Human Lie Detector: The #1 Sign They’re Lying To You, Catch Liars Instantly! | Dr Leanne ten Brinke

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

In this episode of The Diary Of A CEO, host Steven Bartlett interviews Dr. Leanne ten Brinke, a psychologist and director of the Truth and Trust Lab at the University of British Columbia. Drawing from her research and book 'Poisonous

Key takeaways

• People can detect psychopathic traits in just five seconds based on nonverbal cues like fake smiles and exaggerated hand gestures.
• Duchenne smiles—those with eye activation (crow's feet)—are often used by individuals high in dark traits to mask hostile intentions.

Main topics

• Detecting psychopathy through nonverbal cues
• The Dark Tetrad: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism

Notable quotes

You can get a kernel of truth about someone's personality—the extent to which they're psychopathic—in about five seconds.

Conclusion

Dr. Leanne ten Brinke's research reveals that while dark personality traits can be detected quickly through subtle

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) How long does it take someone to spot a psychopath? Speaker 1 (0:02) About five seconds. So most people think a psychopath looks dangerous. They picture the villain in a movie, but that's not how it works in real life. We've done some research in my lab and we found there are certainly some things that you can look for. Speaker 2 (0:14) Have they ever done that with lying to figure out if people can spot lies? Speaker 1 (0:17) Thousands of times. You ask people, what's the number one cue that someone is lying to you? They will say they can't look you in the eye, but there's no research to suggest that that is true. However, there's an essential tool for detecting lies, which is... Oh, fuck. I know I study dark personality traits, and I found that there's four different elements, which are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism. And what we found is that people with higher levels of these traits engaged in Duchenne smiles, which is the activation around the eyes. And they also used a lot of hand gestures. Speaker 2 (0:50) Where does this come from? Speaker 1 (0:51) Well, research suggests that abuse, cold, uncaring parenting style, but also overvaluation of a child early in life may lead to more narcissistic views later. Speaker 2 (1:02) Is there any other fascinating questions you've pursued in your lab? Speaker 1 (1:04) Yes. We studied the extent to which psychopathic personality traits could increase the amount of influence you have in government. And also there are three common mistakes people make when dealing with dark personalities. We'll get into this more later. And I'm Speaker 2 (1:17) wondering if you can spot any of these dark personality traits just by looking at dating profiles. All Speaker 1 (1:22) right. So this is Ryan. This feels like a red flag. And then there's Haley. That would be associated with psychopathy. Okay, David is a brain surgeon. Very impressive. But I'm seeing narcissism. So Speaker 2 (1:35) I guess this begs the question that if someone has those traits you've described, can they be cured? Speaker 1 (1:39) So in my lab, what we found is that... Speaker 2 (1:46) Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple... easy free thing that you can do to help us make the show better i would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button thank you so so so much professor leanne tenbrink At the very heart of your motivations, why is it you do what you do? Speaker 1 (2:28) I want to make people less cynical about human nature, which I think might seem kind of paradoxical given what I study, because I study deception and dominance and so-called dark personality traits. But I think when you understand those topics, and also that there's something you can do about it to make these interactions better, it's incredibly... powerful and can give us a more accurate view of the world. And Speaker 2 (2:58) why are the population at large so interested in these subjects? Because they are. They're fascinated by it. But what is underneath all of the sort of fascination and the curiosity? What are they trying to figure out when people are interested in psychopathy? Speaker 1 (3:11) You know, I think one of the reasons why we are so interested in psychopathy is because it's quite foreign. to us. So most of us move through life caring about other people, having compassion for other people, telling a few lies here and there, but by and large being very truthful and honest and kind of playing by the rules. And that's like the opposite of psychopathy. And so I think when you are faced with this personality that is quite the opposite of your whole experience of being alive, you're like, what's going on? And I want to understand that. I think there's also an element There actually is some research on like true crime specifically and why people are interested in true crime. It tends to be a largely female audience. And some of the motivations that people report is like wanting to understand and wanting to avoid, you know, becoming a victim of these people. Speaker 2 (4:05) Is it possible to spot someone who is a psychopath? Speaker 1 (4:10) Yes. Speaker 2 (4:11) How long, according to the research, does it take someone to spot a psychopath? Speaker 1 (4:16) Okay, you can get a kernel of truth about someone's personality, the extent to which they're psychopathic, in about five seconds. Speaker 2 (4:24) Explain the research to me. Speaker 1 (4:25) Okay, so this is research by Scott Lillenfeld and his colleagues. And basically what they did is they showed people five-second, 10-second, and 20-second clips of these interviews where... criminal offenders were being interviewed by a psychologist and rated on their psychopathic personality traits. And then you had random psychology student volunteer for research watching five seconds of that interaction and making a rating of like, you know, how callous do they seem? How manipulative do they seem? And they found that there is actually a pretty reasonable correlation between the ratings of these like naive folks who watch 5 Seconds and the trained clinical psychologists who did hours-long interviews and gathered collateral information. And so we partnered with Scott and we got these videos and we coded the verbal and nonverbal behavior. Are these people behaving differently? And what are people paying attention to? And what we found is that people with higher levels of these traits engaged in these what we call Duchenne smiles. They're a genuine looking smile. But they, yeah, that's the one. Okay, so what distinguishes these two kinds of smiles is the activation around the eyes. And it's the creation of like crow's feet. So you kind of get, you know, lines in the corner. So a genuine person Speaker 2 (5:56) will have crow's feet when they smile, theoretically. Speaker 1 (5:58) Theoretically. Again, they can be Botox and all kinds of things Speaker 2 (6:00) getting in the way of this, but. Speaker 1 (6:02) Yeah. Okay. So it's in the eyes. Yes, it's totally in the eyes. Whereas a non-Duchenne smile, you know, you have the same kind of upturned lips and maybe you're showing your teeth, you get a big grin, but no activation around the eyes. So you don't get those crow's feet. People who are high in these psychopathic personality traits, they were showing these kinds of like, you know, very happy looking smiles as they were saying really hostile things. So they were using like happy expressions. hostile language at the same time. So you get this kind of like weird emotional presentation. They also used a lot of hand gestures. We call them illustrators. Those seem to be things that just, you know, random observers paid attention to and used to help guide their judgments, which of course is like such little information to go on. But it does suggest that, you know, you can get a sense of someone relatively quickly. But again, personality. is something that exists across time and context. So you're going to get better data the more data that you have across those different times and places. Speaker 2 (7:05) I've got two more facial expressions here. Speaker 1 (7:07) So this is sadness. So some of the research that I've done has actually looked at people who've gone on TV and asked for help trying to find their missing loved one. And in some... proportion of those cases they were actually guilty of killing that person so they are like falsely pleading for help for someone they know is never coming back and Speaker 2 (7:30) isn't this your wasn't this your phd this Speaker 1 (7:32) is my phd yeah what Speaker 2 (7:33) was your phd in in Speaker 1 (7:34) psychology but i was in a more like forensic context at that time so i was uh studying behavioral cues to emotional high stakes deception Speaker 2 (7:45) Are you trying to spot someone who was, say, in the media saying, I can't find my wife, please help me? A Speaker 1 (7:51) thousand percent. Speaker 2 (7:52) But they had killed their own wife? Speaker 1 (7:54) Yes. Yeah. So I was comparing a bunch of those cases to a bunch of cases where people genuinely had no idea where their missing loved one had gone. And they were, you know, desperately pleading to have them home. And this is one of the differences that we saw. in that set of videos where like, maybe you can try to do this with me, Stephen. Are you up for it? Speaker 2 (8:16) I'm up for it. I'm always up for everything. Speaker 1 (8:18) Okay. So in genuine sadness, you get the like downturn lip corners. Okay. So you did that pretty easily. What tends to be more difficult is this combination in the eyebrows. So you're just your inner eyebrows comes upward and together. Oh, you're pretty good. Nicely done. It was Speaker 2 (8:37) hard. So Speaker 1 (8:38) what we saw in the people who were lying was more like surprise. So like they were able to kind of pull the lip corners down. But instead of like the inner eyebrows going upward and together, the whole inner and outer eyebrows would go up, but not together. So it's kind of like. Speaker 2 (8:56) And you could predictably tell from footage if someone had done it or not. Like, was there correlation? Speaker 1 (9:02) Yeah, so we were able to use four different cues, so two verbal and two nonverbal, to predict with about 90 % accuracy who was lying and who was telling the truth. Caveat to that. We tried to replicate that more recently, and we found much more modest effects. But we did find consistencies, especially with the verbal. And there it was the number of words that people used as well as tentative words. So liars would tend to say things like, if you see this, come home or call or whatever. It was kind of like a little vague about what. this person should do if they saw it. Saying things like, it wasn't like an argument per se that we were having. So they kind of left a lot of like gray area in the things that they were saying. Whereas the truthful people were like, when you see this, call me. They Speaker 2 (9:55) were more sort of high conviction and precise. Speaker 1 (9:57) Yes, exactly. Yeah. Speaker 2 (9:58) I think down there we have some cards that say three signs someone is lying. Speaker 1 (10:03) So one cue to deception is sparse or ambiguous information. So the most consistent effect we have that differentiates people who are telling the truth from people who are lying is the amount of detail that they give. So people who are lying tend to give fewer details. Speaker 2 (10:25) Interesting. I thought it was the opposite. Speaker 1 (10:27) Yeah, I hear this a lot where people are like, no, but liars will like, you know, natter on and on and on. That's not what we find in the research whatsoever, especially, especially when people don't have time to prepare. Speaker 1 (10:42) So whenever people have time to prepare, they can start to look pretty much like a truth teller on the amount of information they have. But if you get someone on the spot, the truth teller just has to, like, say, remember what happened and, like, spit it out and tell you, right? And you can even ask for more information, like, tell me more about that. And they can come up with more information about that because they were there, right? The person who is lying has a much harder task. We call this they have increased cognitive load, which means that like they need to come up with details on the spot. They need to. not contradict themselves they need to make sure they remember it for the next time they need to tell this lie they also need to try to imagine like what do you know already and Speaker 2 (11:28) how Speaker 1 (11:29) do i not contradict or essentially step in it right whenever i'm trying to explain what actually didn't happen they Speaker 2 (11:36) must have higher like blood pressure anyway just from knowing that they're not telling the truth and that must make your cortisol spike to know that you're like Speaker 1 (11:44) Yeah, we actually, we've done some research in my lab to show that people who are lying tend to have an increased cortisol reactivity relative to people who are telling the truth. Speaker 2 (11:54) You know, on this one, the reason why I was surprised to hear it is because I'm a big true crime fan, like obsessed. And I often watch the interrogation videos. And I think I thought I heard before that when they're interviewing someone who is guilty, they will give lots of like irrelevant detail on other parts of it. I was watching the Jesse Smollett interview he did on TV. Again, he had time to prepare. So maybe that's the caveat. And he really described a bunch of pointless stuff. He was talking to the journalist. He was like, you know, and then I landed and I called my manager who was in Australia because my manager is on tour with someone else. And then even when he talked about going to Subway and getting the Subway wrap, he mentioned that it was like a tuna wrap. Speaker 1 (12:36) So Speaker 2 (12:36) the details he was sure on, and that were probably true, he seemed to really expand out. Speaker 1 (12:41) And Speaker 2 (12:41) then when it gets into the other stuff, which is where the bulk of the lies took place, allegedly, it was quite vague. Speaker 1 (12:48) Yeah, so we call that embedded lies, right? So, like, he's giving lots of detail where it's truthful. Speaker 2 (12:53) Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:54) And then almost no detail where it's a lie, right? And then lots of detail. where it's truthful. So you can also kind of like compare someone's like baseline. Do they tend to give lots of detail? Do they tend to be sparse on information? You can look for kind of deviations. And so if you notice that like someone tells you a really long story, there's tons of detail about all these other things. And then in this part of the story, there's like very little information, very sparse or ambiguous information, right? That can be a red flag. And I think what's important to remember is that there is no Pinocchio's nose. There's no like one cue. And so what you're looking for is just like these subtle cues that are like red flags and encourage you to follow up, ask more questions, dig in to that topic a little bit further. You Speaker 2 (13:46) know, in the same way they did the research to figure out if members of the public could just on the surface tell if someone was a psychopath in 5, 10 or 20 seconds. Speaker 1 (13:54) Have Speaker 2 (13:54) they ever done that with lying? To figure out if people can spot liars? Speaker 1 (13:58) Literally thousands of times. Really? Yeah. So in my lab, we've actually had them steal a $100 bill from a room. And then we had someone come in and essentially interrogate them. And everyone had to deny it, right? So the people who took it were lying. And the people who did not take it were telling the truth. And we put $100 on the line, right? So like, if you're able to convince this person that... You didn't take it when you actually did. You can keep that, Benjamin. And then we showed these videos to other people, right? People are not very good at detecting these lies or really any kind of lies. On average, people perform at about 54 % accuracy. Like if I gave you 12 videos, six are liars, six are truth tellers. you'll get like six or seven, right? Speaker 2 (14:48) What if someone is trained? Do the stats increase? Speaker 1 (14:53) So they can increase a little bit. Yes. What is better actually is learning how to ask better questions. Speaker 2 (15:00) Oh, really? Speaker 1 (15:00) Yeah. So instead of just being like, here's a video of someone lying or telling the truth, like that's all you get. And just like, look at that and tell me if they're lying or telling the truth. Good lie detectors ask for more information. Or they ask unanticipated questions where people haven't prepared for them. And then those cues of deception, that like sparse information, that like sense that they're thinking really hard is really going to kind of go off the charts. And so learning how to ask good questions is actually a really kind of essential tool for detecting lies. Speaker 2 (15:37) I mean, we're going to have to go into that. rabbit hole. I've got to be careful here because people are going to take this out of context. Say that I suspect my partner is cheating on me and I sit them down and I go, babe, listen, are you cheating on me? And they go, no, absolutely not. What would be a good question to ask to ascertain if they are actually cheating on me? Speaker 1 (15:58) So I think where you first made a mistake is you asked a closed-ended question. You're like, are you cheating on me? No. You didn't even give them an opportunity to like have to come up with something more difficult, right? If you were like, okay, well, I think last Friday night you said you had to work late, but I don't really believe that. I think you were out with someone else. You would say, tell me about, you know, work on Friday night. And so then you're asking an open-ended question. Okay, let's Speaker 2 (16:29) role play. Speaker 1 (16:29) Okay. Speaker 2 (16:30) Okay. You're the one that suspects I'm cheating. Okay. Speaker 1 (16:32) And Speaker 2 (16:33) last Friday night I was up to something. That's the context. Let's do this. Speaker 1 (16:37) Okay. I know you had to work late on Friday night. What were you working on? Speaker 2 (16:42) Yeah, Speaker 1 (16:43) it Speaker 2 (16:43) was a big investment deal that we're working on with a couple of the colleagues. We had to get a deck together. So I stayed until, what, 3 a.m. in the morning or something crazy like that. And I ended up falling asleep on my desk. And yeah, that's a long one. Anyway, what are we doing today? What's for dinner? Speaker 1 (17:02) Okay. Red flags flying up. So I would ask more questions. I would be like, oh, like what client were you working on this for? What's the deck about? Speaker 2 (17:11) Yeah, so we're doing an investment deal with Google. So it's Google's, yeah, it's Google. Speaker 1 (17:17) I could ask you like, okay, tell me about like what was in the deck, right? And you give me a little bit kind of sketchy information. great question to have in your back pocket is just tell me more about that. Like, you don't even have to, like, try very hard to figure out, like, where am I going to stump him, right? Speaker 2 (17:34) If Speaker 1 (17:34) you just ask, tell me more about that, at some point, the liar is going to have a lot more trouble coming up with additional details than the truth teller who's the truth teller is going to be like, oh, well, this is what the project was about. Like, it was actually super annoying because I couldn't get the font on the, you know, on the slide deck to stay on the slide, whatever. Like you as a truth teller. you were there and you know all those annoying little things that maybe you didn't include in the first version of the story. But if someone asks you for more detail, you could go into more detail. Whereas the person who's lying, who's making this up, that's much more difficult for them to do because that didn't actually happen. Speaker 2 (18:15) So they're going to be somewhat vague. Speaker 1 (18:17) Yes, vague. And the details are going to be really difficult to verify. Speaker 1 (18:23) If they do give you some details, it might be like the things that you don't know the co-workers that you were working with, right? Oh, it's the new guy at work. Like, you don't know him. So in general, liars tend to give fewer verifiable details. And there's this actually really fascinating study that, you know, sometimes we're like, we're trying to like dissect, right? Someone's behavior. We're trying. paying attention to their words. We're paying attention like, oh, are they fidgeting or something, which is actually not a good cue to deception. We're looking at their eye contact, also not a good cue to deception. And we are trying to like create this crazy algorithm in our head, like adding up all of these different behaviors to try to determine whether I think you're lying or telling the truth. Actually, research suggests that if you just ask how verifiable was that statement, that's a better strategy for trying to accurately detect lies than trying to use all of these other cues that actually don't work. Speaker 2 (19:23) If you ask yourself, how verifiable is the excuse this person I think his line gave me? Speaker 1 (19:30) Yes, exactly. I think the broader finding is just that it is better to focus on one cue that works than to try to put together all of these little cues that mostly don't work at all. Okay. Yeah. Speaker 2 (19:45) And the third one there? Speaker 1 (19:46) The third one, you know, we've kind of touched on, but it's just visible cognitive effort. So all of this stuff, you know, the details that people need to come up with is really hard to do, right? And they might be speaking really slowly. They might be using lots of ums and ahs and errs. They might be kind of like furrowing their brow trying to figure things out. Again, it's important to remember that like you could pause for a million different reasons. that are not deception related, right? You could just be trying to remember something. You could be furrowing your brow because, I don't know, your forehead's itchy, whatever. So none of these are Pinocchio's nose, but they are reliably associated with deception. Speaker 2 (20:29) What about body language? People always talk about body language. Speaker 1 (20:32) People put a lot of stock into body language, particularly into like gaze aversion. So if you go around the world and you ask people, what's the number one cue that someone is lying to you? They will say sketchy eye contact. And there's no research to suggest that that is true. And if you think about it for like a hot second, it makes so much sense, right? Because I sometimes tell a lie. You sometimes tell a lie. We all know the stereotype that liars can't look you in the eye. So if I want you to believe me, I'm going to make sure I control my eye contact. And that's something that's well under our control. Speaker 2 (21:11) And there's neurodivergence and things like that, which means that some people who have sort of certain neurodiversities struggle with eye contact, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're lying. Speaker 1 (21:22) Exactly. So there's some emerging research to suggest that people who are on the autism spectrum are perceived as lying more when they're actually telling the truth. And that's because of this eye contact thing, which people are using as a cue to deception, but in fact is unrelated. to deception. I mean, there's also like cultural differences, right? In some cultures, it's more respectful, like not to look at you in the eye. And so that can also lead to kind of errors in our judgment. Speaker 2 (21:52) And there's this sort of dark personality trait thing I hear a lot. Is it a triad? Speaker 1 (22:01) It was a triad. Now we get a tetrad. Speaker 2 (22:04) Okay. So is that what this is? Speaker 1 (22:05) Yes. Okay. Speaker 2 (22:06) So if you want to reveal what each of those is one at a time. Speaker 1 (22:10) psychopathy, for example. What is Speaker 2 (22:11) psychopathy? Speaker 1 (22:12) Psychopathy is a constellation that is a set of personality traits. So it's not just one thing. Having kind of a superficial charm, they're quite manipulative, and they tend to be pretty grandiose. So they've got a pretty inflated view of themselves. There's also emotional components. So they tend to have pretty shallow emotional experiences, a lack of remorse and guilt. for harming other people, and they tend not to take responsibility for their own actions. In addition, they tend to be pretty impulsive. So they are kind of living life by the seat of their pants, and they're not really, you know, planning far out into the future. And so they might, you know, kind of mooch off of family members or a romantic partner. And then lastly, they tend to break a lot of rules. So this might be just like workplace rules or social norms, but psychopathy has largely been studied in criminal populations. So this could also be laws. The other... three of the so-called dark tetrad share some elements, but also have some like unique flavors. So the next one we've got here is Machiavellianism. And that is, you know, named after Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince, which is a kind of how-to manual to like gain and wield power effectively. So as a personality trait, they tend to be pretty cynical about other people. They tell a lot of lies. And they try to like manipulate people, but it's more like three-dimensional chess, you know, like they might learn a little tidbit about you, Stephen. They'll be like, you know what? I could use that against him later. I'm just going to like put that in my back pocket. And, you know, when I need to manipulate or like blackmail you in the future, right, they'll have that available to them. So this is, they're very interested in power, which of course is where the name comes from. Next one is narcissism. You know, that's one that people know pretty well, right? So these are people who tend to be very entitled and they're very willing to exploit other people in order to get what they think they deserve, right? So it's like very relentless kind of self-focus. This Speaker 2 (24:27) word has been used quite a lot in culture. It's thrown around all the time. Speaker 1 (24:32) Constantly, yes. Speaker 2 (24:33) What's your view of that? Speaker 1 (24:35) I mean, narcissism, like all of these traits, exist on a continuum. Okay. So you or anyone else, myself, could take a measure, a self-report measure of the extent to which I have these traits, right? And you can land anywhere from very low to very high. Now, some of these traits, narcissism being one of them, actually has a, there's a personality disorder diagnosis at the incredibly high end, right? So this appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. which is basically