Pinocchio’s Nose and The Lying Brain
I want to extend our neurodevelopmental argument by looking at structural abnormalities of the brain that take the form of advantages, not disadvantages. We’ll combine this theme with a core question. The brains of violent and psychopathic offenders may be deformed, but can this also apply to other offenders? What about me and you when we tell a fib or two? Are there brain bases to less serious forms of offending?
Lying is pervasive. At some level, most of us lie most days of the week. We lie about almost anything. When do we lie most? Community surveys show it’s on our first date with a new person. And this gives us a clue as to why we lie so much. –it’s impression management. If we were brutally honest all the time, we’d likely never get that first kiss. Plus we’d make life really miserable for everyone. Do you really want me to tell you what I honestly think of that dreadful new haircut? That gaudy shirt? Your bad-mannered new boyfriend? No, you don’t. So we use lies to smooth out the rough-and-tumble of everyday social encounters. “That new hairdo suits you!” “That shirt really brings out your personality.” “Your new boyfriend is a perfect match for you!” We gain the affection and friendship of others, and at times simply do more good than harm. None of us are saints, but most of us are not serious psychopathic sinners either.
Most of us, that is. For others, lying goes a bit too far. One of the twenty traits of the psychopath is pathological lying and deception. They lie left, right and center. Sometimes for good reason, and sometimes, perplexingly, for no reason. When I worked with psychopaths, before conducting my induction interview I would review in detail their whole case file. And given that I was working in top-security prisons with long-term prisoners, their files were fairly complete. The information about their life trajectories, behaviors, and personalities gave me a good basis upon which to determine whether the prisoner I was working with was a pathological liar. When someone says something that conflicts with what you know, you have a good opportunity to challenge him. You can check if what he says back to you sounds like sense of seems a sham.
The trouble with psychopaths, though, is that they really are extraordinarily good at lying. Just when you think you’ve nabbed them telling an enormous whopper, they have the uncanny ability to reel off a seemingly convincing explanation for the discrepancy without batting an eye. Believe me, against your own better professional judgment you could walk out of that interview room believing that you must have gotten your facts wrong –only to read the file again and check in with the senior probation officer and realize he duped you. You really have to experience it to believe it.
It might surprise you to learn that I don’t have a clue who is and who is not a psychopath, even after four years of working full time with them in prison and thirty years of academic research. I’m just not that fast on the uptake in this arena. If I met you for the first time and we chatted for an hour, I would be none the wiser as to whether you were a psychopath of not. I’ll come back to that later. But it’s not just me. Whether you like it or not, you too are completely clueless when it comes to knowing if someone is lying to you or not.
Don’t take it personally –we’re all hopeless, not just you and me. Police officers, customs officers, FBI agents, and parole officers. They are no better than plain old undergraduates in their ability to detect deception. They actually believe they are good at the lie detection; they don’t even recognize their own mistakes. Doctors don’t know when you are lying to them about made-up symptoms in your attempts to get the medications you want.
Why are we so bad at knowing who is a liar? It’s because all the things that we think are signs of lying are quite unrelated to the ability to detect deception. Think of a time when you did not have any tangible background evidence or context to tell if someone was lying to you, but you judged that person as lying based on how they spoke and behaved. I bet you were basing this on things like their shifty gaze, hesitations in their speech, their fidgeting, or their going off-topic into some detail. In reality, none of these are related to lying. They give us false clues, and we are misled by them.
But how about kids? Surely we are better in judging when a child lies to us? Aren’t we?
Well, no, we’re not. in one study on this topic, children of different ages were videotaped sitting in a room with the experimenter. Behind them is an interesting toy. The experimenter tells the child he must go out of the room and that the child should not peek at the toy while he is away. The experimenter goes away for a while and comes back. Some kids peek, some don’t. The experimenter then asks the child if he or she peeked. Of those who deny peeking, some are telling the truth and some are lying. Experimenters then show the videotapes to a range of individuals to see how good they are at telling when a child is lying. Being correct 50 percent of the time would be the level of chance, because in this scenario, 50 percent of the film clips show a child lying and 50 percent show a child telling the truth.
The tapes are given to undergraduate students. Surely working out if a kid is lying has to be easier than most university exams. But these smart undergraduates are correct 51 percent of the time, not significantly above chance.
So let’s see how customs officers fare when viewing the same tapes –they have a boatload of experience in picking out deceptive travelers. They are al 49 percent –below chance levels– tough to give them some credit they are not significantly worse than the hapless undergraduates.
Okay, so let’s go to cops, as surely they are streetwise about these fledging psychopathic liars. Nice try, but actually the police are al 44 percent accuracy levels, significantly lower than chance, and significantly poorer than undergraduates or customs officers. Next time a cop stops you and accuses you of a traffic violation that you deny and he will not believe your protestation, remind him about this study.
So let’s try again. Maybe eleven-year olds are sophisticated liars, and so we might understand how overall accuracy levels with these kids are at a miserable 39 percent. But can’t we tell if a four-year old is lying? Actually, we cannot. Accuracy levels are at 40 percent at this age, 47 percent at age five, and 43 percent at age six. Parents, you think you know what you kids get up to, but actually you don’t even have a clue with your own toddler. That’s how bad the story is. Sorry, mate, but you really are as hapless as I at figuring out who a psychopathic liar is.
But here’s a ray of hope for you. I have two ten-year-old monkeys at home who are always getting into mischief. And yes, Andrew and Philip are clever and skilfull liars –just like most kids. When I want to know who did what, before I pop the question I tell them that it’s important to be honest and they should promise to tell the truth. Research indicates that getting young children to talk about moral issues first and then asking them to promise to tell the truth significantly encourages a truthful answer –boosting lie detection accuracy from 40 percent to 60 percent.
This research on children made me and my lab intrigued about what makes a psychopath a good liar. People may be hapless at lie detection, but perhaps machines have a mechanism to better delve inside the minds of Machiavellians. Psychopaths may be able to lie to us face to face, but perhaps the signature of a pathological liar may reside below the surface inside their brains. Might psychological liars have a physical advantage over the rest of us when it comes to pulling a fast one?
In our study we assessed whether people had a history of repeatedly lying throughout life. We assessed this in our psychiatric interviews on antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy. We also measured it using questionnaires, and by cross-checking notes between our lab assistants.
For example, on one day our research assistant was struck by the fact that a participant walked on his toes. Upon questioning, our participant told a detailed and convincing story of how he was in a motorbike accident resulting in damage to his heels. The very next day, he was being assessed by a different research assistant on a different floor of our building and he walked perfectly normally. The con only came to light when our research assistants traded notes. A typical pathological lie: deception but without any obvious gain or motivation.
We ended up with a group of twelve who fulfilled criteria for pathological lying and conning by their own admission. But you might reasonably ask how we know if people are telling the truth about their lying. The answer is that –to be honest– we can never be sure that our pathological liars were truthful in admitting that they repeatedly con, manipulate, and lie throughout their lives. But we can be sure that if they are telling the truth, then they are indeed pathological liars. And if they are lying about their lying, then they really have to be pathological liars! So, armed with this logic we went ahead anyway and scanned their brains.
We had two control groups for good measure. One group of twenty-one was not antisocial and did not lie –or at least they claimed they didn’t. These were the “normal” controls. The other group, of sixteen, had committed as many criminal offenses as the pathological liar group –but they were not pathological liars. These individuals made up the “antisocial” control group. These two control groups were then compared with the pathological liar group.
What came out was an unusual finding in the field that must be credited to Yaling Yang, who took the lead on this study. [...] The volume of white matter in the prefrontal cortex was greater in pathological liars than in both control groups. They had a 22 percent volume increase compared with normal controls, and a 26 percent increase compared with criminal controls. The white matter volume increase was particularly true of the more ventral, lower areas of the prefrontal cortex. As you might expect, liars also had significantly higher verbal IQs than the other two groups, but this did not explain away the structural brain differences. As Sean Spence, a leading expert on lying, commented in his editorial on this work, the white matter increase is very unusual, as virtually no other clinical disorder has been associated with this abnormality.
[…] Lying is a complex executive function that requires a lot of frontal lobe processing. Telling the truth is easy. Lying is much harder and requires more processing resources. We think that increased prefrontal white matter provides the individual with a boost in the cognitive capacity to lie because it reflects greater connectivity between subregions both within the prefrontal cortex and in other brain areas. Let’s consider lying a little more.
Lying involves theory of mind. When I lie to you about where I was at eleven p.m. on Wednesday, January 7, I need to have an understanding of what you know about the facts of the case –and what you do not know. I need to have a sense of what you think is plausible, and what is not. For this “mind reading” we need to involve other subregions in the temporal and parietal lobes and connect them to the prefrontal cortex. We have discussed the behavioral cues that are bad signs of when people lie. But extensive studies also show that during lie-telling, individuals suppress unnecessary body movements. When I’m telling you the truth about where I was on the night of January 7 and I have nothing to hide, I may gesture with my hands, raise my eyebrows when making a point in the story, and look up into space for a second or two.
Liars tend to not do that. They sit still and suppress motor activity because they are cognitively focusing on their story. All of their processing resources are going into this activity. Suppression requires prefrontal regulation of the motor and somatosensory areas of the brain that control motor and body movements. Greater white-matter connectivity will facilitate that. While liars are busy building the believable façade of their story, they also have to take care not to look too nervous. This involves suppression of limbic emotional regions that include the amygdala. So again, prefrontal-limbic connectivity is important. The more white-matter wiring there is in the prefrontal cortex, the better all these functions can be subserved.
We think that the cause of the greater white-matter volumes in pathological liars is neurodevelopmental. Again, we are talking about an increase in volume, rather than a decrease. From a neurodevelopmental perspective, throughout childhood there is massive expansion of brain size. Brain weight reaches adult values between the ages of ten and twelve, with a very significant increase in the absolute volume of white matter by this age. We also know that children become most adept at lying at the same time –by then years of age. Interestingly, then, the neurodevelopmental increase in white matter parallels developmental changes in the ability of children to lie. This suggests that the increased white matter we find in pathological liars does indeed facilitate their ability to lie. Based on this perspective, we think that the increased prefrontal white matter found in adult psychopathic liars predisposes them to deception and cunning.
The increase in white matter, then, might “cause” pathological lying. But could it be the other way around? You’ll likely recall from your childhood the late-nineteenth-century Italian children’s story about Pinocchio, the puppet whose nose grew every time he told a lie. Could it be that the act of pathological lying causes the physical increase in white matter in the prefrontal cortex?
This “Pinocchio’s nose” hypothesis is not as ridiculous as it may sound. It’s the concept of brain plasticity. The more time that musicians spend in practicing the piano, the greater the development of their white matter, especially in childhood. Practicing lying in childhood might particularly enhance prefrontal white matter. But even in adults, extensive practice has been found to correlate with brain structure. London taxi drivers have to undergo three years of extensive training to learn their way around 25,000 convoluted city streets. MRI studies have shown that these taxi drivers have a greater volume of the hippocampus compared with matched controls, and also compared with London bus drivers, who do not undergo such extensive training. Just as working in the gym can build up your muscles, mental effort can flex your brain.
In the case of pathological liars, it’s as it a criminal lifestyle makes for a criminal brain. It’s a different story from the one Lombroso was telling in Italy in the nineteenth century –the idea that brain impairment causes crime. But we cannot yet discount the alternative environmental explanation that lying causes brain change.
