We all know the edict of “show, don’t tell” in our writing. When it comes to showing a character who’s hiding the truth, how many of us have shown this by giving the character mannerisms we’ve read or heard are sure-fire lying behaviors, such as clearing their throats, touching their noses, averting their gazes. Guess what? Recent studies have shown liars don't clear their throats or touch their noses or shift around any more than truth tellers do. In fact, curtailing their movements may be a by-product of trying to remember what they’ve said to keep their stories straight.
So let’s talk about some new mannerisms a shifty, torn, gullible, or maybe downright evil fictional character might do to hide their secrets by looking at some studies with real people.
O'Sullivan compares these skillful observers to Agatha Christie's fictional Miss Marple, who could instantly judge the veracity of someone by comparing him or her to people she'd already encountered.
This corroborates with studies by Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England, who has studied lies told by suspects in police-interrogation rooms. Vrij obtained police-recorded videotapes in which 16 suspects in the United Kingdom, charged with offenses such as arson and murder, told both lies and truths about their alleged involvement in the crimes. The police used forensic evidence, witness accounts, and the suspects' eventual confessions to determine the actual events. Before learning the police conclusions, Vrij's team analyzed the videotapes for signs of the suspects' nonverbal reactions to questioning, such as gaze aversion, blinking, and hand-and-arm movements. They also looked at verbal cues, such as pauses in speech and speech disturbances, including "ahs," stutters, and incomplete sentences.
But guess what? The only general difference Vrij found between liars and truth tellers is that the liars blinked less frequently and paused longer while speaking. Seems these longer pauses are preventative means to avoid speech errors and backtracking to fill in forgotten or incorrect details. "Their [liars] stories are too good to be true," says Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written several reviews of the field of deception research.
Liars may also feel fear and guilt or delight at fooling people. According to Paul Ekman, a retired psychologist from the University of California, San Francisco, such emotions can trigger a change in facial expression so brief that most observers never notice. He terms these split-second phenomena "microexpressions” and that these emotional clues are as important as gestures, voice, and speech patterns in uncovering deceitfulness.
Interesting. Might be fun to develop a character who takes great delight in misleading people by lying, or perhaps indulges a risk-taking behavior by lying to see what he/she can get away with.
And then there are the studies that claim liars’ voices become more tense or high-pitched. This approach is the foundation of voice stress analysis (VSA), which is widely used by law enforcement and insurance-fraud investigators.
So let’s review some of these recently studied mannerisms you might use to describe a character who’s lying:
Maybe the next time you have a character who’s ready to fib, cover up something, or launch into the biggest fish story since the beginning of time, one of these techniques will do the trick. Would I lie to you?