Born Liars

by Ian Leslie

  6. By contrast, the police questioning of Omar Ballard was brief, casual, and completely lacking in the high-pressure techniques applied to the Norfolk Four. Unlike their confessions, Ballard’s testimony matched the known facts of the crime and contained verifiable details that had not been publicly disclosed.

  7. Michelle’s parents, who watched the tapes of the confessions, continue to believe that the men convicted of the crime are guilty, and expressed fury at the conditional pardons.

  8. By publicly casting doubt on the phenomenon of recovered memories, Loftus became a pilloried and even hated figure among its almost cult-like devotees. She received death threats, and for a while armed guards were required to accompany her at speaking events.

  9. Three-quarters of a million dollars was spent investigating the Ingram case. Police flew night helicopter patrols, searching for the fires of a satanic cult meeting in progress; all they found were a few terrified students drinking from kegs of beer. Doctors examined the Ingram daughters for evidence of physical violence or sexual abuse, and identified none. A forensic archaeologist, Dr Mark Papworth, was called in to search for the bones of dead babies, with the help of maps that the daughters had helped the police to draw up, identifying the supposed burial spots. After much digging he found nothing except the toe bone of an elk. Papworth later recounted telling one of the detectives that there was ‘No evidence. None at all. Zero.’ The detective replied, ‘If you were the Devil would you leave any evidence?’

  10. The cognitive scientist Mark Changizi explains why this works better for Fitzgerald than keeping his eye on the ball. It takes a tenth of a second between the time the light from the ball strikes his eye to the time his brain perceives it. When the ball and the person are moving fast, a tenth of a second is a long time; if Fitzgerald’s brain is working with a perception of what the world is like when light hits his eye, the ball will fly past him. So he closes his eyes and takes a highly educated guess on what the world will look like in a tenth of a second’s time.

  11. If you lost this ‘sixth sense’ you would become painfully aware of its importance. The clinical neurologist Jonathan Cole has written about a patient who suffered nerve damage from a viral illness at age nineteen, and lost all proprioception. He became entirely reliant on his conscious attention for working out what his body was doing. Unless he watched his arm or leg to keep it still, it moved uncontrollably. After a Herculean effort to train his body he was able to stand, and eventually resume something like a normal life. He learned to walk, to dress himself, even to drive, by applying fierce attention to his own body. But if the lights went out, he collapsed to the floor.

  12. In Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that ‘Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.’

  13. When the researcher holds up the alternative cards (photographs) in this experiment he is actually holding two in each hand, with the opposite choice of each card tucked behind it. The two cards at the front have a black back. When the participant chooses a card, from say, the researcher’s left hand, the researcher lays both cards in that hand face-down, and slides the one on top – the opposite of the one chosen – across the table. The participant doesn’t see that his actual choice remains face-down on the table, because its black back blends with the black tabletop.

  14. This is a slight simplification. A few people seem to have language facility in the right brain. But where it resides isn’t so important. What matters is that specific brain systems handle specific tasks.

  15. ‘How does it feel,’ wonders the neuroscientist Christof Koch, ‘to be the mute hemisphere, permanently encased in one skull in the company of a dominant sibling that does all of the talking?’

  16. Marion’s husband was not a believer. He went to bed as usual that night, and slept soundly.

  17. For the purposes of publication, Festinger changed the place in question to a town in Michigan. He also invented the names for the people involved; those are the ones used here.

  18. There is some evidence to suggest that men are more prone to positive illusions than women, who are more likely to have some negative illusions about themselves – to regard themselves as slightly less skilled and competent than they really are. But it’s hard to tell whether this is a function of gender or of power: women in dominant power relations are more likely to have positive illusions; men in subordinate positions are more prone to negative illusions.

  19. Woods had commanded an Apache helicopter company in the first Gulf War. During the course of his 2003 interviews he realised that one of the men he was about to meet, a senior member of Iraq’s Republican guard, had been the commander of an armoured tank brigade that Woods and his company had destroyed in the open desert of northern Kuwait. After a couple of sessions with this man Woods told him about their previous encounter. The Iraqi calmly recounted the horror of the incident from the other side of the gun sight.

  20. According to the Iraq Survey Group (a separate fact-finding mission organised by US intelligence services), Saddam knew his subordinates had a tendency to lie, but his earlier efforts to check their claims through personal tours of inspection of military facilities decreased as he became more and more reclusive. He was deeply shaken by the 1998 joint US and UK bombing operation ‘Operation Desert Fox’, during which one of his palaces was reduced to rubble. Following this, he retreated even further into a small, closed and secretive world.

  21. Nobody rated Saddam’s people skills more highly than Saddam, who would often boast of his ability to see the hidden hearts of those around him. On one of the tapes that Woods listened to, Saddam declares to his assembled generals and ministers that ‘I know which one of you will betray me before you know.’

  22. Psalm 116 describes the psalmist’s gratitude to God for saving him from physical danger and spiritual despair. In the English (King James) translation verse 11 reads: ‘I was greatly afflicted: I said in my haste, All men are liars.’

  23. Back in 1761, when he was in London, Franklin had attended a performance of music produced by stroking the rims of glasses filled with liquid to various levels. Charmed, he resolved to design a glass-based instrument that would be easier to play. His invention consisted of a row of glass bowls of different sizes, fitted on a wooden axle that was rotated by the action of a foot-pedal. The performer spins the bowls with his foot and touches the rims of the glasses with his moistened fingers. The result is an ethereal, mystical music; notes seem to float in from nowhere, like ghosts, and linger in the air. By 1762 the armonica (Franklin derived its name from the Italian word for harmony) was being commercially produced and was soon taken seriously by composers and musicians (its fans included Beethoven and Goethe). Franklin himself loved to play it and wasn’t above encouraging the popular belief that it had healing qualities. Princess Izabella Czartoryska of Poland describes in a diary how she was ill with ‘melancholia’ when she met the great American, so ill that she was already writing her testament and farewell letters. Franklin – an epic flirt – took her hands, gazed into her eyes, and murmured ‘Pauvre jeune femme’, before playing the armonica for her. ‘Madame,’ he declared after finishing, ‘you are cured.’ Sure enough, she immediately felt like her old self again.

  24. In his 1911 play The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw presents a doctor who is incompetent in every scientific sense, and yet effective nonetheless. Dr Sir Ralph Bloomfield-Bonington (‘B.B.’) is described as ‘healing by the mere incompatibility of disease or anxiety with his welcome presence. Even broken bones, it is said, have been known to unite at the sound of his voice.’ The ideal physician, of course, has both skill-sets.

  25. David Morris points out that cultural beliefs have sometimes evolved to create illness as well as to relieve it, as a means of heading off greater dangers. Apaches, from ancient ti
mes until the twentieth century, suffered from certain maladies unique to their people. Merely crossing the path left by a snake was enough to bring on horrible facial sores (which the shaman would then have to treat). Any contact with a bear – even touching bear fur – could bring on physical deformities. These conditions seem to have developed as the strongest possible signal to keep away from potentially fatal encounters.

  26. The vendor described his Shreddie as ‘not in mint condition – one corner is chipped’.

  27. Zborowski was not the man Mead thought he was. His most significant professional experience was not in anthropology, but spying. All the time he worked for Sedov he was actually feeding information about the Trotskyites to Stalin’s secret police, the GPU (Stalin was said to take a special interest in his reports). Several of Zborowski’s anti-Stalinist friends died sudden, violent and mysterious deaths, including Sedov himself, whom Zborowski then replaced as leader of the group. His GPU handlers then tried to persuade him to go to Trotksy’s hideout in Mexico (the cable urged him to ‘get to the OLD MAN’), but Zborowski contrived to remain in Paris, where he was studying anthropology at the Sorbonne. When Zborowski moved to the United States he continued to spy for the GPU, this time on the activities of his American Trotskyite friends. His spying was revealed to a Senate committee in 1955 by the defector Alexander Orlov. Brought before the committee, Zborowski admitted to spying but said he ceased doing so after 1937. Later evidence proved this to be false, and in 1963 he was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served two before being released. He lied to Margaret Mead, who remained a loyal friend to the end, telling her the Soviets forced him to work for them by threatening his relatives. His academic career was largely unhindered. He rose to become Director of the Pain Institute at Mount Zion hospital, where he remained until retirement. Mark Zborowski died in 1990 in San Francisco, aged 82.

  28. Luckily, she escaped six days later after being freed by resistance fighters.

  29. Students of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial may find this style of argument familiar.

  30. One useful, possibly unintentional side-effect of this doctrine might have been to make the deceit more convincing. Actors are sometimes trained in a similar technique.

  31. Following Garnet’s trial, Shakespeare gave a line to the Porter in Macbeth that audiences would have recognised as a reference to Garnet, Southwell, and Jesuit casuistry: ‘Here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.’ Indeed, as the critic Frank Kermode pointed out, verbal equivocation is one of the play’s themes. The witches employ linguistic trickery to lead on Macbeth, such as their promise that none of woman born may harm him. Only when it is too late does Macbeth ‘begin/to doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth’.

  32. Protestants faced the same dilemma, and some reached similar conclusions as the Jesuit casuists. William Tyndale declared that ‘to lie also, and to dissemble, is not always sin.’

  33. Lee was particularly struck by a piece of research from Italy showing that children agreed that all lying was wrong, unless the lie in question was endorsed by a priest.

  34. Burton intended his book to act as a counterweight to the slew of popular psychology books urging us to trust in our intuitions, a trend started by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which suggested that ‘instant cognition’ is often wiser than years of study or the sifting of evidence. Burton’s point is not that we should disregard our intuitions about people or situations when we’re trying to work out what we think – such feelings can indeed provide very significant data, rooted as they often are in sophisticated unconscious processes. But the more certain we feel, the more we should question ourselves, interrogate other possibilities, and listen to contradictory opinions. Always blink twice.

  Further Reading

  Introduction and Chapter One: The Lying Animal

  Robert Feldman’s book Liar: The Truth About Lying summarises his research on the topic and is a good survey of the role of lies in everyday life. Bella DePaulo’s work in this area is essential, and a guide to it can be found at her website, www.belladepaulo.com. It was Byrne and Whiten’s theory of Machiavellian Intelligence that first made me think about a book on lying, and when researching a piece for The Times science supplement, Eureka, I was lucky enough hear about the development of this theory from Richard Byrne himself. He pointed me in the direction of Nicholas Humphrey’s seminal paper ‘The Social Function of Intellect’. Robin Dunbar’s theory about the importance of social groups to brain size can be found in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language amongst other places. The anecdotes about primate deceit are drawn from Byrne and Whiten’s Machiavellian Intelligence and from Frans de Waal’s work, including Our Inner Ape, a successor to Chimpanzee Politics. I found the stories about Barnum and Jerry Andrus in a piece by Errol Morris for the New York Times, entitled ‘Seven Lies About Lying’. George Steiner’s thoughts on the importance of lying to human development can be found in his book After Babel. Bernard Knox writes about the contrast between Odysseus and Achilles in the introduction to Robert Fagles’s translation of The Odyssey (I thank Stephen Brown for the pointer).

  Chapter Two: First Lies

  Vasudevi Reddy’s book How Infants Know Minds explores the mental and social development of very young children and their burgeoning skills of fakery and deception. Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee have probably done the most and the best work on the topic of children and lying, and their lucidly written papers are well worth reading. I’m grateful to Victoria Talwar for sharing with me her paper on punitive environments and for taking me through her fieldwork in West Africa. Simon Baron-Cohen’s essay ‘I Cannot Tell a Lie – What people with autism can tell us about honesty’ can be found online, at the website of the periodical In Character. I was alerted to Sir Thomas Browne’s take on lying while reading the very stimulating A Pack of Lies: Towards A Sociology of Lying, by J.A. Barnes. Readers interesting in learning more about Browne, a fascinating figure who had much to say about the nature of truth (and many other things), might start with The World Proposed, a collection of essays about him and his work, edited by Reid Barbour and Claire Preston.

  Chapter Three: Confabulators

  William Hirstein’s book Brain Fiction is a good overview of the significance of confabulation and its links to self-deception and storytelling. Will Self was generous enough to spend time discussing with me the nature of his creative process as part of my research for a previous book that never saw the light of day; I’m glad to be able to use some of his illuminating insights here (it was he who put me on to David Hume’s thoughts on the nature of imaginative creation). The story of Jonathan Aitken’s fictional car chase is drawn from The Liar, by Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister, a compelling account of the court case as seen from the Guardian’s side. My description of Marlon Brando’s acting class is based on the journalist Jod Kaftan’s account of his relationship with the great man, first published in Rolling Stone, though I heard it in an episode of National Public Radio’s This American Life to which Kaftan contributed. I first read about Charles Limb’s experiment with jazz musicians on the superb psychology blog Mind Hacks, the point of embarkation for many a journey. I’m indebted to Jonah Lehrer’s various reflections on the mental processes behind creativity, including his excellent piece on it for Seed magazine. I read about the experiment on high-creativity versus high-IQ students in Robert Sternberg’s comprehensive survey of the field, the Handbook of Creativity. I spoke to Adrian Raine about his research on the psychopathic brain when researching a piece about his work for Eureka.

  Chapter Four: Tells and Leakages

  Along with many other people I first read about the work of Paul Ekman in Malcolm Gladwell’s essay for the New Yorker, ‘The Naked Face’. Ekman’s own books, including Telling Lies and Why Kids Lie offer highly readable intr
oductions to his work on facial expressions and deception. I’m grateful to Robert Hunter for discussing with me the theory and practice of lie detection and its relevance to legal process, and for the concept of ‘the demeanour assumption’. I came across the research on rape investigations at Deception Blog (http://deception.crimepsychblog.com), a wonderful trove of links to contemporary deception research, the discovery of which helped convince me that there was a book to be written on this subject (I thank its anonymous compiler). I became interested in the Charles Ingram case after reading an article by Jon Ronson for the Guardian in which he reconsiders his earlier assessment of Ingram’s guilt after reading James Plaskett’s meticulous dissection of the prosecution case, available online. The analysis of the Iranian election was published in the Washington Post shortly after the election had taken place. Its statistical reasoning has subsequently been questioned; those wishing to follow the debate may start here: http://bit.ly/fqGQ3T. I offer it here as a vivid example of a very interesting new discipline.

  Chapter Five: The Dream of a Truth Machine

  My account of the polygraph’s invention and development relies heavily on Ken Alder’s exhaustively researched social history, The Lie Detectors. I also referred to the very readable report on the polygraph produced by National Academy of Sciences, available free online, as is the Pentagon’s 2001 Annual Report on the Polygraph. Tim Weiner, David Johnston and Neil Lewis write about Aldrich Ames’s encounters with the polygraph in their book Betrayal. I first came across Ames’s letter to Steven Aftergood on the wonderful Letters of Note blog. I am grateful to Ruben Gur, Daniel Langleben and Jane Campbell Moriarty for sharing with me their expertise on the new forms of lie detection technology; any views expressed here are very much my own. Ian Herbert’s excellent discussion of the power of false confessions in court cases led me to the Bill Bosko case and to the research of Saul Kassin. Elizabeth Loftus’s papers are all well-written, colourful and worth reading in the original, as are her books. William Saletan has written a very good survey of Loftus’s career for Slate magazine. My account of the Paul Ingram case relies largely on the work of Lawrence Wright, whose reports on the case originally appeared in the New Yorker before being published in the form of a book, Remembering Satan. I also referred to a detailed account of the case written by Ethan Watters for Mother Jones magazine.