

How You Lie Depends on Where You Are From - rshrsh
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-you-lie-depends-on-where-you-re-from

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emodendroket
The headline oversells this a bit. At the end of the day, we have very little
ability to detect lies even in a monocultural environment and it doesn't seem
like we have all that much insight into cultural variations (how could we when
we haven't isolated the signs in any one culture?).

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carsongross
What's interesting to me is the following result:

 _Say you 're in a situation with two people, where one is making a
statement—it might be true, it might be false—and the other person is trying
to determine if that person is lying. The likelihood that you're going to make
the right choice is around 54 percent —just above what you'd get if you
guessed randomly_

What strikes me is that being successfully lied to would appear to be a huge
evolutionary disadvantage for the individual. One would think that humans
would have immensely attuned bullshit detectors, but that doesn't appear to be
the case: we instead appear to be built to trust, at least most of us.

One can easily construct arguments why this is: for example, smaller groups
with high trust can specialize with much lower risk. But one wonders if, in
modern society, this leads to the "idiots lead by sociopaths" situations we so
often find ourselves in.

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emodendroket
Being able to lie successfully also confers an evolutionary advantage and
there are almost no outward indicators most people are lying. Why would you
expect any different?

What's really troubling is various "systems" offered to law enforcement and so
on that do not actually make people more accurate at discerning lies but do
make them much more confident in their ability to do so.

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carsongross
Because the majority of people are terrible liars, is why.

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emodendroket
Maybe you should go teach the researchers who are barely beating chance at
identifying lies if you're so good at it.

