Pinocchio Response

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Do you ever wonder how to tell if a person is lying and how other people say they know someone is lying? In today's society there are many ways to try to detect if people are lying but there is no way to know with 100% certainty that someone is lying without knowing for a fact the correct answer.

A couple ways that people try to detect lies is either using humans as lie detectors or by using the polygraph test. In the TV show "Lie to Me", the psychologist in the show uses nonverbal cues to detect when someone is lying. But in reality it is best to listen to what they are saying rather than how they are saying it to detect lies, but even then humans are only right about 55% of the time when detecting lies.

Another way is the polygraph test. When using this they ask three different kinds of questions: Relevant questions, irrelevant questions, and control questions. When asking the questions they monitor blood pressure, respiration, and skin conductance to try to detect when someone is lying. What I found interesting was that the polygraph is biased against the innocent and it typically misclassifies innocent people as being guilty of crimes. Both of these tests are good ways to help detect a lie but they should not be completely relied on when proving someone guilty or not because they are not 100% accurate.



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Interesting post. I think it would be awesome if we could detect lies, but then again maybe some things are best left to be undetermined. I remember some study on the news said after lying people look in a certain direction, which led my ex girlfriend to conclude I'm lying to every time I looked in that direction. Boy that made things rough, anyways cool post and although I'm curious to know the truth, I think lying (when used with harmless intentions) is an integral part of our society.

This post reminds me of Maury and some dating shows where they use lie detector tests to see if someone is lying. I never knew that the polygraph test worked against the innocent, which makes me feel a bit worse for people who are accused of things using them. Hopefully in the future, a way that almost 100% of the time determines if someone is lying will be developed.

This is such a lame thought but when I think of people lying one example that I watched last night was in the movie Grandma's Boy. Alex lies to all of his co-workers, that test video games, that he is living with three 'hotties' that keep him up all night. It turns out that when he gets found out that it ends up being his Grandma, her two elderly room mates, and for a second he looks like he is in a very awkward situation. It is just one of the funnier ways in which people's lies can catch up with them.

I think lying is just a part of life, and although it would be nice to see when people are lying, I do not ever think it will be done. The human brain is too complicated for a machine to beat it at something as natural as lying, and whatever the electronic is, there will always be people who can beat it. I don't think we will ever have an accurate way to detect lies.

I think this was a very interesting post. Knowing the statistics that only 55% percent of the time humans can detect lies is very intriguing. That's barely above chance! And polygraphs making innocent people seem guilty is terrible. It reminds me of the james bond movie where the MI6 agent betrayed them and the head girl (don't know her name) stated that he passed all their tests including a polygraph. Just a random thought :P

I found this blog really attracts me for the reason that it reminds me a lot about the memories. There were one period that I was so interested in watching the play "lie to me". The actor generated so many ways to detect if the person is lying or not. Also, I think the polygraph test is cool as well. Though it is not 100% accurate it still can be considered a big development.

Although I do wish that we would be able to detect lies with 100% accuracy at some point I do agree with kinc0027 in the fact that there will always be people that can fool the system and that there will never be an accurate way to detect lies.

The book had an interesting point, which was that, when people are lying, they tend to use "emblems" (that is, gestures that convey certain conventional and agreed-upon meanings) more frequently. To me this makes sense. Emblems are like pre-fabricated bits of communication, and perhaps they require less cognitive energy to perform than actual speech. Also, emblems can be regarded as the visual/gestural equivalent of slang: they're informal, folksy, genuine-seeming, off-the-cuff. It makes sense that we'd go out of our way to look authentic and spontaneous and on the level exactly when we're actually being inauthentic and duplicitous and dishonest.

I always feel fishy when I hear of the polygraph test. I feel the test will always be less than reliable due to the inability of a machine to tell whether the subject is nervous because of lying or because of the interrogation or some other outside factor. Maybe the detector tests on Maury or other television shows shouldn't be trusted as much as they are.

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This page contains a single entry by walla421 published on March 30, 2012 12:27 PM.

Will you survive the next time? was the previous entry in this blog.

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