why do our bodies produce tells and signals when we lie?
In: Biology
Lying is stressful!
Not only are people conditioned by society not to lie, but the situation that you feel requires a lie (whether that be a small lie such as “you look great in that dress” or a big one like “I did not kill that man”) is generally a stressful one. Furthermore, you’re often thinking about what will happen if you’re caught in it.
In other words, they’re not lie signals at all- they’re stress signals. And humans are social creatures for whom stress signals form an important part of social signaling.
Lying is hard work. You need to come up with a scenario that is original, NOT what happened and certainly plausible. There is also always the pressure of being caught (causing anxiety, and restlessness) and the fear of what will happen if you get caught. These factors combined produce a lot of stress which is visible outside as tells and signals.
I’m not entirely sure we do, at least to the point that we can reliably tell if people are lying.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2
Several features of humanity combine to form this answer. First, we’re social by default in the same way we breathe by default– you don’t need to think about being social, your face and body automatically signals things to people who see you. Both breathing automatically and signaling socially automatically(anger, happiness, sadness, etc) helped us survive with each other.
We are much more conscious when speaking a language than of our social signals. We can still “take over” the social autopilot, but doing this is very difficult– we generally express what we believe. Here’s what it looks:
Conscious “piloting” of language: “Watch out, there’s a car racing behind you!”
Unconscious signals: *Shock, Surprise, Intense concern, Panic*
The unconscious signals are a result of **belief**. If you really believe the first part, the second will be natural. But if you’re just trying to trick your friend, you have to fake all of the shock, surprise, intense concern, panic, etc– this is a lot of extra work we’re not used to, **except** for psychopaths or other cluster B disorders who can skillfully lie. The evolution of lying is an interesting subject because lying well involves deceiving yourself. We’ve all thought: “It’s sad how this person is lying to themselves… we see it, they probably see it, but they refuse to be honest”. How could this be an adaptation? Lying to *others* giving you an advantage makes sense but lying to *yourself*??? Isn’t that always *bad*? It turns out that this is actually a big advantage simply because if you can lie to yourself, you can most successfully convince others of your own lies, so self-deception is adaptive(beneficial to survival, so it gets passed on). Interesting, huh?
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