59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (26 page)

To score the questionnaire, add your ratings. Low scores run between 10 and 20, medium scores between 21 and 39, and high scores between 40 and 50.

Research suggests that people often approach many aspects of their lives using one of two fundamental strategies—maximizing or satisficing. “Maximizers” tend to obtain high scores on the questionnaire, and “satisficers” tend to obtain low scores. Extreme maximizers constantly check all available options to make sure that they have picked the best one. In contrast, extreme satisficers look only until they have found something that fulfills their needs. As a result, maximizers objectively achieve more but take longer to find what they want and may be less happy because of a tendency to dwell on how things could have been.

For example, in one study of job hunting, researchers categorized more than five hundred students from eleven universities as maximizers or satisficers and then tracked them as they tried to find employment.
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The maximizers ended up with salaries that were, on average, 20 percent higher than those of the satisficers, but they were also less satisfied with their job search and more prone to regret, pessimism, anxiety, and depression.

If you are a maximizer and find yourself wasting too much time searching for the perfect product, you might find it helpful to limit the resources that you put into some activities (e.g., give yourself only thirty minutes to find your friend a birthday card) or make certain decisions irreversible (for example, by throwing away receipts).
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There is an old adage that happiness is about wanting what you have, not having what you want. It seems that when maximizers get what they want, they may not always want what they get.

HOW TO DECIDE WHETHER PEOPLE ARE TELLING YOU THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

How do you think people tend to behave when they lie to you? Take a look at the list of behaviors in the table below and place a checkmark in either the “True” or the “False” column after each statement.

People are often surprisingly economical with the truth. In a survey that I conducted with the
Daily Telegraph
, a quarter of the respondents claimed to have told a lie within the last twenty-four hours. Other work suggests that an impressive 90 percent of people say that they have lied on a date and that about 40 percent of the population are happy to lie to their friends. Deception is also a major problem in the workplace, with surveys suggesting that around 80 percent of people have lied during a job interview, and almost 50 percent of employees have told their boss at least one important lie.
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In view of the prevalence of lying, it is not surprising that all sorts of techniques have been developed in an attempt to detect such fibbery. In ancient times, for example, there was the ever popular “red-hot poker” test. In a procedure that could reasonably be described as hell on earth, a poker would be placed into a fierce fire, removed, and the accused forced to lick it three times. The theory was that the innocent person would have a sufficient amount of saliva on the tongue to prevent burning, whereas a guilty party would have a much drier tongue that would thus become somewhat attached to the poker.

According to the history books, a similar but less barbaric technique was used during the Spanish Inquisition. The accused
would be made to eat some barley bread and cheese, while those around prayed that the Angel Gabriel would prevent the person from successfully swallowing the food if they had lied. To my knowledge, neither of these techniques has been subjected to proper scientific testing, in part, I am guessing, because it would be tricky to obtain the necessary informed consent from participants and the Angel Gabriel. However, if such studies were to be carried out, any positive findings would support one of the most commonly held theories about lying—the Anxiety Hypothesis.

This idea holds that people become very nervous when they lie, and so they develop a variety of anxiety-related symptoms, including a drying of the mouth, which could cause them to become stuck to red-hot pokers and find it difficult to swallow barley bread.

Although the theory is intuitively appealing, obtaining reliable proof for it has proven far from easy, with some research suggesting that liars are no more stressed than those who tell the truth.

In a recent study, for example, conducted by Richard Gramzow at the University of Southampton, and outside colleagues, students were first connected to machinery that measured their heart rate and then interviewed about their recent exam performance.
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The interview involved the students’ describing the grades that they had obtained over the years and comparing their own skills and abilities with those of classmates. What the students didn’t know was that after the interview the experimenters were going to obtain their actual exam results and so would be able to identify which students had been telling the truth and which had been exaggerating. Interestingly, the results revealed that nearly half of the students had exaggerated their academic achievements. Even more interestingly, the heart-rate data showed that those
who had raised their grades for the occasion were no more stressed than their honest colleagues were. If anything, they were slightly more relaxed.

The results from studies using high-tech anxiety-measuring machinery are, at best, mixed. However, that hasn’t stopped the public from accepting the idea that people become terribly tense when they are being economical with the truth. Perhaps driven by the countless films and television programs that show liars with sweaty palms and racing hearts, most believe that the best signs of deceit are those popularly associated with increased anxiety.

Teams of researchers have spent hours carefully comparing films of known liars and truth tellers, with trained observers coding every smile, blink, and gesture. Each minute of footage takes about an hour to analyze, but the resulting data allow researchers to compare the behavior associated with a lie and with truth, and thus uncover even the subtlest of differences. The findings are fascinating. Honestly.

Take a look at the questionnaire at the beginning of this section. How many checkmarks did you put in the “True” column? All of the behaviors listed in the questionnaire are things that people do when they become nervous. They avoid eye contact, squirm in their seats, sweat, and start to garble their words. According to the researchers who have spent hours coding the behavior of liars and truth tellers, not one of the items in the table is reliably associated with lying. In fact, liars are just as likely to look you in the eye as truth tellers are, they don’t move their hands nervously, and they don’t shift about in their seats.

However, because most people hold these mind myths in their heads, they are terrible at deciding whether someone is lying. Present them with videotapes of people lying and telling the truth and ask them to spot the liar, and they perform
little better than chance. Show adults films of children describing a true event and a fictitious one, and the adults are unable to tell which is which.
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Ask someone to convince their long-term partner that they found a photograph of an attractive person unattractive, and they are surprisingly successful.
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Even groups of lawyers, police officers, psychologists, and social workers have been unable to reliably detect deception.
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So what really gives away a liar? Although lying does not always make people stressed, it usually taxes their minds. Lying involves having to think about what other people already know or could find out, what is plausible, and what fits in with what you have said before. Because of this, liars tend to do the things that correspond to thinking hard about a problem or issue. They tend not to move their arms and legs so much, cut down on gesturing, repeat the same phrases, give shorter and less detailed answers, take longer before they start to answer, and pause and hesitate more. In addition, there is also evidence that they distance themselves from the lie, causing their language to become more impersonal. As a result, liars often reduce the number of times that they say words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine,” and use “him” and “her” rather than people’s names. Finally, there is increased evasiveness, as liars tend to avoid answering the question completely, perhaps by switching topics or by asking a question of their own.

To detect deception, forget about looking for signs of tension, nervousness, and anxiety. Instead, a liar is likely to look as though they are thinking hard for no good reason, conversing in a strangely impersonal tone, and incorporating an evasiveness that would make even a politician or a used-car salesman blush.

IN 59 SECONDS

Body Language

For successful lie detection, jettison the behavioral myths surrounding the Anxiety Hypothesis and look for signs more commonly associated with having to think hard. Forget the idea that liars have sweaty palms, fidget, and avoid eye contact. Instead, look for a person suddenly becoming more static and cutting down on their gestures. Also, learn to listen. Be on guard for a sudden decrease in detail, an increase in pauses and hesitations, and an avoidance of the words “me,” “mine,” and “I” but an increase in “her” and “him.” If someone suddenly becomes very evasive, press for a straight answer.
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To spot possible shifts, try to establish what researchers have referred to as an “honest baseline.” Before asking questions that are likely to elicit deceptive answers, start with those that are far more likely to make the person respond in an honest way. During these initial answers, develop an understanding of how they behave when they are telling the truth by looking at their body language and listening to the words they say. Then, during the answers to the trickier questions, watch for the behavioral shifts outlined above.

Also, remember that even if you do see these signals, they are not an absolute guarantee of a lie. Unlike taxes and death, nothing is that certain when it comes to lying. Instead, such clues are simply an indication that all is perhaps not as it should be—a good reason to dig deeper.

E-mail Me

Communication expert Jeff Hancock and his colleagues at Cornell University asked students to spend a week making notes of all of their significant face-to-face conversations, telephone chats, texts, and e-mails, and then work through the list, indicating which ones
contained lies.
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The results revealed that people lied in 14 percent of e-mails, 21 percent of texts, 27 percent of face-to-face conversations, and 37 percent of telephone calls. According to Hancock, people are reluctant to lie in e-mails because their words are recorded and what they say can come back to haunt them. So if you want to minimize the risk of a lie, ask others to e-mail you.

   
DECIDING HOW LONG SOMETHING WILL TAKE

In an insightful study of time management, Roger Buehler at Wilfrid Laurier University asked students to indicate when they expected to finish an important term paper.
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The students believed that they would hand in their work, on average, ten days before the deadline. They were, however, being far too optimistic; in reality, they tended to finish the papers just one day before the deadline. This effect, known as the “planning fallacy,” is not limited to students trying to finish their term papers on time. Research shows that people have a strong tendency to underestimate how long a project will take and that people working in groups are especially likely to have unrealistic expectations.
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Even when they are trying to be realistic, people tend to imagine that everything will go according to plan, and they do not consider the inevitable unexpected delays and unforeseen problems.

However, Buehler’s work has also suggested a quick and effective way of overcoming the problem. When his students were told to think about when they had managed to finish similar tasks in the past, their answers for meeting future deadlines proved much more accurate. It seems that to get an accurate estimate of the time needed to complete a project, you can look at how long it took to finish broadly similar projects in the past.