Following Gavin Williamson’s sacking from Theresa May’s cabinet, we discuss the indicators of whether or not someone is telling the truth.

Things mentioned in this podcast

• Rogers et al (2017), Artful Paltering (
• Serota et al (2010), The Prevalence of Lying in America (
• Hall et al (2010), Strategic Misrepresentation in Online Dating (
• DePaulo (2004), The Many Faces of Lies (
• Jerrim et al (2019), Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (
• Wiseman et al (2012), The Eyes Don’t Have It (
• Mann et al (2012), Windows to the Soul? (
• Aamodt and Custer (2006), Who Can Best Catch a Liar? (
• American Psychological Association, The Truth about Lie Detectors (
• Ten Brinke et al, Telling Lies in Scarce Environments (

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing Gavin Williamson and the Huawei League.

Nearly. Nearly.

Nearly. I'm going to say Gavin Williamson and the Huawei League. Gavin Williamson and

the Huawei League. What about the National Security Council League? Chris, could you lead us in, please? Yes. So for those of you who don't know, Gavin Williamson was the Secretary of State for Defence in the UK. And following a National Security Council meeting about the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and their role in the British sort of telecoms infrastructure, there was an anonymous briefing following this meeting, which gave sort of details of what the discussion was and particularly what the Prime Minister's position had been on this, which was to sort of acknowledge the concerns but to, you know, to side with enabling the Huawei to be involved in our infrastructure. And so after that, there was the sort of very quickly after that, this was in the Daily Telegraph, very quickly after that, there was sort of a certain amount of uproar within government circles and then within the press about the fact that information from this top secret meeting had been briefed to the press. And then there was this sort of whodunit situation of, you know, who the culprit was who had done the anonymous briefing. And straight away, as soon as it became apparent, straight away, I thought to myself, I bet it was Gavin Williamson. And lo and behold, He knew he was a wrongun. Lo and behold, and I had there was no particular, you know, evidence that I was aware of other than a bit of intuition and a few other things, which we'll sort of flesh out in a minute. But I thought I bet it's him. And yes, the subsequent inquiry within government has pointed the finger at him. Now he may turn out to end up being exonerated by a, you know, fuller, more impartial inquiry, but he got sacked anyway. And, you know, I think the balance of probability is that it was it was him. So it got me thinking, why did I think it was him? What what was it that made me think either he was a liar, or he was lying in those circumstances, because he also came out strongly denied it, and started pointing the finger at civil servants as well.

And as former civil servants, that's guaranteed to get our hands up. Right, exactly. Can I just give you the quote that he came out with? Yeah, go on. I absolutely promise, hand on heart, I did not leak this. I realize my obituary will say I did, but I swear on my children's lives, I did not. Which just reminds me of someone, you know, there's people at school who nicked 50p. Yeah. And they say, I swear on my mum, I didn't nick 50p. And I sort of half think maybe he had his fingers crossed behind his back. And so it's okay. I don't know. It reminds me of that Tory MP. Very, very childish style.

Tory MP in the, I think it was in the major government, maybe Thatcher, who went to prison. What was his name? Geoffrey Archer. Oh, yes. Jonathan Aitken. With his sword of truth. Sword of truth. Shield of good old fashioned British justice.

Yeah. Yeah, it's so wonderful, isn't it? I mean, I have to say, in this case, I actually, I'm not totally convinced it was Gavin Williamson, as it happens. Although, you know, I think I agree with Chris, the balance of probabilities are there. But I think the thing we want to talk about is sort of lying in general. So politicians lying, other people lying, and, you know, it seems, is there more of it or less? What drives it? And can we spot it?

Yeah, I mean, that's the big thing we want to talk about. How can we spot a liar? And sort of going back to Chris, because I think what's interesting with his bit of, you know, with his sleuthing abilities, he had already detected, or even more than sleuthing, he knew, there was something about it, he knew that it was Gavin Williamson, right?

I'm going to take issue with your phraseology there. Saying he knew it was Gavin Williamson, but based on some evidence I have.

I don't know if that's the right word. I'm not finding it. Yeah, there was something I intuited. He intuited it. It was something in his waters.

Yeah. And so once it became apparent that it was probably him, or at least that's what the initial inquiry had ascertained, I started thinking, well, why did I suspect him? What was going on? So I tried to unpick the intuition and think about it. And part of it was definitely character based. And I've got this sense that maybe I'm the victim of confirmation bias, because he's sort of irked me throughout his career. He's made it his business to get on your nerves. He has.

Well, let's talk briefly about who he is, because he's got a very lightweight background, I think.

Yeah. So, I mean, he was formerly a fireplace salesman. He sold sort of domestic fireplace. And, you know, he then sort of made his reputation or tried to create his reputation as a bit of a sort of Malcolm Tucker figure. He was the chief whip or maybe more Francis Urquhart. And, you know, he sort of reveled in this image of him being a master of the dark arts and so on, when self-evidently he was kind of laughable, you know. So, yeah, he... Lacked the necessary intellectual wherewithal to be a Francis Urquhart. Lacked any kind of gravitas, exactly. And, you know, so for example, when we were in a diplomatic dispute with the Russian government, he told... it was over the, you know, the polonium poisoning. He... well, no, actually it was over the assassination of Skripal. Novichok. Yeah, Novichok. Yes, exactly. He told Vladimir Putin to shut up and go away in a press statement. And it's things like that. He's just the epitome of the playground buffoon.

Yeah. See, buffoon is the word I was thinking. But how does this then link in? I mean, is it quite simply that?

Right, so that was part of it. So I then thought, this is just the kind of guy who doesn't calculate the fact that you're... that briefing something from a National Security Council meeting is career-ending, high-risk, really not done. He's so sort of gauche that he... that wouldn't have gone on in his mental calculations. That was one thing. The other thing was when they were doing this whodunit, before he gave the denial that Nick said, which was after the finger was pointed at him, when it was just who, you know, who did this, everybody came out and denied it. And he said that he nor any of his team had divulged information from the National Security Council, which was not the same as I didn't speak to the Telegraph and brief them and tell them everything that happened in this meeting. And so it was that. I think they refer to it as sort of poltering, as a strategy where you make a sort of true statement or a defensibly true statement to deflect from the... you know, you don't say something that's a definite lie.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Exactly. Where you were under a certain interpretation of sexual relations. That's true.

Precisely, yes. So I think I sniffed that when he made that statement.

Okay, interesting. Okay, so just one other thing. So I want to hear from Nick before we do. I think one of the things that was interesting after that leak is I was reading an article by a journalist saying leaks don't happen how people think they happen. It's not a question of a journalist ringing up, sorry, a politician ringing up a journalist saying, hey, you never guess what happened in cabinet today. It's just not like that. It's more like little half truths and sort of, you know, bits and pieces and it's kind of building up a puzzle that sort of points towards something. That's kind of how leaking works. Anyway, back onto our main point. We want to talk about liars. We want to talk about spotting liars, where there's more lying. Nick, take us where you want to lead us.

Well, first of all, lying in general is actually very well studied in psychology. It is something you can actually measure quite easily. So there's been quite a lot of studies about where you put people on the spot and get them to lie about things and see if other people can detect them. And it seems that just looking at some of the sort of top level data, it looks children start lying at the age of about two, apparently, when they develop a theory of mind. So that's, you know, when you understand that other people have different beliefs to you and you can therefore influence those people. And then we just get better and better at it. So, you know, there's a lot of this survey evidence. Bear in mind, you're going to be picking up, you know, people who are lying about the extent to which they're lying. But according to Sirota, over a 24 hour period when people were surveyed, 60% of people claim they didn't tell any lies, which sounds very plausible. But 50% of the lies were told by 5% of the people. So there are some big fat liars. And a big corollary of this, actually, going into what Chris was saying, is that if someone's lied before, it's a very good indicator that you should be suspicious of things they're saying in the future. We know about online dating. We've covered it in a previous podcast. But the things that people lie about, obviously, they lie in directions which suit them. So men tend to lie about their social status online. Women tend to lie about their appearance, for example. So DePaulo did a survey about the things that people lie about. And there were sort of everyday lies, right? These would be considered white lies, I think. Things where, you know, you're making life easier for everyone by fibbing. First of all, feelings and opinions. That makes sense. Yes, I love your new haircut. Your actions, plans and whereabouts, you know. So where you've been, you don't bother telling someone, well, actually, I popped into the pub on the way home. You know, it would only get in the way. Things about your knowledge, achievements and failings, explaining your behavior and facts and personal possessions. So, you know, those are the sorts of things that people lie about. And then you've got the big lies, which are, you know, rarer but much more significant. So that's affairs, cheating, misdeeds. So not confessing to an employer that you've been arrested or something. So lying about serious sort of social, significant social things like mental illness or having a miscarriage or something. Forbidden socializing. So that's when you're going out to see your mates instead of going down to the supermarket to get a job. You know, money, money and jobs. So that's obviously a big one for couples. You know, that one, one of them is spending money on something which they shouldn't be. Deaths and illnesses, identity. So that's lying, you know, pretending to be straight when you're gay. Hold on, deaths and illnesses? Yeah. So, well, when you lie, you tell your kids that, you know, granny's just feeling a bit unwell when she's dying of cancer or whatever. Violence or danger. So people will minimize, tend to minimize the danger involved in things. So the example given here is a commanding officer telling his men that it's safe to go into a village when he knows it isn't. Anyway, so there's kind of a lot of survey evidence about lying. And now the question is catching them. That's kind of what we're interested in here. Just looking at what people say about how to catch liars, a lot of it is bollocks, right? So there's a big whole thing about eye movements, which has been experimentally tested. If you look to the left, apparently you're more likely to be telling the truth. There's no evidence for that at all. Looking you in the eye, widely believed. We do it to kids. Don't we look me in the eye and say that? That's not true either. Apparently, if anything, it's the other way around. That liars are more likely to be trying to gauge your reaction. So they're more likely to be looking you in the eye. Whole kinds of all sorts of body language things. Do you sort of physically shrink? Does your body language match the words? The problem there being that everyone's bodies speak slightly different languages. So there aren't really any really good consistent tells that you can spot. And there's other things like sort of fidgeting, speech rate, breathing pattern, a lot of these things. And a lot of these are actually to do with what lie detectors look for, which is really fear. So a lot of these tells are actually fear related. So if someone is afraid that they'll get caught, great. But if someone is lying and isn't too bothered about being caught. Or if they're telling the truth, but they're frightened, or if they're confident enough in their ability to get away with it, then you won't have those tells. And, you know, a couple of things which are true, like people are more likely to lie over the phone, which seems sort of really obvious. So the point is that actually there's not like there's some killer method you can use to spot lies. And people are really bad at spotting lies, and they're much worse than they think. So people think that they're going to spot liars, you know, 75%, 80% of the time in experiments. And it's really no better than a coin flip. It's 50-50 intuitively.

And apparently there's very little variance between people. So it's not like you've got some super lie detectors and some, you know, people who are terribly naive and gullible. It's actually, you know, everybody's about as rubbish as everybody else.

And just to add to that, Armot et al. did a meta-analysis of all the studies that have been done into lie detection, and found that professionals, so law enforcement officials, no better than amateurs. Confidence, how good you think you are at finding liars, no correlation with how good you actually are. Experience, so the amount of time you've spent trying to spot liars, unrelated to how good you are. It seems to be unrelated to education and intelligence, and there's no significant difference in gender either. So basically, kind of in general, we're just not very good at spotting lies. Now we're going to get onto things that are more positive in the future. But one thing I was interested in is, have liars been caught, and if so, how? Now, what I was interested in is, well, now I'll give you some case studies and you can tell me whether that... Now, so I listed a bunch of scandals in which that lying was a component. And the ones I came up with were Profumo scandal. Now, he was rumbled when Christine Keeler blabbed. Wilbur Mills, he was brilliant. I love this guy. He's an American congressman, I think, who was caught drunk driving with a stripper called Fan Fox in his car. I like the sound of this guy. Yeah, he was great. He actually, she jumped out of the car and hid in a ditch and the police then retrieved her from the ditch. He was then reelected, right? And then made the mistake of appearing on stage with her and holding a press conference in her dressing room. At that point, I think his team got him to stand down. Mark Sanford, I don't know if you remember him. He was a US congressman who said he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail. In fact, he was rumbled when he got off a flight from Argentina, where he'd been visiting his mistress and a journalist found him at the airport. Moshe Katsav, he was an Israeli president. He said he was being blackmailed by this woman who worked for him. And it turned out that could lead to him being exposed as a serial harasser and rapist. Right. Mark Page. He was dobbed in by an aide. Well, actually, a congressional page who he tried to sexually harass. John Edwards. Remember him from the presidential? I do. I can see what this is leading to, but keep going. Now, this is brilliant because he had an affair with this woman called Rielle Hunter and had a baby with her. He got an aide to try and take responsibility for the baby. And it emerged that he apparently had once calmed this woman who was worried about having an affair with him by promising her that after his wife died, Edwards' wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews band. I don't know why I found that really funny. So I've got a couple more. Just Elliot Spitzer, he was rumbled. He was a prolific prostitute user. He was another one of these US Congress. He was a politician, wasn't he? Spitzer wore calf length black socks while having sex. Isn't that a brilliant detail? Then you've got Lewinsky scandal again, rumbled by Lewinsky and the semen stained dress made it unambiguous. The Iran-Contra affair actually leaked by the Iranians, possibly at the behest of the US, certain people in the US. And of course, Watergate where they were caught by a break-in. They are some of the toppest scandals of all time. And none of them were caught because someone said, this guy's being very suspicious. Let's look into it. They were caught by two things. One is weak link, other people, and the other is ineptitude. So I think I've come to the conclusion that you might as well try and lie because no one gets caught lying. They get caught because some other evidence comes up.

I mean, what was interesting, we'll come to Chris, but interesting, all those examples were politicians. But also, as you said, but the thing is, even though they got caught by circumstances, ineptitude, someone else, but I wonder if in all of those, to what extent they were challenged along the way, or someone thought they were wrong and they thought they were not telling the truth. But it's also how much we care that someone is lying as well. I think that's something else. But anyway, Chris.

Yeah, well, no, I think, so I think whether you get caught lying is, what that means is quite interesting, because I don't think on the strength, I think we know, we intuitively know that our ability, while there've been all, you know, earlier studies that suggested there were tells to lying and, you know, a lot of early law enforcement and interview techniques were about trying to spot those things and exploit them. I think we intuitively know that actually calling somebody on their lying based on just the evidence of them saying that at the time is not, is not good enough. It's not, it's not sufficient evidence to say, right, we know that person's lying. So the fact that they've been caught based on other people's evidence or information that's come to light afterwards, that makes sense. That is, to me, that is getting caught lying. And, you know, the way sort of law enforcement technique is now going is much more, is much less focused on looking the person in the eye and seeing whether they look shifty or not, and much more about when you release evidence into the interview process to sort of disturb them. So now there's, there is evidence to show that late, late release. So you let the person tell their story. And then as they're getting 90% through the story, you say, oh, that's interesting. What about this piece of evidence? And what you're then looking to do is destabilise their story. So they then already told you things which now can't be true. And they have to come up with subsequent elaborations to explain those and their story starts to unravel. So I think it's sort of the corroboration of the information they're giving you is against other sources is obviously how, you know, the main way to catch lying. Yeah, there is evidence to support that.

Yeah, it's not so much about knowing whether someone's lying or not. It's about catching them and bringing them to justice.

Yeah, I suppose what I'm saying is that in all of in, I think, well, nearly all of the cases I looked at, the suspicion wasn't, oh, this person seems a bit shifty. I'll look into it. It was something totally different. It emerged from a totally different source. You know, it wasn't like people said, well, Nixon seems like a shifty bastard. Let's see if he's organised any burglaries. It was that the burglary was ineptly conducted, you know, and Profumo. It wasn't like people suspected him of being involved in sex parties with prostitutes who slept with Russian attachés. It was that someone blabbed and then they thought, well, hang on a minute, we better look into this. So it's like, yeah, I suppose that that's my point. But no, just in terms of what Chris was saying, Ormerod and Dando, who did the University of Wolverhampton did a study, which I think is really gives us a lot of useful evidence about techniques that could be used to spot lies. And what they did was they had one in a thousand people going through an airport who were being asked where they were going, were planted liars. So they had to lie about where they were going. And when they used the technique of, well, basically three things. One is asking open questions. So instead of saying, you know, did you come by taxi or whatever, you have to say, how did you get here? And that then forces them to have to invent more. Increasing the cognitive load. So this is things like asking them to recount an event, but in reverse order. So they're not able to build the narrative. And then small verifiable details. So, you know, when someone says, oh yeah, I went to the, you know, I went to that university or something, you can then say, well, tell me about, oh, that's interesting. What was your route to work like? Getting them to come up with, you know, that sort of extraneous detail. And apparently they claim that people using these techniques were able to spot these liars 70% of the time, which out of a base rate of one in a thousand is pretty impressive.

And also, you know, there's sort of evidence on that basis of rather than trying to look for physiological signs of lying, trying to look at the content and the sort of pattern of delivery. So if you are asking open questions, there's evidence to show that a liar will take a little bit longer to answer on specific points of detail, presumably because they're trying to work out what they should answer as opposed to just, you know, answer the truth. And also that when you ask for elaboration on something that's not part of the main sort of story of the lie, their word counts will be lower than for, you know, people who are telling the truth. Often liars will have rehearsed a story and the moment you sort of go to the side of that, they'll be calculating, wait a minute, I don't want to sort of, you know, hoist myself on my own petard or whatever.

I'm astonished to say we're actually very, very close to be needing to finish. However, we have got time for a couple of things. One thing I just want to talk about is we've talked a little bit about how in terms of detecting liars and lies, there's actually very little advantage for the one person might have over another. However, on the other side of the fence, I think, was it 5% you said told 50% of the lies?

Yeah, that would seem to be, yeah, there are basically, I think there's consensus that there are prolific liars. So people who lie all the time.

And I suspect that those prolific liars are probably quite good liars, let's say. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.

Well, maybe it's the other 95% who don't tell you that they're lying. That's a really good way of doing it.

And I think I was just wondering what makes for a good liar. And also, I was just wondering, and what I wanted to bring it around to and finish this off on is how much we three lie and whether we think we're good liars or not. Now, okay, I'll start with myself because I think I'm actually quite a good liar. I think the big stuff, I don't believe you. I think the big stuff, I hope, I think I don't do much of that. Maybe a little one every now and again, a little big lie every now and again. I don't know. But the little stuff, I think I lie all the time, you know. And I actually think I'm quite good. And the reason why is I think I've got quite a good imagination. And I'm quite good at thinking on my feet. And I actually don't get freaked out by too much. I can keep quite cool. So I think I'm probably quite a good liar. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things that occur to me. One is that, you know, while they said that while the evidence shows that people's ability to spot lying doesn't vary, what does vary is people's credibility as a liar. So there is some credibility. There is some variance in people's ability to convince people of lies. But then I think there's also this issue of how you lie. Right. Because there's saying something that is definitely untrue that you know is untrue. There is a sort of lie by omission where somebody says, how was your day? And you sort of go, yeah, no, it was mostly okay. You know, and you don't tell them about whatever the thing was. So you're not directly lying, but you're omitting something. There's this idea of poultering as well that I was that I was sort of mentioned early on, which is where you sort of distract by saying something that's true and related to it, but isn't directly, you know, answering the question. And then there is exaggeration where you sort of embellish what is ostensibly true. And so in that, you know, I would say, I don't know whether this is the case, but certainly I, when I'm lying, try and avoid the direct big fib. I know this thing is wrong and I'm going to say it because you fear what you know, you want to be to have a one step back where you can defend your position and say, oh, well, what I meant was, you know, this. Whereas I would say the other three, I, you know, I am. I am guilty of exaggeration, poultering and lies by omission.

And also a phrase that you hear a lot is, oh, he's such a liar, but he believes his own lies as well. Yeah, actually, I think that's a key aspect of being a successful liar. You know, keeping that internal consistency.

Nick? Well, I'm bad at lying. I think I'm just too expressive. And I find it very, I just can't do it. I can't be doing with a cognitive load. And I'm usually not, I'm less concerned, I think, about, you know, lying for status reasons. In fact, I feel almost like it's kind of high status, to be honest, you know. It helps if you're quite high status anyway. Well, exactly. No, but I mean, I feel quite comfortable admitting to, you know, personal failings and things because I don't think, I don't feel like people will, you know, I feel like I've kind of got enough money in the bank, as it were, you know, with the things that I've done well. I don't worry too much about admitting to failings, you know. So, so I, yeah, so I, I'm bad at lying. I don't really, I don't talk about myself very much either. If you, I know that might seem surprising, but I don't, most of what I talk about is stuff and it's not really about me. So I'd, so I, and so I think there's definitely, I mean, I commit omission, you know, a lot. I won't mention things. I tend to kind of shy away from difficult personal topics. So, you know, that's more, that would be more where the, where the, where the sort of lies would come in. But I've become more comfortable with exaggeration. I think being, you know, having your own business, you just have to, you have to kind of learn how to highlight the things you're doing well and, and slightly sweep under the rug the things which you wish you'd done differently, you know. But yeah, no, I think there's, I mean, it's, you know, what obviously of interest to me is this, is this the whole, you know, the way that we've evolved this, this ability to both lie and to spot lies. So obviously we're in a kind of evolutionary arms race and I think the, it benefits us both to be able to lie and to be able to spot liars. And I think actually the interesting thing is 50-50 success rate, i.e. which is no success rate at all. Like we're basically, it's random, shows that we're in a kind of equilibrium, you know, sometimes we get, we can spot liars, sometimes we can't. It's not like the liars or the lie spotters are winning, you know. And of course each of us is both. So yeah.

Yeah. I mean, interestingly, the only, there's one study that I was looking at that did suggest that, you know, if there were any criteria associated with being able to better detect lies than other people, it was your own ability to lie and to be credible as a liar. You can't kid a kidder. Exactly.

Okay. We're going to have to draw things to a halt there. But I just want to say that I think you're just both lovely people. You're some of the most intelligent people I've ever met. And I've just enjoyed the last half hour so much. It's just wonderful. We'll stop there. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Thank you as always for listening. And until next time, goodbye.