Deception Detection

Well hello everyone, and hello Greg. We'll go ahead and get started today on this episode of The Human Behavior Podcast. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Today's a good one to get into. We're talking about deception detection in a number of different domains: people, machines, studies, all kinds of different stuff.

The reason I want to get into this one, we sort of chose, is we're going to start doing some recurring themes in the show, almost like a – I don't want to call it a MythBusters – but we'll talk about some of the common myths about mostly psychology or sociology and just human behavior in general. There's a lot of junk science out there, or something that started great in a lab or in a study and then went off the rails somewhere, and it becomes almost like pop psychology. It gets out there, and then people think that this is true, or there are so many assumptions that are made.

There's a great book – it's a PDF eBook – I'll put it on for the Patreon site for all the subscribers. Some guys, it came out probably 10 or 15 years ago, and they said "50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology." They chunked them really well, and they went down one through 50. There are far more, especially now since 2010. It was interesting, and I like the way they did it. They did some great research. It's almost like each one has little bullet points; they explain what the myth is. They say, "Here's what it is. Here's where that came from, or here are the studies that actually disprove that." Or they sometimes say, "Well, this is unknown," or, "We can't quite make the conclusion that this sort of myth does."

I would use the term "myth" generally. We've had these discussions before about something that happens in the lab or on a college campus or in a study does not directly translate all the time to the real world, or what that means. Now, it may be interesting or novel or unique, or there's some sort of correlation between something that needs more study.

The reason why I'm prefacing it this way, Greg, it's not always the researchers or the people doing the work that screw this up. They're the ones that are like, "Hey, I found all this really cool stuff!" And then it gets kicked out into the public, and people take it and completely misrepresent it. They use it for things that it doesn't apply to. People write an article saying, "Wow, look at this new thing!" It's not necessarily that the researcher wasn't intending for that to happen; they just found something unique, and what they do is they publish their studies and go, "Hey, this is what I found." And then typically people do the, "Well, okay, cool, more research is needed." But sometimes, man, that gets a hold out in the general public, and it just spreads like wildfire.

So, that was a big one with detecting deception, specifically because there are a lot of shows out there about interviews and homicide stuff, and we'll get into that. There are different interview techniques, and there are a lot of assumptions made with those that people don't realize how they work or why they work sometimes, and also why they go wrong sometimes.

I would say, just in general, detecting deception is very difficult, even just deception. I like that better than saying "lie detector," because a lie sort of has some intent behind its meaning, whereas deception is like, "Okay, maybe I think you're deceiving me, Greg, but I don't know why. Maybe it's not 'Yes, you killed that guy,' it's because you're some other reason." You know what I mean? It's you're embarrassed, you don't want to talk to me about that subject. So that's why I use deception.

But there are people that think that they're good at it; they're not. There are machines that think they're good at it; I don't think they detect deception, they detect something else that we'll get into. But that's a quick intro of some of the stuff we're going to go over today.

We'll bring up some of the famous ones: your buddy Ekman from the show Lie to Me. Well, it wasn't from that show, but they kind of based a lot of it on him. Again, it's a great example if anyone's familiar with Ekman. We'll have this stuff on the Patreon site, but he had some great research, and then his studies that he came up with in his hypothesis were wrong because you can't replicate it, and people still use it even though 10 years ago some graduate student at MIT basically poked holes in everything that he did, saying, "You can't replicate these studies." So it's an example for those who've heard of it. But I'm going to throw to you, Greg, about deception detection in general to get started before maybe we get to the whole polygraph thing.

Yeah, and holy crap. When you start off with an intro like that, so much wonderful information. I wrote one, two, three, I wrote at least 15 things down here because Max was up early, so I was moving around for hours today. Brian and I are not only both on cocaine all the time, but we get up very early, hit the gym, and then Brian's like, "What are we going to talk about today?"

I'd be terrified to see you on cocaine, just absolutely terrified. No one – you don't need uppers, you're not a guy that needs uppers.

That's true. So, no, and welcome everybody. But this is so good, and I wrote this down, and I think you should listen to it – and I mean that, our listeners and our viewers. Mistakes of fact with intent are called lies. Don't ever forget that, right? So, that key is where we start with deception detection.

I'll give you a random, because I love film: Forbidden Planet, the 1950s, maybe 1954. Came out. Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, incredible film. Robbie the Robot. What happened right after that film came out—and it was a high-budget, not a B or a C film, with really great action and animation and everything—what happened after that film came out, Brian, is the number of UFO sightings increased exponentially. It went from virtually nothing to everything. People started describing them as a saucer, and indeed, "flying saucer" is what was depicted in the film, right?

So, the power of suggestion is huge, and it's even "huger" – bigger, larger, scientifically (it's a new word, by the way) – when we're vulnerable. So, what happens is that we believe stuff to be true that's street lore, that is... Look, I'll tell everybody, do this: think back to when you first learned about sex, and who you heard that information from, and all of the lies and the "oh yeah, from the [unintelligible] to hide your kids, folks," to where the baby's coming out of and how long the gestation period is and stuff. Those things are called street lore. Those things are—and I love "myth," but "myth" comes from mythology. Go look it up.

What happens is, there are things that are hard for us to explain, so we go to an alternative method of explaining them. And the alternative method is generally accepted in a small group. We call them now like rumors or gossip. But if they persist, Brian, then what happens is that person goes, "Well, you know what Jim said. Well, Jim's a credible source, so we've got to believe that." And, "You know what, yesterday when the sun came up, there was vapor on the whatever." And so now we start finding clues that—and we all know that bias—and then how we're seeking out information to substantiate that.

Another one that we can talk about down the line: everybody knows lunacy, we know where that comes from – the full moon. Those type of things, Brian, when people unintentionally do them, it's street lore. When a person does that with intent to deceive you in some manner, or to gain an advantage on you in some manner, then it's a lie.

What happens is we watch way too much television on the same shit. Like, how many more exposes do we have to have on Loch Ness, right? I mean, we've run it to ground. But with a homicide, that one homicide will spawn nine different shows: "The Cheerleader Murders," "The Midwest Cheerleader Murders," "The Boyfriend Done It," all of these things, because we love gore porn. We love homicides. Why? Because we all know that that's the thing we can't escape. We can't escape death. And when we see somebody that is in a situation where they were led away from life in some suspicious manner, then man, we start. And those shows are an hour long, Brian. They could be three minutes long, three minutes long. So, what do they do? They go, "The janitor that lived down the hall," then they go, "Well, at the airport we found car..." Holy shit.

The other thing is, just to kind of caveat what you're saying with the different shows that come out, because they make a show on it, it's typically because it's remarkable, it's unique. It's a different case than what normally happens. That's why you're hearing about it. That's why it has a three-episode or part series or something like that on Netflix. It's because it's such a unique or different case that it's worthy to comment on. The other 99% of homicides are someone gets angry and kills someone that they know. I mean, it's like...

But you also know that once they have identified the one that had that strange twist, that had that unique thing, what they'll do now is they'll come at it from different angles. They'll come at it from the school teacher, or from that it happened at night, or that fishermen can be this violent. And so what they do is they do what the cooking shows have done. And I love my cooking shows, right? But the cooking shows have jumped the shark. There's only so many ways to poach a damn egg. And so what happens now is they've got the "Buffalo Grudge Match," and they've got the "Barbecue Outback Hammer Homicide." We're going to pair up someone who's never cooked before with a chef. We're going to have like, the dogs, and then the dogs with bees in their mouths, and then...

Spot on, great Simpson reference.

But the problem with that is that every homicide show on television shows horseshit, wrong stuff. Just like the cooking show, showing the worst of... Come on, we know better than that. All you got to do is open a book. All you got to do is go online. But it's interesting, and we love seeing people that they're worse than vulnerable. So why do I say that the homicide shows are wrong? How many times have you seen on a homicide show where they stick a camera in somebody's face? And exactly this happens: the nightly local news does this all the time. They take a neophyte that has no idea about television or facts or anything, and they stick the, "So, what was your neighbor like?" And they don't know. They don't fucking know what their neighbor was like. And what happens? Say, "Look at how this person acted in the interview room. Look at how they acted at the funeral, Brian."

You and I have seen more dead people than alive people, and we've been around both homicidal maniacs and normal, clinically normal people that had to use extreme methods, including homicide, to get out of a nasty situation. And you named two of them that were alike. You named the reactions from a group. We couldn't group them because they're all strangely different. You react differently, I react with humor. You react by getting quiet and sullen.

Yeah. I'm like, "Don't fucking talk to me. Don't do this. Don't..." Like, "I don't want to hear about people," obviously you're hiding something, right? So what I do is, how do you get that in the recipe?

Alright, so you—and that's where it comes from. It's like everyone thinks that there's sort of a typical way to handle those situations, and there isn't. Now, you will, you will be... So, you're not going to see consistent reactions across a segment of people. There are certain things, small elements, that will be universal, but the individual cues can kind of be very different. And now, you will be internally consistent. Like, you're going to be consistent, Greg, with how you do it every time. I'm going to be consistent with how I do it every time, but to me, comparing to you, it would be two different things. Yeah, and so, that's an important part to remember. So, no, you're spot on.

So, let's go to the science, Brian. What does science say about that? Science says that we have to look for incongruent signals. Incongruence helps us detect anomalies. Now that we've hooked onto the anomaly, we measure it against the known or suspected baseline. That's simple science. What do I mean? I mean, I can't just look at a three-second video of a person getting out of a car at a funeral or a wake and go, "They did it! Look, it's clear!" Because we have to measure against that person's baseline at that time and in that place. That's why spacetime is so amazing. That's why we talk about the gift of time and distance. The more we know about the person, the more we know about the situation, now we can actually say, "Those are likely deception indicators." What do we mean by that? Well, if you're doing something completely different, you may be cheating on your spouse, or you may be molesting your kid, or you may be a shoplifter. But it's that baseline change, Brian, that we're looking for, right?

And to hit on what people have studied with this before, because there's been a lot of people who study deception and interrogation and questioning. And there are different techniques and methods out there, and some of them are typically very context-dependent, right? Meaning, okay, and the reason why I bring this up is because you, the Patreon subscribers, you can check this out in the article, the PDF that I'll put on there.

There was a guy, Dr. Ekman, who did a lot of studies on this, and then he kind of came up with some of the micro-facial features and different things. And his sort of theories have been completely, just been like, "Yeah, this doesn't work," or, "You can't replicate this. This is basically unscientific, your findings." But his research was great. And what he even found was, one, people are horrible at detecting deception. Even people like police officers or investigators or interrogators are not any better than the average person in detecting deception out of someone. And two, for a lot of reasons, we come in with like you said, a lot of confirmation bias. And then we conflate different things. Like, there are different interview techniques that you and I bash sometimes in our in-person courses – I don't want to get on here because they're kind of litigious – but yeah, they're wrong. But they've got, yeah, so see, but the idea is, a lot of times they're meant for a specific context, and it may work in that context.

However, if I do that and I'm right, and I use this method and I catch you, Greg, I get you to admit fault or admit to a homicide, and that works for me, that's my go-to now. And I will jam a square peg in a wrong hole time and time again because you won the first time, things that they didn't do. And it happens, it happens all the time.

And so that's the big thing, that humans are not great at it because you don't know where that's coming from. You don't know what this person's doing. And I had a random account – I just thought of this actually when we were, I was driving somewhere, but I was in a rush and I had to stop, get gas, grab something to drink. And then I was kind of in a sketchy area, and I kept looking out at my vehicle and looking what's going around. And when I went up to pay at the cash register, the attendee, the guy working there, was all over me. He was like, "Hey man, like everything good?" Like, "Oh yeah, alright." "You seem kind of nervous." He was getting nervous thinking I was about—well, or like I was fleeing something. You know what I'm saying? But I had so much going on in my mind, and I was just trying to get in there real quick, and I was looking out the window, and there were people coming in. It was like one of these odd places that I didn't really notice until I got inside that I was like, "Oh man, it's probably not the best place to stop." So I was trying to be quick then too. So this guy's like, they're adding up, boom, boom. He sees it before, come on. Oh, because he sits there every day and sees, he has such a great baseline for behavior at a gas station, in a convenience store. He sees every different type of character of people. And so he was pinging on me, doing confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error. Like, "Hey, is this dude... did this dude just commit a homicide? He's fleeing the state!" Because it was right near a state line. It was one of those things where I was just like, but it just reminded me of that. It's a perfect everyday example where we get that wrong.

I want to resurrect Ekman. Ekman is a great man, a great thinker, and he came up with some wonderful hypotheses. And during hypothesis testing, some of the stuff worked and some of it didn't. And just like a person that unknowingly follows that false clue and creates something from it, and then only to be dashed later on. I mean, that's what history shows about science, right? "Hey, you know, Pluto, it's a planet!" "It's not."

With Ekman, the problem is, I don't want his record to go downhill for all the good stuff that he did because a couple of things that he did are completely unfounded. But let's do a limited objective experiment, Brian, and I can't use you because we're talking about relationships, right? So, I would ask everybody in the audience, what is the longest relationship you've been in, whether it's dating or casual or a marriage situation? And did that end with some deception, subterfuge? And if it did, how long did it go before you figured out you were being lied to?

So now, hold that here, Brian – holding up my left hand. And on the right hand, you've got an hour in the interview room before somebody asks for an attorney to get them to tell you everything about that. Now listen, interview rooms are great, but you know what they're good for? They're good for tying somebody to a story so we can impeach their testimony later. And that's the greatest way of finding out if your kid's lying or if your spouse is lying, right?

So now if we go back and we look at that and go, "Wait a minute, I was fooled for a good long time." Why? Because everybody lies. Now, everybody lies. They lie about things to save face. They lie about things to get away from things or get away with things. What's the difference between getting away with and away from? "I don't want to talk about that right now, Brian." So I go, "Oh yeah, it was a great show." I'm lying, it wasn't a great show, and I hated it. But I want to go to the water cooler and get my beverage and go back to my room, right? Or I want you to believe that I'm really in on that because I want to gain an advantage with you, right? Totally different things, but we all do them.

And we've even categorized them, Brian. We go, "Well, a white lie is okay." And it's okay to lie about the... The problem is that when we start going to methods of detection, it all goes back to that Salem, Massachusetts, remember the witch trials? So, "Okay, does the witch float?" "Well, witches are notoriously lighter than water, so that one will float, which means she is a witch, so we kill her." Or, "She's normal, and she drowns, and we go, 'Oh, thank God she wasn't a witch,' but she's dead." We all come to those same unscientific outcomes, and we rush to those. Why, Brian? You talked about it: when that dopamine gets released, when you get that caper and that person does confess and you get the answer.

Can I tell you a story about repeat performance? So, early on in my career, we had a situation, and the parents were believing the kid, and the kid was a known liar and the kid was a known thief. And they had come into the office, and they were talking to everybody, and I go, "We got to get this kid to divulge that he's been lying to his parents." So I put a riot helmet on the kid, and I had him sit next to the copy machine, and I already printed up a piece of paper that said, "He's lying." And so in front of the kid, I asked him just a couple of perfunctory questions, and I said, "Listen, I want you to tell the truth with each one of these. Do you understand?" "Yeah." And on the one that I knew that he was lying to his parents about, I pressed the copy machine, and it came out, and I showed him, and I go, "Look, you're lying! The truth detector is showing that you're lying!" And the kid started sobbing. He looked at his parents and he goes, "It was Billy and Jimmy and Tommy were there!" And we laughed it off, but it worked.

So probably 11 or 12 – and I'm not proud of any of this, folks – 12 or 13 years later, maybe 11 or 12, I was in Colorado. We had a situation where the kid was alleging stuff, and the parents were believing him, and it wasn't true. There was zero evidence. As a matter of fact, there was a bunch of evidence contrary to that that demonstrated that the kid was using deception to get back at this person. And so we were in my office, and I happened to be the interim chief of police at the time. And the way my office was set up is I could type stuff at my computer – remember the old days with the big monitor and stuff? And when I hit "print" to save, the printer was out in the lobby, but it would go straight to that printer with a chord that came in. So we had the kid come in and I go, "Hey, you know, we have the voice stress analyzer, it's been tested. So what you're going to do is just speak in a normal voice. I'm going to ask you these control questions." It was all a ruse, Brian. Every bit of it was a lie, and it came up "he's lying, he's lying, he's lying." And I showed it to the kid, and the same thing, they turned to the parents and they go, "Okay, you're right. It wasn't an abduction, they ran away, this is what..."

Now listen, I used those extreme methods twice in my career because the first time it worked, and even though it was a joke, it was practical because it was unscientific. We all knew that it was a ruse, and if the kid would fall for that, they would fall for anything. So I have a very low opinion of lie detectors because of that, because it was the inference, Brian, it was the setting, it was all of these other things rather than scientific evidence. But I knew it would work because the person was vulnerable to those suggestions.

Yeah, no. So let's jump into the polygraph, lie detector. But real quick, I also have a link up, and there's actually a great book – I know it's more about data science and everything – but it's called Everybody Lies. A guy found out that one of the best ways to get good truthful information is to look at what people search in their Google history, or even Google Trends over time, because you're likely the most honest you're going to be is when you're at home alone on your computer on that Google search bar.

To that end, Brian, delete if I die in this chair, delete my browser history, please.

Okay, yeah, no one needs to see that. But the polygraph thing is a great one. Anytime people have asked me about that or my thoughts on it, I just flatly say there's an absolute reason why it is not admissible in court. There's a reason why you can't use that. Now, maybe there are other reasons to use it. It's not that it's just completely unnecessary or not needed or junk. You can use that kind of like you did, but you didn't even have a real one; it was all a lie, and it worked flawlessly because of it. It was a parlor trick. So, what is that then? What is the polygraph, and what's the purpose of it? Because I think there are misconceptions about it too.

Yeah, and I want to tell you that there are a couple of states that allow the results of a polygraph test – five or six: Alabama, California, Florida – but it's in very specific wavelengths, a very laser focus. For example, the government can also use it in certain ways to determine your security clearance background.

Yeah, exactly. Go do the research on that to find out.

So, for example, I had both Michigan and Colorado as my law enforcement, then federal time with other agencies, and we never used it. I have almost 30 years in law enforcement and never once on any caper that we used ever did we use a polygraph. Now, the two times I used it as a ruse, it both worked because of the suggestion.

So, a real polygraph machine – a lie detector is the lesser, more often used but less scientific name, let's call it – it provides a continuous visual record of your physiological activity. So, whether it's your blood pressure, your respiration, your skin conductance, and all of that is put on a chart. And then, guess what happens, Brian? A human trained as an examiner determines what that means. So, didn't we do that once with bones on a car hood?

And I know I'm being a dick, folks, if you're a polygraph examiner, but I've got a very low opinion of charlatans in general. And if you can show me where there's science to back it up, then I'll go with it. But there's not enough science to be admissible in court, Brian. So I have a problem with it, and I think that's okay. My personal opinion is that while they may offer helpful clues, why do we not believe that the lie that we think we're indicating is actually anxiety? Do you remember in 2013 or whatever when we did that thing after Ekman with the anxiety detectors at the airports? Are they still there, Brian? No, they took them out because they were given false positives, because people are anxious when they get in line to go through TSA. They're anxious when they go to get on a plane. You see what I mean? I just don't believe it's a scientific threshold yet.

Well, I've even seen polygraph examiners get interviewed, and they even say it. They're like, "Well, yeah, it has a lot to do with the examiner and how you do this." It's like, okay, so it's the machine, is what we're saying? Like even they're saying it's not the machine, it's the person administering the test. It's like, what do we know when a human...?

Anything?

Well, yeah, that's what I mean. It's like you can't really... then how scientific is this? And so, like you said, it's a measurement of different physiological factors. So it can show physiological arousal, right? Your increase in heart rate and respiration, like skin, you know, how much sweat and stuff like that. There's a bunch of stuff you can do. But again, it comes down to why someone's being deceptive. You don't always know, or maybe they're anxious, and those things can get conflated very easily.

And so, you know, it kind of goes back to what you were talking about. You want to get someone's story, in what they said, to see if that changes, to see or what they leak out. Because, you know, a lot of times – and I'm using these shows as a reference, there are a million documentaries and there are all these interviews and these different techniques that people use – and a lot of them are successful because they know, going into the interview, that, "Alright, this is likely the suspect. There's no one else. We think it's them. We have all this evidence, but it's all so circumstantial. If we can get them to leak out some other piece of information that can tie them to the area, then we'll know." And you'll get all kinds of stuff. It can start with, "No, I didn't know anything about it." It's like, "Well, then yeah, no, I heard..." "Well, yeah, no, I was there, but I didn't go into the convenience store, I was here." You know, right?

And sometimes it's someone lying because they know the person that did it, and they don't want to say anything, but they're also somehow culpable in some small way, whether they were there or whatever. So they're trying to make sure, "Okay, well, I don't want anything to do with this because I don't want to get in trouble, but I don't also want to rat this person out because then I'm screwed." You know? There's all this stuff going on in there, and you can't really effectively measure that on an individual and then come up with certain... you can't really extrapolate enough quality information out of there to make a good... there are deception indicators, right? But I don't know why you're being deceptive.

If all of a sudden you have a lack of episodic saliva, and your hypothalamus heats up, because there are different reasons why that stuff happens. You have those physiological responses. And it's kind of like one of the best ways I saw it described, which I like, is it's sort of like a fight between your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system. Because your prefrontal cortex will lie all day long; that's your, some people call it your "lying brain." But your limbic system, your primitive brain, knows what actually happened. So it's going like, "Wait, what's going on here? No, we were there. What? Oh shit, are we in a survival situation? I'm going to start kicking out some catecholamine here, a little bit of cortisol, maybe a little bit of fight-flight-freeze to kind of carry you through, because this – I don't know what's going on here. This is danger, this is bad." You know? But that same stuff might happen when you're just anxious and you haven't slept for a few days, and something traumatic happened. So you can have all of these different physiological responses for different reasons which produce a false positive or a false negative, even too. You'll get some.

So I just, let's go to the law and let's go to science because you're spot on on both. So let's go to the law. Circumstantial evidence has solved more capers than any other form of evidence ever. And it always leads the jury or the judge to show them the story.

Real quick, can you kind of define circumstantial versus direct evidence?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, if I don't have an artifact or a piece of evidence that I can hold up and it's demonstrable – so I say these fingerprints go to that person, this blood goes to that person, and both of them were found inside the body of the, you know, something that's correct and it's linking and it's science-based – okay. A video of the homicide in progress and you turn and smile at the camera. Okay, those are so rare, they're like hens.

But circumstantial evidence means that, hey, your cell phone pinged in the area, and we have this ATM camera that shows what appears to be your vehicle going by. And then later at the Walmart you used your credit card, and then the person was dumped in an area that you used to go hunting or climbing at. Okay, Brian, those things would add up to demonstrate to a reasonable person that this is most likely the person that committed it. And more people are imprisoned on that. And do we get that wrong? Of course, we get that wrong. But it's so rare that we get it wrong that the Innocence Project doesn't have thousands and thousands of capers. You get it? Okay, unless somebody really lied or put their thumb on the scale, it's a rarity.

Now somebody at home that's a copper detective is going, "Oh, you guys are full of shit because I use the polygraph all the time and I get the best convictions." And I use this... Look, the reason you do is because you got a great caper, you got a slam dunk, you got a shoe-in, you got one of those capers where the evidence and interviews and everything went well. And that's why you're getting to where you're getting. Because there are things called unsolved, and they're unsolved largely because we misread pieces of evidence, or the person knows when to invoke the, what is that, "Friday, call the attorney!" Yeah, "Shut the fuck up Friday," right?

Why I mean that is, look, I'll give you a deception indicator that I ask everybody to go and try to debunk on your own, Brian: all the times that I dealt with human beings in and out of police work in my own life, I know when a person's crying and that it's genuine, and I know when a person can't generate the tears. Now you're saying, "Yeah, but there are actors that can cry on cue." Yeah, I got it. But again, what is the context and relevance of that crying?

But when all of a sudden somebody's going, "Oh, Tommy and Billy were there," and they're doing the act in the interview room now, and no tears are coming. Tears are easy, Brian. I cry four or five times a day now, I'm just a mess, right? And I always, yeah, exactly, and you're immense. But I get those tears that are just coming down all the time and they're hot and my eyes get red and everything else. Watch how many times that you see a person where they're doing the convincing body motion, but you're not getting those reactions. You're getting a red face, of course, and they're pushing as hard as they can, but no tears are coming.

Now, if you're a physiologist or if you're a doctor and you go, "Well, I'll tell you what, when a person has the so-and-so disease," because there's a disease for everything. But Brian, what are the chances that that person not only had that disease but also was involved in a homicide and was the likely prime suspect? Because we don't just go out and grab somebody that lived on the same block and throw them in that chair. That's what people mistakenly get. Because if we can solve a problem in 30 minutes or an hour on TV, we start thinking, "Well, guess what? That's ingenious."

And I'll give you one: CBS News, 1986, 60 Minutes did the expose where they hired three or four polygraph firms, and what they did is they said, "Hey, there was this theft, and here are the people," and all – and it was all contrived, Brian. And each one of them came up with a suspect and were willing to testify to the fact that that person was guilty. If you can show me that that parlor trick, which I disclose I'd used twice, many times more in my career, there were times being out on the street going through a dark backyard in Detroit, and there were so many hedges and alleys and everything else, and I knew the suspect was close. And I go, "Alright, I see you, come out with your hands up, or I swear to God I'm going to shoot you!" I was flying my ass off, and here they come backing out of the hedges. You get what I'm trying to say?

But Brian, that's how a suggestion works both ways. That's a knife that cuts both ways. Would you agree that a polygraph examiner that's given the case profile – because they have to be in on nuanced parts of the case that the news doesn't know, nobody else knows, only the suspect would know – could that change how you ask or how you feel about the person and could that be conveyed to the person, changing the results?

So, look, the beautiful way of conducting surveillance on a human is the fly on the wall, because you never notice the fly on the wall, and you don't impact everything that's going on, even though you know you do physically. But the idea, it's less than sitting somebody down and going toe-to-toe with them and going, "Where were you on the night of the 23rd?" That's a completely different environment.

And Brian, if you lie, you gave the convenience store example. Folks, you don't understand that Brian spends a lot of time at convenience stores and McDonald's because he gets free Wi-Fi; that's how the show is being funded right now. But the idea is, Brian, what if I'm anxious because you're going to find out that I told you that I'm a fatty, and I hid snacks all around the house? So I eat well. Shelly monitors everything I do. I work my ass off, I've lost a ton of weight, I feel great. But I'll tell you what, I've got a couple of hidey-holes in the place for shit that I like. So, I like those Nutty Bars. I go crazy for a Nutty Bar with coffee, but I've got to hide them. Why? Because I'm letting Shelly down, and that bothers the hell out of me. So if you talked about where I bought those Nutty Bars, and that just happened to be on the same street as the homicide, I'm going to lie my ass off about that. And you know what it's going to do? It's going to demonstrate anxiety. So your brain doesn't understand how to regulate way too much anxiety and way too less. So it'll come across as what? Deception. But you can't tell if the deception is because you fogged everybody to death with a five-pound sledge, or if you're just keeping the fact that, "Hey, I've been cheating on my wife, and I don't want her to find out that the reason I didn't come home that night is because I was cheating." That willful misrepresentation of the truth, that's going to come out somewhere, Brian. It has to.

Yeah, and it kind of goes back to people being different. And this, I equate the deception indicators and the polygraph kind of stuff, it's almost like when you're talking about human behavior and you get into kinesics and body language, right? It's great, there are some things you can understand just through someone's body language and what they're doing. But if you're starting there, you're probably setting yourself up for failure, right? If you have all of these other contextual and environmental cues and other pieces of information, that's where you sort of start. And then those might be the icing on the cake or the sprinkles on top of the cupcake to go, "Okay, I'm fairly confident now. This is the last 10% I needed. They're clearly being deceptive." You know what I'm saying? You're picking up on something that's happening, even if you can't quite clearly articulate why. But again, you're tying it back to knowns. So you're always starting with these knowns: "Here's what I know." And then I can compare the unknowns versus the knowns in a sense. It's like, "Well, I don't know about this, and this is what they said." And then you can do that same thing like we talk about the explanatory storyline, like, "Okay, if that's what happened, what else needs to be true for that story to happen, for that situation to occur?" And then you can go back and like, "Well, those factors weren't there, so it's unlikely that that story is true." And again, you don't always know why.

The other thing that people really get into is it goes back to, we always like to say, most people want their say, not their way. Humans are constantly on transit. That's why when they do have those suspects in there that they think, "Alright, all the evidence is pointing to this person," a lot of times it's done just to try to get them to talk, right? And they're trying to get them to talk because it's way easier to go, "Alright, we got a confession," and we're good with a slam dunk. Or they implicated themselves in some manner. Maybe it didn't rise to the level of a confession, Greg, but maybe through that talking, they either impeach their testimony or implicated themselves, "Yes, I know that person. Yes, I was at that house." And now they've got something else to go on.

Totally with you on this. Yes.

And that's a reason why some of those things exist, and you know, there are all these different studies and people trying different techniques, and for the most part, it doesn't... The only thing is, if you're trying to get someone to talk or tell you something, you have to build that rapport and you have to get them talking, you have to keep them going. And then they'll either... if it's in a case of a homicide or something like that, yeah, maybe they will kind of want to get that off their chest and they will want to tell someone it's weighing heavily. But you already basically know at that point, right? That's the thing. Those shows aren't riveting to me, it's not suspenseful because it's like, "Well, I obviously did it." You're just trying to draw it out of them, and that takes time.

That's even the comparison to like, the enhanced interrogation or torture and stuff like that. It's like, it's never been shown to work. If you torture someone, they're going to tell you what you want to hear. They tell you anything to get that shit to stop. You can go back and read about what the Chinese did during the Korean War. There are some great ones on that because they chose the long, psychological route with different American captives and slowly over time got them to kind of, even if they weren't admitting to something, they would end up writing a story saying, "Yeah, I renounce the United States and its ways, and communism is better, and I've realized this." And they're doing that willingly. But that was a long process to slowly get them to that point. But at the same time, that person's no longer kind of who they are at that point, right? They basically, what people call brainwashed. They've manipulated them enough slowly at a time. And you can do that to get someone to tell you a piece of information, but plugging them up to a machine or saying, "Oh, I saw their brow furrow and they started sweating and they're lying, and this is my..." It's like, look man, there could be a lot going on that you don't know about. So if you're relying on unuseful...

Oh yeah, well, that's with all of these...

I was just like, because I was watching one with Mika, and she was asking me these different questions about it. I was like, literally, this person, all they need to do is like, "Hey, I'm done talking. I need a lawyer. Charge me or let me go." And I go, "This is all over then. It's done, it's done." And now they're going to detain them, they're going to try to go to trial and put a case together. But they could stop this at any time.

Exactly. So, let's bolster your argument because you're spot on again, and let's go to the law. What does the law say? Again, film buff. Harrison Ford, 90s, Air Force One – great. "Get off of my plane!" "Not without my family!" That's my Harrison Ford, by the way, and it doesn't sound like Gilbert Gottfried for a change. But during that film, he stays rather than taking the escape pod as the President on the plane that's been hijacked by terrorists. And then what do we have? We have Article 25 of the Constitution that says, listen, in that extreme environment, the President is no longer making good decisions, so he's no longer the President. So if we've got that written into the Constitution to make sure that he's not making shitty decisions because he wants to save his daughter.

And what's a deathbed confession? A deathbed confession is a legal opinion that says, listen, this person knows they're going to die, and they're going to confess about it, so we're going to admit that in court. As a matter of fact, it would be hearsay evidence, but it rises to another standard. So if that person – and, you know, I want to get something off my chest – yeah, I'm sitting there with blood. "I just killed my old lady. I lit the house on fire. I did all these other things." I'm going to tell you anything to get out of that room because it may be the last time that freedom. And I'm not going to go, "Yeah, you know what? You got me." I'd love people to write in about those stories. I bet we get four out of the 100,000 that they've done, right?

So, how can we use it, Brian? I say, go to the science. The science, the data shows that Americans largely believe that polygraphs are accurate. So here we're talking about street lore again. And Brian, when you sent out the paperwork, there's a study that showed that 70% of Americans that were polled said, "Yeah, it's a reliable, useful technique for detecting lies." So, use that against the person and get a registered, certified polygraph examiner to render their opinion. And if the person's lying, go in and tell them, "Look, you volunteered the polygraph, and it shows you're being deceptive. Now let's start a new conversation. Let's you and I sit down. I'll get you a Coke, and you tell me what really happened." Brian, that's a great attention-getter. And it's legal to use. It's deceptive in a manner because you're not scientifically 100%. But if 70% of the population believes it's true, use it.

We still have people that watch the video and say, "Oh, that's a ghost on a broom flying across Mexico." No offense to my Mexican friends, but it's all horseshit. So, when you go to a funeral – and sadly, you just came back from one – when you go to a funeral, I would suggest, Brian, that everybody that listens to us does "the Brian test." Do you hear gossip? Of course you do. Do you hear rumors? Do you hear everybody's third or fourth generation theory on why it happened? Brian, of all the funerals you've been to, and all that crap that you've heard, how much of it was true or played out or had a scientific underpinning? Come on, right? It's almost none.

But that kind of goes into our desire, sort of as humans, to establish causal relationships, to understand why this occurred and what happened. And we don't... We know, like I always talk about on here, we don't like uncertainty. Humans are not good with uncertainty, and so we have to sort of say, "Well, this is... I need a storyline here. I need to know what happened," which is normal. And then so we attribute those things to it that have nothing. It's that fundamental attribution error and then confirmation bias. The idea is, yeah, they're looking for some sort of, "What was the, what caused this to happen?" And a lot of times it's like, "Look, there are a number of contributing factors that coalesced together at this time and place which created this outcome. And had one of those not been there, that outcome may have been different," or maybe it was the same, but it may have been different. And so, that difference is enough.

If I look at all that stuff as sort of like the relationship between things, just versus the story of what happened and the facts and the detailed timeline, it's like, "Well, how do these all relate to one another?" That's when you get into, "Oh man, it's a little murky," or, "Oh, I can establish the relationship, so now that makes sense." But it's rarely, rarely that you're going to get a definitive answer when it comes to something like deception.

Now, I always say, kids are always great to use because they're not as good as adults at lying, right? And so they'll stick with that lie, Brian, so they'll have a longer time. And it's like the insurgent because she's stubborn like her mom. And then so I'll get her tripped up on something, she'll stick to that and go back to it, and then just freak out like, "Well, it's only because..." and then just completely flip-flop. I was like, "Alright, so we know that's not what happened." But it's obvious because they're not as good at it. They're slow, they can't come up with a quick story right away because they don't... Brian, what do they not have? They don't have the timeline, they don't have the baseline, they don't have the experiential knowledge to go into that.

And that's why shitty barracks lawyers and crappy former penitentiary members when they come out, that's why they talk a lot. "Oh yeah, and this and that and other," because they've got it down, Brian. They know exactly what you need to hear.

Yeah, "Well, I'm not going to tell you this, but if you give me the DA's whatever, I'll disclose who else was there." Brian, they're masters of it. Your kids aren't though, and it's fun because you can play with that a little bit, right? I was a great barracks lawyer when I was in the Marine Corps, and people would say stuff, "No, that's a violation of, you know, UCMJ Article whatever." And I'd just make something up. They're like, "Well, I didn't know that." And I was like, "Well, that's because it's not real, I just made that up." "Oh, you were really convincing on that one." Oh my God, that's horrible!

Well, let's do it this way. Let's go back to science for just a minute on your hypothesis that you just threw out. So you know that driving is a privilege, not a right, and that if you're suspected of a DUI, you have to submit to roadsides. Now you say, "I'm not going to do the roadsides." Okay, that alone can be used against you in court. Now you have the choice between a breathalyzer or a blood test. And in some instances, like an accident, you don't have a choice. But the idea is that that stuff is all admissible in court, and it's all evidence. It's tangible artifacts that I can show to court: "Here's your blood alcohol."

When we talk about a lie detector, a polygram, it's voluntary. "Well, would you take one?" So the idea just of it being voluntary shows the low standard that the law puts on it. And you're saying, "Yeah, then why would the states allow it?" Certain states allow it in very narrow capers and in very narrow use when you testify to it. And I'll tell you, it's the first thing that a defense attorney is going to go after. Try to get the defense attorney to go after the blood test results. He has to go after the alcohol swab, and the officer wasn't trained, and it was dark that night, and the 50,000 blood tests the hospital did in the last 24 hours, some of them were messed up. You get what I'm trying to say? That I have to build that moment of doubt into the jury. With a lie detector, not so much.

Now, even saying that you failed the lie detector is inadmissible in most courts. You get what I'm trying to say? So, can you use it as a tool to open dialogue in some...? And look, there were probably a million lie detector tests administered in the United States last year. Good, good on you, good for you. But what is your cost-benefit analysis, and what is your success ratio? And if it still hasn't been proven scientifically, I...

Yeah, no, I just saw a good one where you were talking about kind of use cases for it. It was one of my buddies, and it was a background investigation for a government agency. And same thing, so he gets to his polygraph, and then about a quarter of the way through, the polygraph examiner stops and goes, "Hey, you know what? Let's stop for a second. Let's take a break. Let's go grab some water, maybe a cup of coffee real quick, and sit down and talk." It's like, "Okay." So he goes to the bathroom, grabs water. He's like, the guy goes, "Look, man, we're going to start over. Here's the thing, I'm not here to disqualify you for this job. I'm here to make sure that you're being honest with the answers you're giving me. The answers don't matter." And he goes, "I don't care how many times you did cocaine when you were in college. I'm here to see if you're being honest about how many times you did cocaine in college. Are you ready to begin this again?" And he was like, "Yeah, okay." So he started and passed and got hired or whatever. But it was just a hilarious story because the examiner was like, "Look, man, you're pinging so hot all over the place on this thing." He's like, "It's not what this is about. This is what this is for." And he was like, "Alright, got it."

But that's different, obviously, in like a homicide investigation or something. But for the background stuff, you're just trying to... But that's the thing, you answered the questions, and then they're going back to see what your answers are in person to those questions, right? I mean, they already have the baseline you provided: "Have you ever done any of these things? What's your history here? Did you live here? What happened here? What was this?" And then they put you up to that and ask you those again. They're like, "Okay, are you matching up or what's going on here?" To see if there's a difference. So you're measuring it, you're using it as a measurement tool for a specific purpose. So I just like, it's a funny story, but it's also kind of how you can use this stuff.

So we'll give that to, in a very controlled context that everybody in the audience will understand. So my son, Nico, was the master. "So, Nico, go brush your teeth, come down, we'll say our prayers, time to go to bed." And so Nico would go up and dick around with his Legos, or he would build something with one of his things. And then I'd have to yell at him. And then finally I had to start walking up the steps to get him to do something. So then it was like, "Bring me your toothbrush." And he caught on immediately that his toothbrush was dry. "You're lying, you didn't brush your teeth." And then he'd sulk back upstairs, brush his teeth. So then what? When I asked him, "Bring me your toothbrush," he'd bring me the wet toothbrush. It's just dripping water, dripping all the way down the stairs. I go, "Okay, now breathe." And he goes, "What?" I go, "Breathe, let me smell your breath."

And now you learned. Nico was fighting every step of me being the dad in the situation. If he would have just brushed his teeth, he would have got over it within a minute and gone back to play. But he had to go through all of these steps to deceive me. Okay, so the great thing was, it was easy because I could see the pattern of deception, and I understood the "why." So if you get the "how," the "why" becomes so much more evident.

And people don't... there's no investigative agency in the United States that just throws a census hanging on the wall and they just throw a dart at the census and go, "It's this guy, Juan Johnson, he's the murderer." There's got to be evidence that inculpated you in some manner at the beginning. And could this be a way? Yeah, but stop believing in the shite and go back to the science. How many blood tests are inconclusive? How many breath tests are inconclusive? But then how many lie detector tests are inconclusive? I just say weigh that.

And again, Brian's goal and my goal is not to poke fun at you or poke you in the eye if that's what you do for a living. But we're just saying in the greater scheme of things, that is only one small part of the entire investigative process, and we just don't spend a lot of time adding credibility to that. I give it the same amount of credibility as the insider threat testing that I have to do to keep my security clean. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Where it's, "Hey, let's...

Exactly. And there's a guy peeking around the corner. "Hey, click on the photo of the boat and see your coworker, Bill. Your coworker, Bill, recently bought an expensive boat. What should you do?"

No, you're exactly right, and it's been the same forever. It has been. But no, it's good that—that's the toothbrush one, that's the Uncle Buck one where he's watching the kids, John Candy, and he does the, "I got a buddy at the crime lab, and I can send him your toothbrush, and he'll be able to tell whether or not you actually brushed your teeth." The two kids are staring at each other like, "Ah!"

Exactly. That's the thing. I mean, we believe what we want to believe.

And if it had a substantial underpinning of science, then all states would be allowing it, and it would be somewhere in the legal center.

And here's sort of my big takeaways on this one: you're going to likely feel like, "Okay, I think that this person is likely deceiving me in some manner." Okay, well, don't rely on some nebulous or subjective indicator. Go on what you know about the situation and then compare it to them. I mean, that's as simple as what I tell people. Okay, write down what this person said, and then draw a line down the paper. On the other side, write down what they actually did. And if there's some incongruence there, then you've got something. And again, it's one of those things, it's the sprinkle on top to go, "Alright, now I was 95% confident, now I'm 99.9% confident," whatever it is. You can't take it and start there and go, "I think this is happening," or, if you do and you go, "I think they're being deceptive, now I have to find out why or what about or what the issue is," it's not just going off of that. I just think that they—it goes back to the, "Give me the list of indicators and things I need to look for." It's like, "Well, it doesn't exist. It's different for everyone."

I say throughout the, Brian, I say throughout the incongruent standard. For example, unless you're a surgeon that's on call for a hospital, you don't have two phones. You have two phones because you're being deceptive. If you've got a phone for the detective bureau and your personal phone, that's a different thing where everybody in that situation has that. Yeah, okay, because you can show, you can demonstrate that, "Hey, it was a part of the thing that I was issued," so don't get suspicious. But all of a sudden, if you're a street thug and you don't even have a job but you've got those two phones, something's wrong.

But what's the next thing? Check your fuel. Fuel costs different money, so the money doesn't help. But the gallons of fuel going back and forth to work don't change, now. Right now, in Colorado, that would be different because the bridge is out, so it's seven hours instead of the hour. But listen, if you're just going to work and coming back, and all of a sudden your times are off, and then I look and you're getting three times the amount of gas, filling up with gas more. Yeah, you're doing a meet-me-eat-me. So the idea is, those are tangible, and those are what I talk about as artifacts or evidence. Artifacts: the thing I can hold up. Evidence: the thing I can point to and say, "Take a look at this. This is very demonstrative that somebody's lying to you." And then you come up to them, you go, "Why are you using three times as much gas?" And the person goes, "Okay, well, I've got to tell you, I've still been visiting Dad at the hospital." That fits. "Okay, I got it. I'm sorry that I asked you about that. You don't have to lie about that. I'll drive with you next time," right? So the idea is that the difference between a mistake and a lie is intent. So if you remember that starting off the bat, there's a lot of evidence out there that you can get to without this electronic chicanery.

So again, for the Patreon folks, I'll have that PDF on there, you can take a look at. And we'll jump into some more of those in different episodes. We'll kind of keep this as a recurring thing, some common myths, because there's a bunch out there. But I kind of want to categorize some of them and do them together. You'll see, for those listeners who subscribe to the Patreon, this is, look at the science and what really happened. And then what's cool about it is you get to kind of see the quantum leap of logic that occurs where people from outside that who don't know that or weren't part of that study or weren't in that field go, "Oh, I see. Then that must mean this over here." And it's like, "Uh, and that's where things go off the rails." Yes, that's where it goes completely off the rails. What happens in a lab or in a controlled environment or in a study is not directly... I can't directly conceptualize that in every single encounter that I'm in. It's not necessarily true; it's only within those given parameters or those given factors that were involved with that. So, just be careful with any of that stuff.

I think that's a good spot to end on. I mean, we covered a lot with the different deception...

Well, let me just throw a challenge out to the audience. In the next 24 hours, I want you to use the "Greg-ism" electronic chicanery. But you have to say it to somebody in the course of your day, and you'll get a smile, you'll get a smile. Trust me on that.

On that note, thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.