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]