People are pretty lousy lie detectors. In ordinary social interactions, when all we have to go by is what the other persons are saying and how they are saying it, our judgments of whether someone is lying or telling the truth are correct only a little more often than chance. My colleague Charlie Bond and I discovered that when we summarized the results of all of the studies that had ever been done on the topic, in which more than 24,000 people had participated. By chance, accuracy would have...
