have said something—cried out, protested. But Montes? She “didn’t do a freaking thing except sit there.”
In the moment, however, Carmichael missed that clue. Montes was uncovered only by chance, four years later. What Levine found is that we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment—and it puzzled him. Why? What happens at the moment someone tells a lie that specifically derails us? To find an answer, Levine went back to his tapes.
Here is a snippet of another of the videos Levine showed me. It’s of a young woman—let’s call her Sally. Levine walked her through the straightforward questions without incident. Then came the crucial moment:
Interviewer: Now, did any cheating occur when Rachel left the room?
Sally: No.
Interviewer: Are you telling me the truth?
Sally: Yeah.
Interviewer: When I interview your partner, I’m going to ask her the same question. What is she going to say?
Sally pauses, looks uncertain.
Sally: Probably…the same answer.
Interviewer: Okay.
The moment Levine asks the question “Did any cheating occur?” Sally’s arms and face begin to turn a bright red. Calling it an embarrassed blush doesn’t quite do it justice. Sally gives a whole new meaning to the expression “caught red-handed.” Then comes the critical question: What will your partner say? Blushing Sally can’t even come up with a convincing “She’ll agree with me.” She hems and haws and says, weakly, “Probably…the same answer.” Probably? Blushing Sally is lying, and everyone called in to judge the tape realizes she’s lying.
Here’s the next tape Levine showed me. It’s of a woman who spent the entire interview obsessively playing with her hair. Let’s call her Nervous Nelly.
Interviewer: Now, Rachel had to get called out of the room. Did any cheating occur when she was gone?
Nervous Nelly: Actually my partner did want to look at the scores, and I said no—was like, “I want to see how many we got right”—because I don’t cheat. I think it’s wrong, so I didn’t. I told her no. I was like, “I don’t want to do that.” But she did say, “Well, we’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I don’t know if that was part of it or not, but no, we didn’t do that.
Interviewer: OK, so are you telling me the truth about the cheating?
Nervous Nelly: Yeah, we didn’t—she wanted…my partner honestly said, “We’ll just look at one.” I was like, “No, that’s not cool, I don’t want to do that.” The only thing I said was, “I’m surprised they left all the money in here.” I honestly don’t steal or cheat, I’m a good person like that. I was just kind of surprised, because normally when people leave money behind, you are going to take it—that’s just what everybody does. But no, we didn’t cheat. We didn’t steal anything.
The twirling of the hair never stops. Nor do the halting, overly defensive, repetitive explanations, nor the fidgeting and the low-level agitation.
Interviewer: OK, so when I call in your partner for an interview, what is she going to say to that question?
Nervous Nelly: I think she’ll say that she wanted to look.
Interviewer: OK.
Nervous Nelly: If she says otherwise, then that’s not cool at all, because I said, “No, I don’t want to cheat at all.” She just said, “Why not just look at one?” She said, “Well, the answers are right there,” and I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am. It’s not what I do.”
I was convinced Nervous Nelly was lying. You would conclude the same, if you saw her in action. Everybody thought Nervous Nelly was lying. But she wasn’t! When her partner reported back to Levine, he confirmed everything Nervous Nelly said.
Levine found this pattern again and again. In one experiment, for instance, there was a group of interviewees whom 80 percent of the judges got wrong. And another group whom more than 80 percent got right.
So what’s the explanation? Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like