盯眼睛没用？研究发现这么做反而更容易被骗｜科学60秒

来源：市场资讯

（来源：环球科学科研圈）

如何科学说谎和识别谎言

在年轻人的团建和大聚会中，“狼人杀”“谁是卧底”称得上是最好入门的破冰游戏。开局时，人们经常自信满满地认为，只要紧盯对方的眼神和微表情，便能将骗子一眼识破。然而，一轮游戏结束，卧底和狼人留在了牌桌，出局的却是那些“看起来最可疑”的人。等到彻底结束的复盘才发现，我们自以为很会识谎，之前的推理却都是错的。对于被“误杀”的人来说，撒谎也远比想象中难。

全球真人秀节目《叛徒》（The Traitors）的规则与这两款游戏类似：23 名参与者中，有 20 人是“老实人”，剩下三人则是“叛徒”。叛徒必须在整场游戏中伪装成老实人，不能被识破，老实人的任务则是通过投票将叛徒一一揪出并淘汰。

这档节目的美国赛季可能是目前为止最精彩的赛季之一。参赛阵容由真人秀明星、奥运运动员和演员等各界名人组成，最终奖金池高达 25 万美元。最终获胜者是来自《美国版爱情岛》（Love Island USA）的罗布·劳施（Rob Rausch），他不仅将自己完美伪装成老实人，几乎全程未被识破，还在最后关头背叛了他最亲密的盟友，为所有观众和参赛者上了一堂精彩的“撒谎大师课”。

或许是出于对真相的执着，人类一直痴迷于如何判断某人是否在撒谎。但现实中，我们在这件事上似乎并没有什么长进。心理学家邦德（C. F. Bond）与德保罗（B. M. DePaulo）于 2006 年发表了一项大规模荟萃分析，他们综合了 206 篇文献和文档、超 24,000 名判断者的数据，结果发现，人们在区分谎言与真相时，平均正确率仅约 54%，这和随机猜测的 50% 相差无几。

为何我们如此不擅长识谎？最主要的原因之一在于，我们对“说谎行为”本身存在根深蒂固的错误认知，而这些偏见恰恰成了骗子最得心应手的工具。其中最典型的误解是，人们普遍认为，说谎者在撒谎时不敢直视对方。但经验丰富的骗子深知这一被大多数人深信不疑的“伪科学”，反而会刻意与受骗者对视。

与错误的“常识”相反，在现实情况中，人们思考下一步该说什么时，目光往往会自然地移向一侧，这是再正常不过的反应。若想更准确地识别欺骗，首先要做的就是放下对说谎者行为的固有偏见。

此外，比较反常识的还有一点，如果我们放弃关注身体语言等视觉线索，专注于倾听对方说话，反而更容易识别出谎言。

英国朴茨茅斯大学（University of Portsmouth）的测谎科学专家、高级研究员莎伦·里尔（Sharon Leal）解释道，人们对说谎者肢体动作的固有偏见和过度解读，往往是准确识谎的最大障碍。莎伦还表示，如果参加《叛徒》，她会完全抛弃所有基于身体动作的测谎机制，只专注于听人们说了什么，并找出其中的前后矛盾之处。

当然，测谎从来不是一门万无一失的科学，就目前所知，没有任何方法能百分之百确定某人是否在撒谎。

这并不意味着撒谎者的言行全然无迹可寻。说回肢体语言，曾有研究发现，人们在撒谎时往往会减少不必要的动作，如减少手部动作的频率、放慢语速等。原因在于，与说实话相比，撒谎可能需要耗费更多的认知资源。举个例子，如果在走路时突然收到一条重要短信，为了回消息，你就不得不减慢步速，或者干脆停下来。此时大脑发出的信号是，“我现在只想专注于一件事”。因此，撒谎者的认知负荷更高，其行为自然会受到抑制。

还有一个大部分人没注意到的细节，真实的微笑往往是慢慢消退的，如果你察觉到某人的微笑骤然消失，这可能表明，此人并不是发自内心在微笑。

基于“撒谎消耗认知资源”的原理，还有研究者发展出一种名为“认知面谈法”（cognitive interviewing）的测谎策略，其中一项测试内容是要求受访者逆序复述事件经过。朴茨茅斯大学的研究团队于 2008 年发表的一项实验研究证实了这一方法的有效性：当模拟嫌疑人被要求倒序陈述事件时，警察识别谎言的准确率从正序陈述下的 42% 跃升至 60%。原因在于，真实记忆的提取路径是灵活的，而骗子在维持一套“编造”故事的同时，若被迫倒序重现，认知负荷将急剧增加，破绽也随之暴露。

相较于测谎研究，如何成功用谎言骗过他人的研究相对较少，毕竟前者在刑事司法领域有着更为直接的应用价值。但在游戏中，或者一些身不由己的时刻，我们该如何成为更高明的说谎者？

已有的研究揭示了一些规律，其中较为核心的一个方法，是让谎言……[查看全文]

How The Traitors reveals the psychology behind lying

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

The global reality TV show franchise The Traitors has a simple premise: among a cast of, say, 23 people, roughly 20 are “faithfuls,” and about three are “traitors.” The job of the traitors is to lie so they remain undetected. The job of the faithfuls is to suss them out.

All of that led SciAm’s breaking news reporter Jackie Flynn Mogensen to wonder, “What does science have to tell us about how to spot liars? And what can it tell us about how to be more effective liars?”

She recently wrote about all this and is here to spill the deets. But before we get started, if you’re interested in the current U.S. season of The Traitors and haven’t seen it, be warned there will be spoilers.

Hi, Jackie. Thanks for joining us today.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Pierre-Louis: So for those who haven’t seen the show, can you tell us a little bit about what Traitors is?

Mogensen: Yes, so Traitors is essentially a reality TV game show that is a lot like the party game Mafia, if you’ve ever played it, where there is a group of traitors within the group and everyone else are faithfuls. The goal for the faithfuls is to vote out the traitors, and the goal of the traitors is to pretend to be faithful for the length of the game.

And the cast, it’s usually, for the U.S. version, a cast of celebrities ...

Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.

Mogensen: Reality TV stars, Olympic athletes, actors, etcetera. And at stake is a prize pot worth $250,000.

Pierre-Louis: I know the season just recently ended. Can you tell us a little bit about how this season went?

Mogensen: This was one of the best seasons that I’ve seen so far, and I have watched the Australia version as well. [Laughs.] And I think it was just overall, really a master class in lying by Rob Rausch from Love Island, who ended up winning the show. He does a fantastic job of blending in as a faithful and ultimately [does] a really great job of lying to his fellow castmates. And he basically goes pretty much undetected the whole season and in the end betrays some of his closest allies, which was very sad to watch, but also made really great television.

Pierre-Louis: What made you decide that this was worthy of, like, scientific exploration?

Mogensen: Well, first of all, I am a superfan of the show. I started watching a few seasons ago. And people in the office I know are also fans, too, and combined with y’all’s Heated Rivalry episode from earlier this year—I was really inspired by that. I felt like it could be a good opportunity to dive into the science of one of my favorite shows, too.

Pierre-Louis: One of the big things in the show and that you really get into [in] your reporting is essentially, like, the science of lying. And I feel like humans have been obsessed with the idea of figuring out how to tell if someone is lying. But one of the things your article points out is, generally, we’re pretty bad at it. I think there was a meta-analysis that looked at a bunch of studies and found that, on average, people are about 50–50 at detecting liars. Why are we so bad at it?

Mogensen: This is a question I did ask some of my sources in my reporting. I think there’s a few reasons. I think one of the main ones is that we let our biases get in the way, and that’s one of their main strategies—if you were to be in the show The Traitors or if you want to be better at detecting lies, something to do is just throw out the biases you have about other people and lying itself.

So for instance, one of the key misunderstandings that I heard from both sources is that liars, if they’re telling a lie, won’t look you in the eye ...

Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.

Mogensen: But that’s actually not true at all. Liars, if they’re good, know that’s what people expect, and they will purposely look you in the eye, whereas, you know, in this conversation right now I’m thinking about what I might say next; I look to the side. That’s not an indication of lying. [Laughs.] At least I hope you don’t think so. But in general people look to the side when they’re thinking about what to say next, and that, that’s not necessarily lying. So that’s one example of a bias that you might have about lying going into a show like The Traitors.

Pierre-Louis: One of the things that I thought was interesting is that we’re better at detecting lying if we don’t pay attention to physical cues, if we just focus on the voice. That was quite shocking to me.

Mogensen: Yeah, that was interesting. I think that was from one of my sources, Sharon Leal, who’s a senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth in England. She studies lie detection, and I asked her—and she’s also a fan of the show. I asked her, “What would you do if you were on The Traitors?” And she said [essentially], “I would completely throw out all physical lie-detection mechanisms; I’d basically just listen to what people are saying and try to listen to—for inconsistencies,” because she knows how often our biases or perceptions of what other people’s body movements—how often that gets in the way of lie detection.

And so that was her advice as an expert, and I think I would listen to it, too, if I was on The Traitors [Laughs] because there’s a lot of other things that can get in the way of accurate lie detection. And it’s not a foolproof science. You can never for certain know if somebody is lying or not, as far as we know. But there are other tips that they shared as well.

Pierre-Louis: What are some of the other ones?

Mogensen: So going back to body language, there are some things that they’ve found in research that people who are lying tend to do. I mean, again, it’s not foolproof, but people tend to stop moving as much when they’re lying. They don’t use their hands when they speak as much, or they’re slower. And that might be because lying takes cognitive effort; it takes more cognitive effort to lie than it does to tell the truth. It’s sort of like if you’re walking on the street and you get a text, you’ll often stop to answer the text. It’s your brain saying, “I just wanna focus on this one thing at a time.” And so that’s one thing liars might do.

Another thing is, if you notice someone’s smile, if it ends really abruptly, that could be a sign that it’s not a true smile. You know, true smiles tend to fade more slowly.

And then the other thing is—to be aware of is just, given how much cognitive effort it takes to lie, is something called “cognitive interviewing.” One strategy within cognitive interviewing, for instance, is asking a person to recall what happened to them in reverse. And they actually did a study on this in 2008 and found that police officers were better at detecting lies about an incident when sort of mock suspects told their recollection of that event in reverse. And I think that that’s just because it’s easier to access memories when they’re true, and when you’re trying to stick to one straight story, it’s kind of hard to recollect backwards, essentially.

Pierre-Louis: So I’ve never played Mafia or Traitor, but I have played Two Truths and a Lie, and I’m good at it. And one of the reasons I think I’m good at it is because I tend to pick truths that are kind of, like, outlandish and don’t seem like they’re real. So, like, one of my favorite truths is that I’ve seen a polar bear in the wild, and people just don’t think that a girl from New York City will have seen a polar bear in the wild. And then for my lie I usually pick something that is true and then twist it slightly.

Mogensen: Mm.

Pierre-Louis: So it’s not a big change; it’s a small change, and that small change makes it a lie.

And that raises a question, which is, like, so far we’ve been really focused on how to tell if someone’s lying, but on Traitors some of the people really need to be good liars. So how do we become better liars?

Mogensen: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I think a lot of the research focuses on lie detection because it’s oftentimes a tool used in the criminal-justice system, for instance, and that’s why the researchers are interested.

Less focus, I think, just based on my, you know, read of the literature for this piece, is that there’s research into how to be a good liar, but a lot of it is kind of taking advantage of what you might already know:What is someone’s biases they may already have? How can you play into that? Like you just explained in your example about Two Truths and a Lie: “How close...[full transcript]