Born Liars by Ian Leslie Page A

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 reallyenjoying 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