Although we might wish that it were not true, students do occasionally tell a deliberate lie to the teacher. In explaining why an assignment is late, for example, a student might claim to have been sick when the student was not in fact sick. Worse yet, a student might turn in an assignment that the student claims to have written when in fact it was “borrowed” from another student or (especially among older students) even from Internet.
In situations like these, is there any way to discern when a person actually is lying? Many of the signs would have to be nonverbal, since by definition a liar's verbal statements may not indicate that falsehood is occurring. A large body of research has studied this question looking for nonverbal signs by which deception might be detected. The research can be summarized like this: people generally believe that they can tell when someone is lying, but they can not in fact do so very accurately. In a survey of 75 countries around the world, for example, individuals from every nation expressed the belief that liars avoid eye contact (Global Deception Research Team, 2006). (This is an unusually strong trend compared to most in educational and psychological research!) Individuals also named additional behaviors: liars shift on the feet, for example, they touch and scratch themselves nervously, and their speech is hesitant or “awed. But the most important belief is about eye contact: a liar, it is thought, cannot “look you in the eye”.
Unfortunately these beliefs seem to be simply stereotypes that have little basis in fact. Experiments in which one person deliberately lies to another person find little relationship between averting eye contact and lying, as well as little relationship between other nonverbal behaviors and lying (DePaulo et al., 2003). A person who is lying is just as likely to look directly at you as someone telling the truth and on the other hand, also just as likely to look away. In fact gaze aversion can indicate a number of things, depending on the context. In another study of eye contact, for example, Anjanie McCarthy and her colleagues observed eye contact when one person asks another person a question. They found that when answering a question to which a person already knew the answer (like “What is your birthday?”), the person was likely to look the questioner directly in the eye (McCarthy, et al., 2006). When answering a question which required some thought, however, the person tended to avert direct gaze. The researchers studied individuals from three societies and found differences in where the individuals look in order to avoid eye contact: people from Canada and Trinidad looked up, but people from Japan looked down. All of their answers, remember, were truthful and none were lies. If gaze aversion does not really indicate lying, then why do people believe that it does anyway? The research team that studied this belief suggested that the belief does not actually reflect our experiences with liars, but instead function as a deterrent to lying behavior (Global Deception Research Team, 2006). Since nearly everyone disapproves of lying, and since detecting it is often difficult, the next best strategy is to persuade potential liars that they might in fact be detected. Furthermore, if we believe that liars should feel ashamed of their behavior, it is reasonable to suppose that they would show signs of shame i.e. gaze aversion, shifting on their feet, hesitation, and the like. The irony is that if we begin to doubt a person's truthfulness, a truthful person is more likely to feel uncomfortable, so the person is likely to begin averting gaze and showing other signs of nervousness anyway. The end result is to reinforce the stereotype of gaze aversion, but not to identify an actual liar.
For teachers, the implications of this research are twofold. First, it suggests that we should be very careful before deciding whether or not a particular student is lying on a particular occasion. We should encourage students to be equally careful with each other; it is too easy, it seems, to jump to conclusions about this sort of judgment. Second, it implies that a better way to reduce lying by students is to develop high-quality relationships with them, so that students will not feel a need to lie. Obviously, developing high-quality relationships is a big job and it may be easier with some students than with others. But it appears to be more effective than falsely accusing truthful students while overlooking actual deceptions.
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