The future of lying Jeff Hancock

[Music]

[Music]

let me tell you it has been a fantastic

month for deception

and I’m not even talking about the

American presidential race we have a

high profile journalist caught for

plagiarism a young superstar writer

who’s booking involves so many made-up

quotes that they’ve pulled it from the

shelves a New York Times expose on fake

book reviews it’s been fantastic now of

course not all deception hits the news

much of the deception is every day in

fact a lot of research shows that we all

lie once or twice a day as Dave

suggested so it’s about 6:30 now suggest

that most of us should’ve lied let’s

take a look at Winnipeg how many of you

in the last 24 hours think back have

told a little fib or a big one how many

have told a little lie out there all

right good

these are all the liars make sure you

pay attention to them know that look

good there’s about two-thirds of you the

other third didn’t lie

or perhaps forgot or you’re lying to me

about your line which is very very

devious this fits with a lot of the

research which suggests that line is

very pervasive it’s this pervasiveness

combined with the centrality to what it

means to be a human the fact that we can

tell the truth or make something up that

has fascinated people throughout history

here we have Diogenes with his Lantern

does anybody know what he was looking

for a single honest man and he died

without finding one back in Greece and

we have Confucius in the East who was

really concerned with sincerity not only

that you walked the walk or talk the

talk but you believed in what you were

doing you believed in your principles

now my first professional encounter with

deception is a little bit later than

these guys a couple thousand years I was

a customs officer for Canada back in the

mid 90s yeah I was defending Canada’s

borders you may think that’s a weapon

right there in fact that’s a stamp

I used a stamp to defend Canada’s

borders very Canadian of me

I learned a lot about deception while

doing my duty here in customs one of

which was that most of what I thought I

knew about deception was wrong and I’ll

tell you about some of that tonight but

even since just 1995-96 the way we

communicate has been completely

transformed we email we text we Skype we

Facebook it’s insane

almost every aspect of human

communication has been changed and of

course that’s had an impact on deception

let me tell you a little bit about a

couple of new deceptions we’ve been

tracking and documenting they’re called

the butler the sock puppet and the

Chinese water army it sounds a little

bit like a weird book but actually

they’re all new types of lives let’s

start with the butler’s here’s an

example of one on my way anybody ever

written on my way then you’ve also lied

we’re never on our way we’re thinking

about going on our way here’s another

one sorry I didn’t respond to you

earlier my battery was dead your battery

wasn’t dead you weren’t in a dead zone

you just didn’t want to respond to that

person that time here’s the last when

you’re talking to somebody and you say

sorry I got work got it go but really

you’re just bored you want to talk to

somebody else

each of these is about a relationship

and this is a 24/7 connected world once

you get my cell phone number you can

literally be in touch with me 24 hours a

day and so these lies are being used by

people to create a buffer like the

butler used to do between us and the

connections to everybody else but

they’re very special they use ambiguity

that comes from using technology you

don’t know where I am or what I’m doing

or who I’m with and they’re aimed at

protecting the relationships these

aren’t just people being jerks these are

people that are saying look I don’t want

to talk to you now or I didn’t want to

talk to you then but I still care about

you our relationship is still important

now the sock puppet on the other hand is

a totally different animal the sock

puppet isn’t about ambiguity per se it’s

about identity let me give you a very

recent example as in like last week

here’s RJ Ellery bestseller author and

in Britain here’s one of his

best-selling books here’s a reviewer

online and on Amazon my favorite by

Nicodemus Jones is whatever else it

might do

it will touch your soul and of course

you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones

is RJ Ellery he wrote very very positive

reviews about himself surprise surprise

now this parked sock puppet stuff isn’t

actually that new Walt Whitman also did

this back in the day before there was

Internet technology sock puppet becomes

interesting when we get to scale which

is the domain of the Chinese water army

Chinese water army refers to thousands

of people in China that are paid small

amounts of money to produce content it

could be reviews it could be propaganda

the government hires these people

companies hire them all over the place

in North America we call this astroturf

II an - the turfing is very common now

there’s a lot of concerns about it we

see this especially with product reviews

book we’ve used everything from hotels

to weather you that toaster is a good

toaster or not now look at these three

reviews or these three types of

deception you I think the Internet is

really making us a deceptive species

especially when you think about the

astroturf in where we can see deception

brought up to scale but actually what

I’ve been finding is very different from

that now let’s put aside the online

anonymous sex chat rooms which I’m sure

none of you have been in I can assure

you there’s deception there and let’s

put aside the Nigerian prince who’s

emailed you about getting the 43 million

out of the country let’s forget about

that guy - let’s focus on the

conversations between our friends and

our family and our co-workers and our

loved ones those are the conversations

that really matter what does technology

do - deception with those folks here’s a

couple of studies one of the things one

of the studies we do are called diary

studies in which we ask people to record

all of their conversations in all their

lives for seven days and what we can do

then is calculate how many lies took

place per conversation within a medium

and the finding that we get that

surprises people the most is that email

is the most honest of those three media

and it really throws people for a loop

because we think well there’s no

nonverbal cues so why don’t you lie more

the phone

in contrast the most lies again and

again and again we see the

phone if the device that people lie on

the most and perhaps because of the

butler lie ambiguity as I was telling

you about

this tends to be very different from

what people expect

what about resumes we did a study in

which we had people apply for a job and

they could apply for a job either with a

traditional paper resume or on LinkedIn

which is a social networking site like

Facebook but for professionals involves

the same information as a resume and

what we found too many people surprised

was it those LinkedIn resumes were more

honest on the things that mattered to

employers like your responsibilities or

your skills or your previous job how

about Facebook itself you know we always

think that hey there are these idealized

versions people are just showing the

best things that happen their lives I

thought that many times my friends in no

way they can be that cool and have that

bit of a life well one study tested this

by examining people’s personalities they

had four good friends of a person judge

their personality then they had

strangers many strangers judged the

person’s personality just from Facebook

and what they found was those judgments

of personality were pretty much

identical highly correlated meaning that

Facebook profiles really do reflect our

actual personality all right well what

about online dating I mean that’s a

pretty deceptive space I’m sure you all

have friends that have used online

dating and they would tell you about

that guy that had no hair when he came

or the woman that didn’t look at all

like her photo well we were really

interested in it and so what we did is

we brought people online daters into the

lab and then we measured them we got

their height up against the wall we put

them on a scale got their weight ladies

love that and then we actually got their

drivers license to get their age and

what we found was very very interesting

here’s an example of the men and the

height along the bottom is how tall they

said they were in their profile along

the y-axis the up vertical access is how

tall they actually were that diagonal

line is the truth line if they’re dots

on it they were telling exactly the

truth as you see most of the little dots

are below the line what it means is all

the guys were lying about their height

in fact they lied about their height

about nine tenths of an inch what we say

in the lab as strong rounding up

you get two five eight and 1/10 and boom

five nine but what’s really important

here is look at all those dots they are

clustering pretty close to truth what we

found was eighty percent of our

participants did indeed lie on one of

those dimensions but they always lied by

a little bit one of the reasons is

pretty simple if you go to a date a

coffee date and you’re completely

different than what you said game over

right so people lied frequently but they

lied subtly not too much they were

constrained well what explains all these

things what explains the fact that

despite our intuitions mine included a

lot of online communication

technologically mediated communication

is more honest than face-to-face that

really is strange how do we explain this

well to do that one thing is we can look

at the deception detection literature

it’s a very old literature by now it’s

it’s coming up on 50 years it’s been

reviewed many times there’s been

thousands of trials hundreds of studies

and there’s some really compelling

findings the first is were really bad at

detecting deception really bad

fifty-four percent accuracy on average

when you have to tell somebody that just

said a statement is lying or not

that’s really bad why is it so bad well

it has to do with Pinocchio’s nose if I

were to ask you guys what do you rely on

when you’re looking at somebody and you

want to find out if they’re lying

what cue do you pay attention to most of

you would say that one of the cues you

look at is the eyes the eyes are the

window to the soul and you’re not alone

around the world almost every culture

one of the top cues is eyes but the

research over the last 50 years says

there’s actually no reliable cue to

deception which blew me away and it’s

one of the hard lessons I learned when I

was a customs officer the eyes do not

tell us whether somebody’s lying or not

some situations yes high stakes maybe

their pupils dilate their pitch goes up

their body movements change a little bit

but not all the time not for everybody

it’s not reliable strange the other

thing is that just because you can’t see

me doesn’t mean I’m going to lie it’s

common sense but one important finding

is that we live for a reason we lie to

protect ourselves or for our own gain or

for somebody else’s gain so

are some pathological liars but they

make up a tiny portion of the of the

population we lie for a reason just

because people can’t see us doesn’t mean

we’re going to necessarily lie well I

think there’s actually something much

more interesting and fundamental going

on here the next big thing for me the

next big idea we can find by going way

back in history to the origins of

language most linguists agree that we

started speaking somewhere between

50,000 and a hundred thousand years ago

that’s a long time ago a lot of humans

have lived since then we’ve been talking

I guess about fires and caves and

saber-toothed Tigers I don’t know what

they talked about but they were doing a

lot of talking and that get said there’s

a lot of humans evolving speaking about

a hundred billion people in fact what’s

important though is that writing only

emerged about five thousand years ago so

what that means is that all the people

before there was any writing every word

that they ever said every utterance

disappeared no trace evanescent gone so

we’ve been evolving to talk in a way in

which there is no record in fact even

the next big change to writing was only

500 years ago now with the printing

press which is very recent our past and

literacy rates remained incredibly low

right up until World War two so even the

people of the last two millennia most of

the words they ever said disappeared

let’s turn to now the networked age how

many of you have recorded something

today anybody do any reading today did

anybody write a word it looks like

almost every single person here recorded

something in this room right now we’ve

probably recorded more than almost all

of human pre ancient history that is

crazy we’re entering this amazing period

of flux during human evolution where

we’ve evolved to speak in a way in which

our words disappear but we’re in an

environment where we’re recording

everything in fact I think in the very

near future it’s not just what we write

that will be recorded everything we do

will be recorded

what does that mean what’s the next big

idea from that well as a social

scientist this is the most amazing thing

I have ever even dreamed of now I can

look at all those words that used to for

millennia disappear I can look at lies

that before were said and then gone

remember those a shorter feigning

reviews that we were talking about

before well when they write a fake

review they have to post it somewhere

and it’s left behind for us so one thing

that we did I’ll give you an example of

looking at the language is we paid

people to write some fake reviews one of

these reviews is fake the person never

was at the James hotel the other review

is real the person stayed there now your

task now is to decide which review is

fake I’ll give you a moment to read

through them but I want everybody to

raise their hand at some point remember

I study deception I can tell if you

don’t raise your hand all right how many

of you believe that a is the fake all

right very good about half and how many

of you think that B is all right

slightly more for B excellent

here’s the answer B is a fake well done

second group you dominated the first

group you’re actually a little bit

unusual every time we demonstrate this

it’s usually about a 50/50 split which

fits with the research 54% maybe people

here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and

better at figuring it out there’s cold

hard winters I love it all right so why

do I care about this well what I can do

now with my colleagues in computer

science is we can create computer

algorithms that can analyze the

linguistic traces of deception let me

highlight a couple of things here in the

fake review the first is that Liars tend

to think about narrative they make up a

story who and and what happened and

that’s what happened here our fake

reviewers talked about who they were

with and what they were doing they also

used the first-person singular

I way more than the people to actually

stay there they were inserting them

selves into the hotel review kind of

trying to convince you were there

in contrast the people that wrote the

reviews that were actually there

their bodies were actually entered the

physical space they talked a lot more

about spatial information they said how

big the bathroom was or they said you

know here’s how far shopping is from the

hotel now you guys did pretty well most

people perform a chance of this task our

computer algorithm is very accurate much

more accurate than then humans can be

and it’s not going to be acted all the

time this isn’t a deception detection

machine to tell if your girlfriend’s

lying to you on text messaging we

believe that every lie now every type of

life fake hotel reviews fake shoe

reviews your girlfriend cheating on you

with text messaging those are all

different lives they’re gonna have

different patterns of language but

because everything is recorded now we

can look at all of those kinds of lines

now as I said as a social scientist this

is wonderful it’s transformational we’re

gonna be able to learn so much more

about human thought and expression about

everything from love to attitudes

because everything is being recorded now

but what does it mean for the average

citizen what does it mean for us in our

lives

let’s forget deception for a bit one of

the big ideas I believe is that we’re

leaving these huge traces behind my

inbox and outbox for email is massive

and I never look at it I write all the

time but I never look at my at my record

at my trace and I think we’re gonna see

a lot more of that where we can reflect

on who we are by looking at what we

wrote what we said what we did now if we

bring it back the deception there’s a

couple of takeaway things here first

lying online can be very dangerous right

not only are you leaving a record for

yourself on your machine but you’re

leaving a record on the person that that

you were lying to and you’re also

leaving them around for me to analyze

with some computer algorithms so by all

means go ahead and do that that’s good

but when it comes to lying and what we

want to do with our lives I think we can

go back to Diogenes and

Confucius and they were less concerned

about whether to lie or not to lie and

more concerned about being true to the

self and I think this is really

important now when you are about to say

or do something we can think do I want

this to be part of my legacy part of my

personal record because in the digital

age we live in now in the networked age

we are all leaving a record thank you so

much for your time and good luck with

your record

[Applause]