Transparent Liars

Transparency in general refers to the openness of liars in telling lies and the openness of truth-tellers in telling the truth. Transparent liars are disbelieved when they are lying, whereas nontransparent liars are believed when they are lying.

In the psychological literature on lying, transparency was identified with how leaky liars were when lying. Traditionally it was held that leakage was prevalent among liars, especially in the case of lies that were not sanctioned and when there was something important at stake for the liar (high-stakes lies). That is, traditionally it was held that most liars were transparent. Recent research on lie detection has cast doubt on this claim about the prevalence of leakage and has argued instead that leakage among liars is much more variable: leakage is the exception rather than the rule for liars. The conclusion is that there are far fewer transparent liars, and many more nontransparent liars, than studies originally held.

In the work of Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in the late 1960s and 1970s it was determined that liars typically experience certain emotions, such as guilt (about telling lies) and fear (being detected when they tell lies). It was also determined that liars can experience delight in succeeding in duping people. Truth-tellers, by contrast, do not typically experience these emotions in telling the truth. Although liars may attempt to suppress these emotions and control the display of these emotions, by attempting to hide the emotions with a mask of neutrality (maintaining a “poker face”), or covering the truly felt emotion with a different, false emotion, [Page 897]emotions are not normally under the conscious control of liars. In addition to verbal cues that signal lying, such emotions can be leaked to the recipients of lies, nonverbally, and hence are also cues that signal lying.

This idea of leakage was expanded upon by researchers in the 1980s such as Miron Zuckerman, Bella M. DePaulo, and Robert Rosenthal, who advanced a four-factor internal state theory. Liars, as opposed to truth-tellers, are more likely to experience greater levels of arousal, emotions (such as guilt and fear), greater cognitive effort, and more effort to control their nonverbal displays of emotion. Each of these internal states was thought to be associated with certain nonverbal behaviors; for example, in the case of increased cognitive effort, lying was thought to lead to an increased number of speech errors and longer response latencies. Even if liars presented themselves as honest, therefore, they leak cues to their own lying, both verbally and nonverbally.

If liars typically leak cues to their own lying, then it follows that liars are typically transparent liars. Because this conclusion was at odds with lie detection experiments, in which subjects are, on average, only 54 percent accurate in detecting liars, or only slightly better than chance, researchers argued that people are poor at detecting leakage, at least without training. As it were, people are poor at detecting transparent liars.

More recently, researchers such as Bella M. DePaulo and Charles F. Bond have determined that there is much more variance in liars' transparency and much less variance in people's ability to detect lies, even if variance in transparency is not large in an absolute sense. The majority of people can lie without leaking, or without leaking very much, to the recipients of the lies they are telling. That is, the majority of people are not very transparent liars. A small proportion of people, however, have a tendency to give themselves away and to leak that they are lying. That is, a small proportion of people are transparent liars. Although not perfectly transparent, such transparent liars are detected by the recipients of their lies.

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