Pants On Fire | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

what about those that that have been trained to lie you know that this is this is they know
how to do this they know how to lie in an interrogation is that possible are we able to
to train people to lie oh people lie all the time i don't know if you have to be trained i
think people learn as they grow up there's all kinds of lies people can tell right you can tell lies about the
past the future yourself other people you can lie for fun you can lie to not be punished you can lie because it's
your job if you're a professional working undercover you have to lie you can tell lies about what you did or what
you will do those are all different kinds of lies so in the context of when people are being
questioned by the police there's a number of ways in which a person could look if they are deceptive could look
absolutely normal whereas a truthful person might actually be frightened of the police and they
ironically would look deceptive there's this thought that if you want to know if someone is lying you should be
able to tell by just looking at them that people give off signals of dishonesty this is huge in tv shows like
sherlock and lie to me plastic one-sided shrug translation i have absolutely no confidence what i just said the body
contradicts the words he's lying it feels so compelling that you should be able to recognize you know fear disgust
anger uh sadness and that these are universal expressions and i think that it's true that around the planet by and
large many emotions are expressed similarly on by by the facial muscles not entirely but similarly what's really
i think more questionable scientifically is whether or not these expressions or micro facial
expressions these quick flashes of human emotions on your face are actually signals of lying
so if your body doesn't matter the way we've thought it has for so long and what does
i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal [Music] for 20 years andy morgan has been studying human memory and deception he's
worked with the fbi cia the military law enforcement groups and it goes without saying that all those people morgan
worked with they really like to know when someone's lying to them they will do some crazy expensive exhaustive
things to find out if someone's lying to them but what we're learning now is that a
lot of those things they've been trying they just don't work we've been looking for physiological
clues since the 1920s with the invention of the lie detector this is the read polygraph
a lie detector in the past 20 years an estimated 200 000 persons have staked their futures
many of them their lives on this machine the polygraph as you know is a device that
records how fast you're breathing sort of your respiration rate and how much your chest is moving they put tubes
around your chest and the general belief in law enforcement and within the polygraph community for years has been
rooted in the idea that we call the fear and alarm hypothesis that variations in
blood pressure and pulse rate are present during and after the act of lying that
telling a lie is threatening in some way and that threat to you will trigger a difference a shift the conscious act
of lying creates an emotional disturbance and and cause your blood pressure to rise or
your skin conductance to go up or your respiration rate to change like holding your breath or maybe breathing more
rapidly now it may not shock you that the polygraph isn't a perfect tool but we were actually surprised to learn just
how inaccurate the machine is we actually know the polygraph in the way it is mainly used
is not better than chance at detecting deception maybe slightly at 52 52 53 you could literally flip a coin and be
just as accurate as the polygraph at detecting a lie but the idea that your body gives you away is still very much
alive it's still being used in police departments all over the country cops are trained to read body language
some investigators claim they can watch an interrogation with a sound off and know if someone's lying
but what andy morgan says is that when put to the test people aren't any better at sensing a lie than chance
and if that's true that we can't see a lie that we can't hear a lie or smell a lie or physically sense in any way when
someone's playing us then what do we do [Music] about a decade ago morgan and some
colleagues decided to test a different technique they started interviewing people from all over the world about
1200 of them so ranging from white brits to chinese east indians lebanese jordanians
moroccans sudanese afghans iraqis vietnamese russians my colleagues and i have tried to study
people inside and outside the united states and we've mainly used a particular technique
called cognitive interviewing cognitive interviewing is based on the premise that memory doesn't work like a video
camera there are sights and sounds and smells stored deep in your brain that can all be recalled if pushed hard
enough so every time morgan sat down to interview an american or jordanian some of them would be lying and others would
be telling the truth and he would ask them to do something pretty simple to tell us a story about what they've been
doing the most memorable concert that i've been to it's not the best it's the most
memorable so obviously this isn't actually tape for morgan's research we just put some of our friends to the test
was yay sayer about a year ago i went to a foo fighters concert in 2005 for the in your honor tour and then say
so if you imagine for a minute that i was there with you what would i have seen if i'd been there with you the
entire time they had the lights programmed with the music and so the mirrors really like reflected the
light and so there was like it would form shapes then we say when they're done so i think i'm getting a better picture
in my head so imagine from a moment i was with you but this time i was blind and i could only listen what would i
have heard during that time so it's more of a shuffling of like rubber against pavement there go down metal steps go
down to the car all car doors open you know depending on the contacts you might say what would i have smelled there was
this this girl that was standing next to me who was in his sweater dress who did not wear deodorant and then we
say starting with the very last thing that happened um what do you remember happening right before that uh
leave dorm right before that go walk backwards to car right before that get in car come
back to dorm kind of having them just walk us backwards through their memory crunching guitars and awesome drum stuff
what's been found over the years in many studies of cognitive interviewing is that using those
mnemonic prompts those those sensory prompts what you would have seen heard smelled thought touched or tasted
they trigger more memory recall you get more detail the picture becomes much more rich and complex without suggesting
anything specific to the person you're interviewing but here's where things get interesting
turns out if you're telling a lie a made-up story even one that's well rehearsed
you can't complete this interview not without giving yourself away if you tell a very simple lie there's not much work
to go i don't know and you have nothing to say kids do that all the time but if you're telling uh if you're telling a
story that's reasonably complicated and supposed to be believable because if i'm
lying to you my goal is to sell you the story i'm telling you and then to leave before you figure out it's not true
or not to bring up anything that might lead you to suspect that it's not true i'm trying to tell my story and stick to
it we find that liars are often worried that if they're inconsistent they will be thought to be lying so what they do
is they tell you a story so if i say tell me everything that happened they might tell me quite a wonderful story i
went to see florence in the machine it was like in the spring but then when i say
so let's go back to the beginning so imagine i was with you what would i have seen you know heard thought smell touch
tasted or walk through it backwards the overall result is they have very little to say do you remember the car
ride home uh not really they will say things like well pretty much just like i told you
before and they will repeat uh very closely the same thing they've already told me so that i'm not learning
anything new over time the thing is i don't even really remember it's sort of like comparing a digital photograph of
your house with the tree in the front yard and a child's picture of it where there's a house and there's a tree and
there's clouds and there's birds but there's not a lot of detail and what we tend to do when people tell us lies as i
think we fill in that we fill in the blanks and that morgan says is where the problem lies we fill in the blanks
because of course we want to believe people so andy morgan's challenge was to find a way to take these interviews and
analyze them without filling in the blanks to do this he had to put a little distance between himself and the
interesting person telling the story the way we've analyzed that in most of our studies is we record the interviews and
we do a transcript and we let the computer just count the number of words that comes out of a person's mouth in
the interview and the number of unique words that comes out of their mouth that so if you think about the phrase
one small step for man one giant leap for mankind there are ten words but you've used one
and four twice so there's only eight unique words as you're thinking harder about monitoring what you're saying it
has the side effect of reducing the richness of what you have to say and shortens the
thing that you have to say all the computer is doing is counting those two variables and
when we sort people based on those two variables response length and unique word count
the computer's right typically 80 to 85 percent of the time [Music] whereas our professional raiders whether
they come from homeland security or the fbi or the dia or other intelligence groups or law enforcement
our human raiders are rarely better than 54 correct it's kind of a crazy idea that someone
with a transcript and a tally sheet could tell us whether or not what we're remembering is accurate while someone
with decades of fbi interrogation training could be flying blind and this idea could have all sorts of
huge implications think about a jury a jury is just a bunch of people trying to figure out who to believe
but people according to andy morgan are terrible at figuring out who to believe isn't it possible that a juror with a
transcript of the trial who's never laid eyes on the accused might actually do a
better job at figuring out who's lying who to trust for andy morgan's part he's glad our
bodies aren't the end-all be-all it's reassuring to know that although there's so many books on nonverbal behavior and
people say 90 of communication is nonverbal based on the science i think that the best way to sort out
the truth is to listen to what people have to say and to know that maybe our fate won't
hang on sweaty palms or pounding heart that our words really do matter [Music] thanks to andy morgan who's a forensic
psychologist at yale and just in case you were curious during his interview with us he used more than 7200 words and
enough unique words to make us trust he wasn't lying the show is produced by lauren spohr
eric metal and me i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal you

Every law enforcement agency from the local police to the CIA to the FBI have tried use lie detector technology to catch suspects telling lies or the truth. But the fact is… most of their efforts just don't work. On this episode of the Criminal Podcast, forensic psychologist Andy Morgan talks to us about the difficult truth regarding the industry around lying.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 2 originally published February 14, 2014 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-two-pants-on-fire

Brief Summary

Forensic psychologist Andy Morgan discusses the flaws in lie detection methods and the importance of cognitive interviewing techniques.

Key points

The Inaccuracy of Polygraphs. The polygraph is not better than chance at detecting deception, despite its long-standing use.
Cognitive Interviewing Technique. Morgan's technique of cognitive interviewing reveals that liars struggle to maintain their stories.
Implications for Jurors. A juror with a transcript might be better at detecting lies than trained professionals.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

People lie all the time.

0:27WatchOct 24, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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