The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.
4.
Over the course of his career, the psychologist Tim Levine has conducted hundreds of versions of the same simple experiment. He invites students to his laboratory and gives them a trivia test. What is the highest mountain in Asia? That kind of thing. If they answer the questions correctly, they win a cash prize.
To help them out, they are given a partner. Someone they’ve never met before, who is, unknown to them, working for Levine. There’s an instructor in the room named Rachel. Midway through the test, Rachel suddenly gets called away. She leaves and goes upstairs. Then the carefully scripted performance begins. The partner says, “I don’t know about you, but I could use the money. I think the answers were left right there.” He points to an envelope lying in plain sight on the desk. “It’s up to them whether they cheat or not,” Levine explains. In about 30 percent of cases, they do. “Then,” Levine goes on, “we interview them, asking, ‘Did you cheat?’”
The number of scholars around the world who study human deception is vast. There are more theories about why we lie, and how to detect those lies, than there are about the Kennedy assassination. In that crowded field, Levine stands out. He has carefully constructed a unified theory about deception.3 And at the core of that theory are the insights he gained from that first trivia-quiz study.
I watched videotapes of a dozen or so of those post-experiment interviews with Levine in his office at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Here’s a typical one, featuring a slightly spaced-out young man. Let’s call him Philip.
Interviewer: All right, so…have you played Trivial Pursuit games…before?
Philip: Not very much, but I think I have.
Interviewer: In the current game did you find the questions difficult?
Philip: Yes, some were. I was like, “Well, what is that?”
Interviewer: If you would scale them one to ten, if one was easy and ten was difficult, where do you think you would put them?
Philip: I would put them [at] an eight.
Interviewer: An eight. Yeah, they’re pretty tricky.
Philip is then told that he and his partner did very well on the test. The interviewer asks him why.
Philip: Teamwork.
Interviewer: Teamwork?
Philip: Yeah.
Interviewer: OK, all right. Now, I called Rachel out of the room briefly. When she was gone, did you cheat?
Philip: I guess. No.
Philip slightly mumbles his answer. Then looks away.
Interviewer: Are you telling the truth?
Philip: Yes.
Interviewer: Okay. When I interview your partner and I ask her, what is she going to say?
At this point in the tape, there’s an uncomfortable silence, as if the student is trying to get his story straight. “He’s obviously thinking very hard,” Levine said.
Philip: No.
Interviewer: No?
Philip: Yeah.
Interviewer: OK, all right. Well, that’s all I need from you.
Is Philip telling the truth? Levine has shown the Philip videotape to hundreds of people and nearly every viewer correctly pegs Philip as a cheater. As the “partner” confirmed to Levine, Philip looked inside the answer-filled envelope the minute Rachel left the room. In his exit interview, he lied. And it’s obvious. “He has no conviction,” Levine said.
I felt the same thing. In fact, when Philip is asked, “Did you cheat?” and answers, “I guess. No,” I couldn’t contain myself, and I cried out, “Oh, he’s terrible.” Philip was looking away. He was nervous. He couldn’t keep a straight face. When the interviewer followed up with, “Are you telling the truth?” Philip actually paused, as if he had to think about it first.
He was easy. But the more tapes we looked at, the harder it got. Here is a second case. Let’s call him Lucas. He was handsome, articulate, confident.
Interviewer: I have to ask, when Rachel left the room, did any cheating occur?
Lucas: No.
Interviewer: No? You telling me the truth?
Lucas: Yes, I am.
Interviewer: When I interview your partner and I ask her the same question, what do you think she’s going to say?
Lucas: Same thing.
“Everybody believes him,” Levine said. I believed him. Lucas was lying.
Levine and I spent the better part of a morning watching his trivia-quiz videotapes. By the end, I was ready to throw up my hands. I had no idea what to make of anyone.
The point of Levine’s research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You’d think we’d