by Ian Leslie
One of the interviewing techniques he recommends is to ask the suspect to tell their story backwards. By putting this extra mental pressure on suspects, those already struggling with the effort to tell a consistent lie will make mistakes that give them away. In 2007, Vrij and his colleagues published the results of a study that tested the police’s conventional techniques against their own. The research involved more than two hundred and fifty student interviewees and two hundred and ninety police officers. The interviewees either lied or told the truth about staged events. Police officers were then asked to spot the liars using the traditional methods. Those who focused on visual cues proved significantly worse at identifying liars than those looking for speech-related cues. The liars seemed less nervous and more helpful than those telling the truth. As Vrij predicted, the most reliable technique turned out to be the backwards-story test.
Another technique designed by Vrij is the sketch test: asking people to draw a scene they claim to have witnessed. While it’s non-verbal, this technique also puts pressure on the cognitive facilities of the liar. In Vrij’s study, thirty-one participants – all of them members of the police or armed forces – were sent on a mock mission to pick up a laptop from a ‘secret agent’. Afterwards they were asked to make a detailed drawing of the location at which they’d received the laptop. Half the participants were instructed to tell the truth, the other half to lie. Vrij hypothesised that the liars, in order to make their lie convincing, would sketch a location they’d actually been to in the past, furnishing it with the kind of detail often thought to be the hallmark of a good lie. He also predicted that in doing so they’d forget a key part of the scene: the agent. The truth-tellers would be much more likely to draw the man with the laptop, as he was such a central part of the scene they had in their minds. So it proved. On the basis of this factor alone it was possible to detect who was lying nearly ninety per cent of the time.
Although Ekman and Vrij place different emphases on what to look for, both agree on the importance of taking a holistic approach. When assessing truthfulness, a person’s voice, hand movements, posture and speech patterns should all be taken into account, and it’s vitally important to put all of this in context: do these behaviours contrast in revealing ways with how the person usually acts, and how do they square with everything else that’s known about the situation? Such judgements require many fine and fallible calculations; there is no single, all-purpose tell we can use as a short-cut. Pinocchio’s nose remains a fairy tale.
The Demeanour Assumption: Why We’re Worse Lie Detectors – and Better Liars – Than We Think
In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgement about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim’s statement, with the role of victim played by a professional actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgements by assumptions about the victim’s demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair. In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of different ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. It turns out there is no universally ‘appropriate’ reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.
Shakespeare’s warning about how hard it is to read ‘the mind’s construction in the face’ is supported by a host of empirical evidence, yet interrogators remain stubbornly convinced of their ability to tell if a person is truthful by observing them, and relying only on their gut instincts. The lawyer and fraud expert Robert Hunter calls this misapprehension the ‘demeanour assumption’. He cites the case of the American student Amanda Knox, arrested in 2007 for the murder of Meredith Kercher. The Italian police concluded she was guilty based almost entirely on their assessment of Knox’s demeanour under intense questioning: ‘We were able to establish guilt,’ declared Edgardo Giobbi, the lead investigator, ‘by closely observing the suspects’ psychological and behavioural reactions during the interrogations. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigation as this method has allowed us to get to the guilty parties in a very quick time.’ Giobbi’s logic is dangerous, because people do not behave in police custody or in court in the same way as they might outside it and, guilty or innocent, some people will always behave suspiciously.
Of course, it’s not just police investigators who suffer from this bias. We all have a tendency to make instant judgements about a person’s integrity based on received ideas about appropriate demeanours. Italian prosecutors were quick to leak stories about Knox doing cartwheels while in custody, and when the press published pictures of her with a smile on her face readers around the world reacted the same way: no innocent person accused of a crime would behave like this. But people react to intense pressure in unpredictable ways, and a single photo yields no reliable information about a person’s inner thoughts. But as unscientific as it is, the demeanour assumption plays a part in some of society’s most important mechanisms. Hunter points out that it underpins the notions of oral evidence and jury trials; those who watch witnesses give evidence are assumed to be best placed to judge whether they are telling the truth.
What does it stem from, this over-confidence in our intuitions about lying? It probably has something to do with our innate tendency towards self-absorption, and our difficulty in recognising that other people are as fully rounded and complex as we are. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, reminds us that when two people meet there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way they relate to one another. When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel. You know when you’re hiding your true thoughts and feelings – pretending to be fascinated by your boss’s endless anecdote, or grinning your way through a terrible first date – but you nonetheless tend to assume the other’s appearance tells the full story of how they feel – if she’s smiling, it’s because she’s really enjoying herself. It’s been found that people over-estimate how much they can learn from others in job interviews, while at the same time maintaining that others can only get a glimpse of them from such brief encounters. The model we tend to work with is something like this: I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem, you are predictable and easy to read. ‘I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person,’ sighs the narrator of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet.
Paradoxically, this asymmetry makes us less confident than we should be in our own ability to lie, because we assume other people can read our faces as easily as we suppose we can theirs. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart, a man who has committed a murder is being interviewed by clueless detectives. He becomes convinced that they can just tell he’s guilty, and breaks into a needless confession. It’s a dramatic example of what the psychologist Thomas Gilovich terms the ‘illusion of transparency’ – the irrational but often irresistible conviction that others can read our minds. A dinner guest suspects that her hostess can read her distaste for the food she’s being served; a secret admirer guesses the object of his crush must have an inkling of how he feels; a business executive gets the overwhelming feeling that everyone in the room can tell how nervous she feels about making a presentation. We have a powerful tendency to exaggerate such fears and intimations, because although we mentally compensate for the fact that we have better access to our inner states than others do, we find it hard to compensate enough.
Gilovich carried out a series of experiments to demonstrate that we’re much harder
to read than we imagine. In one of them, groups of participants played a round-robin lie detection game – a version of Call My Bluff. Each person told either a lie or a truth and the rest of the group had to guess which was which. The ‘liars’ in each group consistently over-estimated the extent to which the other would guess they were lying. The effect was particularly pronounced amongst those who scored higher on a separate test for self-absorption.
The Strange Case of Major Ingram
No-one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan
On 10 September 2001, Major Charles Ingram faced this question:
A NUMBER ONE FOLLOWED BY ONE HUNDRED ZEROS IS KNOWN BY WHAT NAME?
It was the last in a sequence of twelve questions asked of Ingram on Britain’s (and the world’s) most popular game show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? With the help of all three lifelines, Ingram had got the first eleven answers right. Now he stood on the verge of becoming only the third contestant in the show’s history to win a million pounds.
For the best part of two evenings the studio audience had been amazed and bemused by Ingram’s progress. His idiosyncratic manner offered a vivid contrast with the previous two winners of the top prize. Judith Keppel, who became the first Millionaire in 2000, possessed all the poise and self-assurance of England’s upper middle-class: even when unsure of her answers, she was never unsure of herself. David Edwards, who had won the jackpot only five months before Ingram’s appearance, exuded a different kind of confidence: that of a man who lives and breathes general knowledge quiz shows, and collects facts the way books collect dust.
Ingram, by contrast, twitched with self-doubt. He took an age to answer every question, circling around each option in turn, contradicting himself, lurching towards one before looping back and landing, as if by accident, on an answer he might have dismissed as impossible just a few seconds previously. He showed none of the strong instincts that can help pressured contestants override their doubts on crucial questions. Yet somehow he had stumbled towards the right answer eleven times. Now he was groping his way towards an answer that would either win him a million pounds or lose him nearly half that amount.
Faced with his four choices and bereft of lifelines, Ingram admitted he was unsure. ‘You haven’t been sure since question number two,’ groaned the show’s host, Chris Tarrant. ‘I think it’s a nanomole,’ said Ingram, his hands clambering all over his face. ‘But it could be a gigabit.’ Tarrant hinted heavily that Ingram ought to take the money and run. For a moment, Ingram seemed to agree. ‘I just don’t think I can do this one.’ But he persisted. ‘I don’t think it’s a megatron. And I don’t think I’ve heard of a googol.’ Ingram murmured the latter word three more times to himself, before announcing that ‘By a process of elimination, I actually think it’s googol, but I don’t know what a googol is.’ The cameras focused on Ingram’s wife, Diana, in the audience. She looked nauseous. ‘You’ve got half a million – and you’re going for the one you’ve never heard of?’ asked an incredulous Tarrant. After more mulling, Ingram announced, with something approaching resolution, ‘I’m going to play.’ The audience let out a gasp of dismay. Ingram flinched. ‘No, I’m not!’ But he did, declaring googol his final answer. After the excruciating delay of a break in recording, Tarrant asked for Ingram’s half a million-pound cheque back. ‘You no longer have that,’ he said, ripping it up. A pause. ‘You’ve just won one million pounds!’ The audience exploded with excitement and relief.
The episode was never broadcast. A week later, while the rest of the world reeled from the attacks of September 11th, Ingram received a phone call at his home in Wiltshire from Paul Smith, managing director of the show’s maker, Celador Productions. Smith informed Ingram that the cheque Tarrant had handed him, post-dated for 18 September – the next day – had been cancelled. So had the episode itself, due to broadcast the same day. Smith referred vaguely to ‘irregularities’, without suggesting they were connected to Ingram, who sounded surprised but not upset. Five days later, at seven a.m., Ingram answered a knock at the door. It was the police, there to arrest him and his wife. At the same time, eighty miles away in Cardiff, a third man was being arrested: Tecwen Whittock, who had been sitting in the Fastest Finger First row of contestants during Ingram’s time in the hot seat.
A year and a half later, on 7 April 2003, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London found Charles and Diana Ingram and Whittock guilty of conspiring to cheat their way to a million pounds. Charles Ingram resigned his commission from the army. Eighteen months later he was declared bankrupt.
To attempt to steal a million pounds is one thing; to attempt it under the noses of fifteen million people is quite another. But it wasn’t just the audacity of the Millionaire Three’s scheme that struck the public – it was the absurdity. The story that emerged from the trial read like the script of a very British drama, mixing tragedy with comedy, low cunning and risible self-delusion. The popular version went something like this: a dim Major from a minor public school is persuaded by his ambitious wife to co-operate in a get-rich-quick scheme that involves getting on to the country’s most watched game show and then using the coughs of an accomplice in the studio – a quiz show veteran – to direct him to the correct answers. Against all odds, the unlikely threesome pull it off. Until, one morning, the phone rings.
All three defendants pleaded not guilty, and later continued fiercely to protest their innocence, despite being offered large sums of money to ‘tell their story’. After the trial, ITV broadcast a documentary about the aborted show and its aftermath. The programme was viewed by an extraordinary seventeen million people – more than the series itself. It presented an edited version of Ingram’s run, drawing attention to the heavy coughs that seemed to occur every time the Major mentioned a correct answer. To the public, the documentary offered the peculiarly satisfying spectacle of watching a man engaged in an elaborate deception for which he had already been caught. Ingram’s reactions to his coughing cues were so obvious, it was funny. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of a googol.’ Cough. ‘I actually think it’s googol.’
An odd lacuna lay at the heart of the prosecution case, however: there was no evidence of Major Ingram and Tecwen Whittock ever meeting, speaking, or emailing each other. Whittock had had brief conversations with Diana on the phone, but in the world of quiz show obsessives this was unremarkable. Diana had been a contestant herself (she won £32,000) and was co-authoring a book about the show; prospective contestants frequently seek out the advice of those who have been there before them. Neither did police discover any calls or meetings between the three after the show’s recording. (You might have imagined that in the period after Ingram’s win and before he knew of the investigation the three would have talked, if only to discuss the distribution of spoils). After a team of Scotland Yard’s top detectives had taken eighteen months to carry out their enquiries, the Crown’s case rested entirely on the tape of Ingram’s appearance and the suspicions of Celador staff.
These suspicions seem, on closer examination, to have been surprisingly flimsy. For instance, the court was told that the production staff became wary when the Major used up his lifelines early in the show. But a look back at previous contestants who had made long winning runs indicated that there was nothing unusual about this. It was argued that Whittock’s guilt was indicated by the fact that he leaned over to ask his fellow panellist about one of the questions. But at least one former contestant testified that this was normal too. A production assistant thought it odd that the Major said he would be going to work in the morning, despite having just won a million pounds. But the previous million-pound winner, David Edwards, a teacher, had done precisely that just twenty weeks before. Celador’s testimony bore a touch of what psychologists call ‘hindsight bias’ – the tendency to recall one’s own thoughts and feelings in a manner consonant with what you now know, or think you know.
There is no doubt, ho
wever, that the tape is compelling evidence. There are 192 coughs on it, and the prosecution deemed nineteen of the loudest ones to have come from Ingram’s accomplice – although they conceded it was impossible to prove. Tecwen Whittock didn’t deny coughing a lot. He suffered from hay fever and rhinitus, an allergy to dust. Independent experts testified to the authenticity of his condition and agreed that it would have been exacerbated by sitting for hours in the dry heat of the studio. As the prosecuting barrister scornfully pointed out, however, ‘There is no condition causing you to cough after someone has given the right answer to a question.’ Except – perhaps there is.
During the twenty-two days of the trial at London’s Southwark Crown Court, there was a lot of coughing in the courtroom. The tape of Ingram’s appearance was played in full at least a dozen times, and the key segments were replayed over and over, with the coughs helpfully amplified by Celador production engineers. But the coughs weren’t coming just from the tape. A journalist sitting in the public gallery noticed that every time one of the barristers mentioned the word ‘cough’ – which is to say, frequently – people in the public gallery broke out into coughing fits. When a leading expert in respiratory conditions was giving evidence, proceedings were halted because a female juror couldn’t stop coughing. During the defence barrister’s summing up, two more jurors seized up and the judge adjourned proceedings until they could recover.
Those responsible didn’t consciously decide to cough on this cue – they were reacting unconsciously and involuntarily. If the correlation between their coughs and the word cough had been pointed out to them they would have been startled. James Plaskett, a former winning contestant on the show, who published an exhaustive analysis of the Ingram trial, wondered if a similar effect explained Whittock’s coughing. Once you accept that people cough in unconscious response to external stimuli it seems plausible that Whittock was at least some of the time, because we don’t know that all the coughs were his – reacting involuntarily to the answers he knew to be right. Plaskett reviewed a DVD of Judith Keppel’s winning performance. Audible audience coughs occurred after her first enunciation of the correct answer but before definitely committing to her answer at the £2,000, £4,000, £8,000, £64,000, £500,000 and £1,000,000 points. That’s to say, at six of the last ten questions – just as with Ingram.