Born Liars by Ian Leslie Page B

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