It's interesting that so much study as been done on detecting deception, but there is little serious scholarship on how to get away with a lie. Maybe they're two sides of the same coin, or maybe it's that we're so good at lying that there isn't much room for improvement.
People don't seem to be very good at spotting deception signals. On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55 percent of the time. This success rate holds for groups as diverse as students and police officers. "Human accuracy is really just barely better than chance," says DePaulo.Deception is a really fascinating arms race, especially considering that it's the main flaw with just about every game-theory-based explanation for cooperation. It's always slightly more expensive to catch liars than it is to lie.
(HT: GeekPress.)
Oooh. Weighing in on this one is deadly. Well, someone has to be first. I'll take an honest shot at it. (ha ha)
I believe that one's ability to detect a lie goes up in proportion to how skilled one becomes at the art of lying. In other words, to do it is to recognize it.
As a teenager, I often took lying to the extreme. As an adult, I am now burdened with the consequence of finding it difficult to trust others, am fairly skilled at detecting lies from others, and have had a long road back to honesty.
Lying is one of those things that carries a heavy, long-term consequence. I find honesty to be refreshingly easier to pull off: You don't have to remember what you say. Not to mention that my life is far better off using honesty as the best policy.
George Carlin, however, did point out that "if honesty is the best policy, then, by the process of elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy."
Cheers.