target of the lie, there is a chance that the liar will feel guilty about lying, and that behavioral signs of that guilt will betray the lie or motivate a confession. But the lie catcher must avoid the temptation of thinking too well of herself, presuming respect to which she is not entitled. The distrustful or hypercritical mother must have the self-knowledge to realize that she has those characteristics and therefore should not presume her daughter will feel guilty about lying to her. The unfair employer must know that he is seen as unfair in the eyes of his employees, and cannot rely upon guilt signs to betray their deceptions.
It is never wise to trust one’s judgments about whether someone is lying without any knowledge about the suspect or the situation. My lie-catching test did not give the lie catcher any opportunity to become familiar with each person that had to be judged. Decisions about who was lying and who was truthful had to be made based on seeing each person only once, with no other information about that person. Under those circumstances very few people were accurate. It was not impossible, just difficult for most. (I’ll explain later how those who were accurate were able to make this judgment with so little information.) We have another version of our test which shows two examples of each person. When lie catchers can compare the person’s behavior in two situations, they are more accurate, although even then most do only slightly better than chance.3
The lie-checking list in chapter 8 should help in estimating whether in a high stakes lie there will be useful, misleading, or few behavioral clues. It should help in determining whether there will be detection apprehension, deception guilt, or duping delight. The lie catcher should never simply presume that it is always possible to detect deceit from behavioral clues. The lie catcher must resist the temptation to resolve uncertainty about truthfulness by overestimating his own ability to spot a lie.
Although the Secret Service was the only occupational group which did better than chance, a few people in every other group also scored highly. I am continuing research to learn why just some people are very accurate in detecting deceit. How did they learn it? Why doesn’t everyone learn to spot lying more accurately? Is this really a skill that is learned, or might it be more of a gift, something you either have or don’t have? That odd idea first came to mind when I found that my eleven-year-old daughter did nearly as accurately as the best of the U.S. Secret Service. She has not read my books or articles. Maybe my daughter isn’t so special; perhaps most children are better than adults in spotting lies. We are starting research to find out.
A lead on the answer to the question about why some people are accurate lie detectors comes from what the people who took our test wrote when we asked them what behavioral clues they used in making their judgments about whether a person was lying. Comparing those who were accurate, across all the occupational groups, with those who were inaccurate, we found that the accurate lie catchers mentioned using information from the face, voice, and body while the inaccurate ones only mentioned the words that were spoken. That finding, of course, fits very well what I say in the earlier chapters in Telling Lies, but none of the people we tested had read the book before they took our test. Some people, the ones who were accurate lie catchers, knew that it is much easier to disguise words than expressions, voice, or body movement. Not that words are unimportant—very often contradictions in what is said can be very revealing, and it may well be that sophisticated analyses of speech can reveal lying4—but the content of speech should not be the only focus. We still need to find out why everyone does not check the words against the face and voice.
New Findings on Behavioral Clues to Lying
Other research we completed in the last two years further substantiates and adds to what Telling Lies says about the importance of the face and voice in detecting deceit. Measuring the facial expressions shown in videotapes of the student nurses when they were lying and telling the truth, we found differences in two kinds of smiles. When they were truly enjoying themselves they showed many more felt smiles (figure 5A in chapter 5), and when they were lying they showed what we call masking smiles. (In a masking smile, in addition to the smiling lips there are signs of sadness [figure 3A], or fear [figure 3B], or anger [figure 3C or figure 4], or disgust.)5
The distinctions among types of smiling has been further supported in studies of children and adults, in this country and abroad, in many different circumstances, not just when people lie. We have found differences in what is occurring within the brain and in what people report they are feeling when they show a felt smile as compared to other kinds of smiling. The best clue to whether the smile is truly one in which the person is experiencing enjoyment is the involvement of muscle that surrounds the eye, not just the smiling lips.6 It is not so simple as just watching for crows-feet wrinkles at the outer corners of the eyes, because that won’t always work. Crows-feet are a useful sign of a felt smile only if the smile is slight, the enjoyment experienced not very strong. In a very large or broad smile the smiling lips themselves will create the crows-feet, and so you have to look at the eyebrows. If the eye muscle is involved because it is truly the smile of enjoyment, then the eyebrow will move down, very slightly. It is a subtle clue, but one we have found people can spot without any special training.7
We also found that the voice pitch became higher when the nursing students lied about their feelings. This change in voice pitch marks increased emotional arousal, and is not a sign of lying itself. If someone is supposedly enjoying a relaxing, pleasant scene her voice pitch should not get higher. Not all the liars showed both facial and voice signs of their deceit. By using both sources of information, the best results were obtained—a “hit” rate of 86 percent. But that still means that on 14 percent a mistake was made; on the basis of the facial and voice measures we thought the person was being truthful when they lied, and lying when they were truthful. So even though the measures work on the great majority of people, they don’t work on everyone. I don’t expect we ever will obtain a set of behavioral measures which will work on everyone. Some people are natural performers and won’t be caught, and some people are just so idiosyncratic that what reveals lies for others won’t for them.
In work in progress Dr. Mark Frank and I have found the first evidence supporting my idea that there are some very good liars, who are natural performers, and some people who are terrible liars and can never succeed in deceiving others. Dr. Frank and I had people lie or tell the truth in two deception scenarios. In one scenario they could have committed a mock crime, taking $50 from a briefcase, which they could keep if they could convince the interrogator they were telling the truth when they claimed not to have taken the money. In the other scenario they could either be lying or telling the truth about their opinion on a hot issue such as abortion or capital punishment. Frank found that those who were successful liars in one scenario were successful in the other, and those who were easy to detect when lying about their opinions were easy to detect when lying about the crime.8
This might seem very obvious, but much of the reasoning in the earlier chapters could suggest it is the specifics of the lie, not the person’s ability, that determines whether a particular lie succeeds. Probably both factors matter. Some people are so good or so bad at lying that the situation and the specifics of the lie won’t matter much; they will consistently get away with it or fail. Most people are not so extreme and for them what determines how well they can lie is who they are lying to, what they are lying about, and what is at stake.
The Odds Against Spotting Lies in the Courtroom
What I learned in teaching police, judges, and attorneys over the past five years suggested a wisecrack—which I now use in my workshops: The criminal justice system must have been designed by someone who wanted to make it impossible to detect deceit from demeanor. The guilty suspect is given many chances to prepare and rehearse her replies before her truthfulness is evaluated by jury or judge, thus increasing her confidence and decreasing her fear of being detected. Score one against the judge and jury. The direct examination and cross-examination take place months, if not years, after the incident, thereby blunting emotions associated with the criminal event. Score two against the judge and jury. Because of the long time delay before the beginning of the trial, the suspect will have repeated her false account so often that she may start to believe her own false story; when that happens she is, in a sense, not lying when she testifies. Score three against the judge and jury. When challenged in cross-examination, the defendant typically has been prepared if not rehearsed by her own attorney, and the questions asked often allow a simple yes or no reply. Score four against the judge and jury. And then there is the innocent defendant who comes to trial terrified of being disbelieved. Why should the jury and judge believe her, if the police, prosecutor, and the judge, in pretrial moves for dismissal, did not? The signs of fear of being disbelieved can be misinterpreted as a guilty person’s fear of being caught. Score five against the judge and jury.
While the odds are against the finders of fact, as the judge and jury are called, being able to rely much upon demeanor, that is not so for the person who does the initial interview or interrogation. Usually it is the police, or sometimes, in cases of child abuse, a social worker. These are the people who have the best chance of being able to tell from behavioral clues if someone is lying. A liar has usually had no chance to rehearse, and is most likely to be either afraid of being caught or guilty about the wrong action. While the police and social workers may be well-intentioned, most are not well trained in how to ask unbiased and non-leading questions. They have not been taught how to evaluate behavioral clues to truthfulness and lying, and they are biased in their typical presumption.9 They think that nearly everyone they see is guilty, and everyone is lying, and that may well be so for the great majority of those they interrogate. When I first gave my lie-catching test to police officers I found that many of them had judged every person they saw on the videotape as lying. “No one ever tells the truth,” they told me. Fortunately, juries are not continually exposed to criminal suspects, and they are therefore not as likely to presume the suspect must be guilty.
Admiral Poindexter’s Exploration Flags
The behavioral clues in face, body, voice, and manner of speaking are not signs of lying per se. They may be signs of emotions that don’t fit with what is being said. Or they may be signs that the suspect is thinking about what he is saying before he says it. They are flags marking areas which need to be explored. They tell the lie catcher that something is happening which she needs to find out about by asking more questions, checking other information, and so on. Let’s look at one example of how these flags can work.
Recall that in mid-1986 the United States sold arms to Iran in hope of obtaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups directed by or sympathetic to Iran. The Reagan Administration said it was not simply an arms for hostage swap but was part of an attempt to reestablish better relations with the newly emerging moderate Islamic leadership in Iran following the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. But a scandal of major proportions arose when it was reported that some of the profits made on the sale of those arms to Iran were secretly used, in direct violation of congressional law (the Boland amendments), to buy arms for the contras, the pro-American Nicaraguan rebel group that was fighting the new pro-Soviet, Sandinista leadership in this Central American nation. At a press conference in 1986 President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese themselves revealed the diversion of funds to the contras. At the same time they claimed not to have known anything about it. They did announce that Vice Admiral John Poindexter, the national security affairs adviser, had resigned and that his colleague Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North had been relieved of his duties at the National Security Council. News reporting of the Iran-Contra scandal was extensive, and polls taken at the time showed that the majority of the American people did not believe President Reagan’s claim that he did not know about the illegal diversions of profits to the contras.
Eight months later Lieutenant Colonel North testified before the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. North said that he had discussed the whole matter often with the William Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Casey, though, had died just three months before North testified. North told the committee that Casey had warned him that he (North) would have to be the “fall guy” and that Poindexter might also have to share that role to protect President Reagan.
Now Poindexter testified telling the congressional committee that he alone gave approval to Colonel North’s plan to divert profits from the arms sales to the contras. “He claims to have exercised this authority without ever telling the President so as to protect Reagan from the ‘politically volatile issue’ that subsequently exploded on them. ‘I made the decision,’ Poindexter declared in an even, matter-of-fact tone.”10
At one point in this testimony, just when he is asked about a luncheon he had with the late CIA director William Casey, Poindexter says he cannot remember what was said at the lunch, only that they had sandwiches. Senator Sam Nunn pursues Poindexter sharply about his failed memory, and within the next two minutes Poindexter shows two very fast micro facial expressions of anger, raised voice pitch, four swallows, and many speech pauses and speech repetitions. This moment in Poindexter’s testimony illustrates four important points.
1. When the behavioral changes are not restricted to a single modality (face, or voice, or such autonomic nervous system changes as indicated by swallowing), it is an important flag that something important is happening which should be explored. While we shouldn’t ignore signs which are restricted to only one type of behavior, since that may be all we have, it is likely to be more reliable, and the emotion driving the changes to be stronger, when the signs cut across different aspects of behavior.
Former National Security Adviser Vice Admiral John Poindexter
2. It is less risky to interpret a change in behavior than to interpret some behavioral feature which the person shows repeatedly. Poindexter did not often show speech hesitations, pauses, swallowing, or the like. The lie catcher must always look for changes in behavior, because of what I call the Brokaw Hazard in chapter 4 (page 91). We will not be misled by a person’s idiosyncrasies if we focus on changes in behavior.
3. When the behavior changes occur in relation to a specific topic or question, that tells the lie catcher this could be a hot area to explore. Even though Senator Nunn and other Congressmen had pushed Poindexter on many topics, Poindexter did not show these behaviors until Senator Nunn pushed him about the lunch with Director Casey. Poindexter’s suspect behavior pattern disappeared when Nunn stopped asking about the lunch and moved on to another topic. Whenever a group of behavioral changes appears to occur in relation to a specific topic, the lie catcher should try to verify that it is indeed topic related. One way to do so is to drop the topic, moving on as Nunn did to something else, and then unexpectedly return to the topic and see if the group of behaviors reappears.
4. The lie catcher should try to figure out alternative explanations of why the behavioral changes are occurring, considering explanations other than the possibility that they are signs of deceit. If Poindexter was lying in his answers about the luncheon, he probably would be upset about doing so. He was known to be a religious man; his wife is a deacon in their church. It is likely that he would have some conflict about lying even if he thought it was justified for national interest. And he would likely be afraid of being caught as well. But there are other alternatives which need to be considered.
Poindexter was testifying for many days. Let’s suppose that during the lunch break he always confers with his attorneys, eating a sandwich prepared by his wife. Suppose this day, when he asks his wife if she has made him a sandwich she becomes irritated and says, “John, I can’t make you a sandwich every day, week in and week out, I have other responsibilities too!” And if they have the type of marriage in which anger is rarely expressed, Poindexter might be upset about this episode. Later that morning when Nunn asks him about the lunch and he mentions they had sandwiches, the unresolved emotions about the argument with his wife reappear, and it is those feelings which we see, not guilt about lying about some aspect of the Iran-Contra affair or fear of being caught.
There is no way for me to know whether this line of speculation has any grounds. That is my point. The lie catcher must always try to consider alternative explanations other than lying and gather information which may help rule them out. What Poindexter has revealed is that something about the lunch with Casey is hot, but we don’t know what, and therefore we should not leap to the conclusion he is lying without ruling out other explanations.
Former Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North
Oliver North’s Ability to Perform
Lieutenant Colonel North’s testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings illustrates another point made in Telling Lies, North appears to be a good example of what I call a natural performer.11 I don’t mean to suggest that North was in fact lying (although he was convicted of lying in his earlier testimony before Congress) but only that if he was we could not tell from his demeanor. If he were to lie, he would be very convincing. His performance, as performance, was beautiful to behold.12
Public opinion surveys taken at the time showed that North was widely admired by the American people. There are many reasons for his appeal. He might have been seen as a David against the Goliath of the powerful government, viz. the congressional committee. And, for some people, his uniform helped. He might also have appeared to be a fall guy, unfairly taking the rap for the president or the CIA director. And part of his appeal was his manner itself, his style of behavior. One of the hallmarks of natural performers is that they are likable to behold; we enjoy their performance. There is no reason to think that such people lie any more than anyone else (although they may be more tempted since they know they can get away with it), but when they do lie their lies are seamless.
North’s testimony also raises ethical and political questions about the propriety of lying by a public official. In the next chapter I discuss this and other historical incidents.
*Perhaps the professional groups we tested might have done much better if we had given them a lie to judge which was specific to the situation they usually deal with. We may have only learned who are the good lie catchers regardless of situational familiarity, not who are the good lie catchers when operating in their usual terrain. I think that is not so, but only further research can rule that possibility out.