liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.
This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like our stereotype of how a liar acts. And she also happens to be lying. That’s why we all get her right. In the Friends episode, when Monica finally breaks the news to her brother Ross about her relationship, she takes Ross’s hand and says, “I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. I’m sorry. But it’s true, I love him too.” We believe her in that moment—that she is genuinely sorry and genuinely in love, because she’s perfectly matched. She’s being sincere and she looks sincere.
When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed. Nervous Nelly is mismatched. She looks like she’s lying, but she’s not. She’s just nervous! In other words, human beings are not bad lie detectors. We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.
At one point in his pursuit of Bernie Madoff, Harry Markopolos approached a seasoned financial journalist named Michael Ocrant. Markopolos persuaded Ocrant to take Madoff seriously as a potential fraud, to the point that Ocrant made an appointment to interview Madoff in person. But what happened?
“It wasn’t so much his answers that impressed me, but rather it was his entire demeanor,” Ocrant said years later.
It was almost impossible to sit there with him and believe he was a complete fraud. I remember thinking to myself, If [Markopolos’s team] is right and he’s running a Ponzi scheme, he’s either the best actor I’ve ever seen or a total sociopath. There wasn’t even a hint of guilt or shame or remorse. He was very low-key, almost as if he found the interview amusing. His attitude was sort of “Who in their right mind could doubt me? I can’t believe people care about this.”
Madoff was mismatched. He was a liar with the demeanor of an honest man. And Ocrant—who knew, on an intellectual level, that something was not right—was so swayed by meeting Madoff that he dropped the story. Can you blame him? First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it’s not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.
And why did so many of the British politicians who met with Hitler misread him so badly? Because Hitler was mismatched as well. Remember Chamberlain’s remark about how Hitler greeted him with a double-handed handshake, which Chamberlain believed Hitler reserved for people he liked and trusted? For many of us, a warm and enthusiastic handshake does mean that we feel warm and enthusiastic about the person we’re meeting. But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts honest.1
3.
So what was Amanda Knox’s problem? She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts guilty. She’s Nervous Nelly.
Knox was—to those who did not know her—confusing. At the time of the crime she was twenty and beautiful, with high cheekbones and striking blue eyes. Her nickname was “Foxy Knoxy.” The tabloids got hold of a list she had made of all the men she’d slept with. She was the femme fatale—brazen and sexual. The day after her roommate’s brutal murder, she was spotted buying red underwear at a lingerie shop with her boyfriend.
In fact, the “Foxy Knoxy” nickname had nothing to do with sex. It was bestowed on her at age thirteen by soccer teammates for the deft way she moved the ball up and down the field. She was buying red underwear a few days after her roommate’s murder because her house was a crime scene and she couldn’t get access to her clothes. She wasn’t a femme fatale.2 She was an immature young woman only a few years removed from an awkward and pimply adolescence. Brazen and sexual? Amanda Knox was actually a bit of a misfit.
“I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and the theater geeks,” she writes in her memoir, published in 2011 after she was finally released from an Italian prison.