He’s shifting in his seat. Talking fast. Looking away. Touching his face. Whatever he’s saying, it definitely doesn’t seem true.
Turns out, it might be.
It’s tempting to fall back on conventional wisdom in looking for the signs of a lie. But really, lying is much more complicated. And as a society, we’re still fairly bad at detecting deception — even when the stakes are very high.
But new strategies have emerged to make the pursuit of truth more accurate. One approach relies on the content of a liar’s words. The other, on counterintuitive clues from speech. Neither are perfect, but in a field that relies on outdated methods to catch lies, these are backed by empirical evidence.
