You can get better at lying with more practice, a recent study suggests.

Researchers found that with a little training, people can learn to tell a lie more automatically and efficiently. It gets easier for folks to repeat the lies and becomes harder for them to differentiate deception from telling the truth.

The idea that lying becomes easier with more practice comes on the heels of news from the sports world of two high-profile athletes publicly admitting their tall tales. It's something cyclist Lance Armstrong and Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o may have both discovered while repeating their own lies about not using performance enhancing drugs or the "death" of Te'o's fake online girlfriend even after learning he was the victim of a hoax.

In this small study, published in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science, scientists looked at whether lying can be trained to become more automatic and a less demanding task for the brain. The research involved 48 college students from China who were assigned to either an instruction group, a training group, or a control group.

After all groups completed a task for the first time, the instruction group was told to speed up their deceptive responses and make fewer errors during their second attempt. The training group was also told to speed up their deceptive responses and make fewer errors, but they also received more practice and were given more time to prepare their lies. The control group simply repeated the task for a second time.

Researchers noticed that the reaction time needed to tell lies was reduced in both the training and instruction groups. But the results also revealed that only the training group, who had the most practice telling lies, no longer took more time to be dishonest compared with telling the truth.

"We were surprised to find that lying is more malleable than previously thought," said study author Xiaoqing Hu, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Simply asking the participants to speed up and make fewer errors when telling a lie enabled the participants to do so, he explained. "In other words, a strong motivation makes people a better liar."

Exactly how does lying become easier and more automatic with practice?

As Hu explained it, lying is usually accompanied by conflicting thoughts because people are mostly honest and genuine during social interactions.

But what he believed happened during his study is that as participants repeatedly practiced retrieving a dishonest response from their minds, the original conflicts and barriers to lying were reduced, and people became better at stretching the truth.

Previous research had claimed that lying is more cognitively demanding than being honest and lying cannot be made easier. The thinking was that constructing lies and keeping them straight in someone's head required more mental work, so people typically took a little longer to give false responses compared with giving honest answers, and they made more mistakes when fibbing.

Yet Hu's study results indicate that this may not necessarily be the case. He said that lying can be more multifaceted, and repeating a lie makes it more fluent or easier.

"People can also become good at deceiving themselves, which is similar to a repeated lie," Hu pointed out.

Although Hu admits he did not follow the Armstrong or Te'o news closely, his research findings seem to suggest that once you repeat lies often enough -- and especially when you have a good reason to do so, such as to maintain a positive self-image or to avoid punishment -- you may no longer feel that you are lying.

"Once people feel their lying is justified, they may no longer experience the moral or mental conflict," Hu said.

Related:

Could you go 10 weeks without lying?

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In the the story of Walt Disney's “Pinocchio,” the boy puppet's lies are revealed whenever his wooden nose grows. Since then, a “growing nose” has been synonymous with being caught in a fib. It turns out that this idea isn’t too far from the truth.

Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain found that when people lie, their noses and orbital muscles become hot, a condition they call the Pinnochio effect.

Emilio Gómez Milán and Elvira Salazar López have been using thermographic cameras to record people as they discuss subjective experiences, when they perform different dances, and when they become sexually aroused (no surprise that sexual excitement causes additional heat to emanate form the genitals and chest, a little less so for women than men). Thermography detects body temperature; it's the technology that allows night vision to work.

“Our main objective was to look for somatic markers of quale -- feelings, emotions, and subjective experience that cannot be easily verbally explained but only experienced, like love or religious experience or beauty. Is it possible to differentiate [between] a person who every Sunday [says] the Lord’s prayer but in fact is a nonbeliever?” Gómez, an assistant professor of psychology, writes via email.

The researchers asked subjects about subjective experiences—such as whether a piece of art was beautiful or whether they believe in God—while in an fMRI or in front of the tomographic cameras. This allowed Gómez to see what occurred in the brain and what happened to facial temperature when a person described quale. He then compared the data from two imaging machines to see if there was any overlap in brain activity and facial temperature. Other researchers have found that fMRI effectively shows when someone is being less than truthful, such as when a person admits to liking a painting but really does not believe it.

When people fibbed, the temperature in the muscles around the nose and the eyes, heated up while other areas of the face cooled. This corresponds with action in the insular cortex, nestled deep within the cerebral cortex, which controls emotions, our subjective sense of our inner blood, blood pressure during exercise, and perception of pain. Stronger negative or conflicted feelings increase activity in the insular cortex, leading to more heat emanating from the nose and orbital muscles.

Gómez believes that temperature in these regions increase because the activity in the insular cortex prompts a physiological change.

“These two changes (insula activation and temperature changes) are the two sides of the same coin,” he says. Because the insula aids in the regulation of body temperature, it comes as little surprise that body temperature increases during emotional experiences.

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We tell one lie, sometimes two, every day, sharing an average of 11 untruths per week. We tell lies to avoid hurt feelings, or we embellish to make a story more interesting. 

But whether it’s a white or boldface lie, all these fibs harm our health. Researchers discovered that people who lie less experience better physical and mental health than those who commonly bluff.

“If I could establish a link between better health and lying, maybe people wouldn’t [lie so much],” says Anita Kelly, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

As an expert in secrecy, Kelly had known that people frequently lie and also value honesty in others. Fascinated by this paradox, she wondered if people could stop lying and how it would impact their health and relationships.

Kelly divided 110 participants, ages 18 to 71, into two groups: a control group, who could go about their lying lives as usual, and a “no lie” group, who were instructed to refrain from all lies, whoppers and white alike, for 10 weeks. Once a week over the 10 weeks, subjects answered questions about their health, sometimes while connected to a polygraph machine. Both groups knew they would be answering questions about the number of white and major lies they told but the no lie group were also instructed not to fib (and they even signed a contract stating they wouldn’t).  Being hooked up to a polygraph machine meant the no lie group couldn’t lie about the times they'd, well, lied; if they did lie during the week, they had to admit it (telling no lies has a learning curve; despite best intentions, the no lie group still fibbed). 

“The irony is that now that we have more outlets for disclosure [such as Facebook], it forces us to lie more because now people ask really bold questions,” she says.

When people refrained from sharing white lies, weekly they experienced three fewer physical ailments such as sore throats or headaches. And, their minds were at ease -- avoiding little fibs led to four fewer reports of mental anguish, such as depression and anxiety.  

Giving up a bluffing habit wasn’t easy. The non-liars had to consciously think about what they were saying. When they first tried 24/7 honesty, they still told a few lies a week, but not as many as the control group.  

“Depending on the participants, some found it very easy to drop to zero [lies]; some did drop to zero. It still was, on average, one lie in the non-lie group,” she explains.

In her daily life, Kelly tells as few tall tales as possible. She once discovered a dead chipmunk prior to a meeting and she struggled to dispose of it, making her tardy. Because she’s known for her honesty, no one doubted her.

Kelly stresses that not lying doesn’t mean sharing harsh truths -- it means telling kind truths or not revealing some information. A kind truth might sound like “I loved how that other dress looked on you,” instead of “you look terrible in this dress.” Participants in the no lie group also avoided exaggerations by changing the subject or not answering questions, politely, of course.

In addition to reporting less anxiety and depression and improved physical health, the no lie group felt happier in their relationships.

“Good relationships have long been connected to good health,” says Kelly. “The bottom line is this is really about the relationships … being caught in these lies is anxiety [producing] because we don’t want to ruin the relationships.”

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It's not that he's untrustworthy, it's just that he's thinking.

Whenever I’ve watched video of myself on TV, I think I look shifty-eyed. I’m asked a question and my eyes dart away from the camera into which I’ve been told to look. At the time, I don’t know I’m doing it, but I am.

Psychology professor Howard Ehrlichman of Queens College, City University of New York, has been studying eye movement since the 1970s. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, he reviewed some of his work, including recent findings, and argued there’s robust evidence that I’m not being shifty-eyed at all. I’m just thinking. More specifically, I'm accessing long-term memory.

“There’s no way to prove this is universal,” Ehrlichman says. “But I can say that you can see it just by looking at people on TV, and in interviews. I am convinced it is universal.”

Ehrlichman is referring to saccades, rapid eye movements that disengage the focus of one’s vision, often moving down and away from, say, the eyes of a person to whom you are talking. Or a TV camera.

Over the years, there have been a number of seemingly logical explanations for the darting eye phenomenon. Humans place great importance on the eyes of others -- it’s part of how we determine friend from foe or intuit what others are thinking. Because this requires brain power and focus, many believe we have to disengage in order to direct our thoughts elsewhere. Another theory suggests that the direction of eye movement is related to the hemisphere of the brain we're accessing. That idea even showed up as a plot point in an episode of “The Mentalist.”

Sadly, Ehrlichman, says, “people in law enforcement do believe that,” and think they can tell if somebody is telling the truth or not. But during his work for his Ph.D. dissertation he found little evidence to support the idea.

In fact, Ehrlichman’s research shows that these eye movements have nothing at all to do with vision or hemispheres. He speculates the intermittent eye movements are an evolutionary holdover.

Most animals are what Ehrlichman calls “sensory/motor machines.” They are constantly scanning and reacting to the environment, looking for food, say, or trying to avoid danger. When they find what they are looking for, they fixate on it.

Our brain’s long-term memory is like an internalized landscape. We don’t need our eyes to scan it, but “our eyes go along for the ride,” Ehrlichman says, even if we’re not looking for anything visual.

Ehrlichman and his colleagues proved the saccades are unrelated to actual vision by putting people in dark rooms, alone. “We see this effect even if they have closed eyes and they have nothing to disengage from,” he says. “The pattern is the same as when people are sitting with their eyes open.”

In one experiment, subjects were asked to name things according to visual properties, like “green” or “triangular” versus naming words meaning the same as “pleasant.” The visually-related items like “green” evoked no eye movement. But when subjects searched their brain data banks for words matching pleasant, the saccades were obvious.

Similarly, when subjects were asked to visualize their living room and describe it, which you’d think would lead to lots of eye movement as they mentally scanned the room, there was virtually no saccade activity.

“We think once they retrieve the image, they can move through it without searching long-term memory,” Ehrlichman explains.

On the other hand, when an answer to a question is right in front of us, say if we’ve just rehearsed a Q and A, we don’t need to scan our internal memory landscape. We can pop out an answer to a question and maintain our focus.

So rather then being shifty, eye movements could actually mean somebody -- including yours truly -- is simply being thoughtful. 

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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We know our faces may give away our fibs -- whether it's shifty eyes, a sweaty upper lip, a slight smirk, or Pinocchio's fictitious lengthening nose.

Now a new study reveals that muscles in the upper face may divulge when people are not telling the truth. Researchers found four different facial muscles that a trained eye can use to separate genuine expressions of emotion from deceptive ones.

"Facial cues are an important, but often ignored, aspect of credibiity assessments where an emotional issue is in question," says study author Dr. Leanne ten Brinke.

"Cues to emotional deception are likely to occur when the underlying emotion a liar is attempting to mask is relatively strong," suggests ten Brinke of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan.

For the study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, researchers watched the videotaped facial actions of 52 people who made televised pleas for the safe return of a missing relative. As it turns out, half of the pleas were from deceptive individuals who were later convicted of murdering their loved one.

Coders analyzed more than 23,000 frames of video from real-life cases in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. They compared the facial actions of 26 genuine pleaders to those of 26 liars.

By looking closely, researchers found some facial muscles "leak" signs of our true feelings during these intensely emotional and pressurized pleas to the public.

Genuine pleaders showed more contraction of two facial muscles related to grief and sadness: corrugator supercilii, one of the three muscles of the eyelid that helps wrinkle the forehead, and depressor anguli oris, a mouth muscle that is associated with frowning. In liars, they detected subtle contractions of the zygomatic major, a facial muscle linked with masking a smile, and full contraction of the frontalis muscle suggestive of a failed attempt to seem sad.

"What was surprising was just how strong these facial failures were able to predict which pleaders were the deceptive murderers compared to the genuinely distressed relatives," points out ten Brinke. She says muscles in the upper face "leak" signs of true emotion because they are under less of our conscious and voluntary control.

Can you use these facial muscles to tell when your teenager or a cheating spouse is lying to you? Some clues may be revealed by asking emotional questions and looking for seemingly out of place emotional expressions particularly in the upper face, suggests ten Brinke.

But it's not a silver bullet.

"Facial analysis does not provide us with a Pinocchio's nose," admits ten Brinke. "Not everyone will leak their true emotions, and some people are better than others at adopting a false face -- like psychopaths," she adds.

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• How to spot a fake smile: It's all in the eyes
• Pants on fire: Scientifically proven ways to catch a liar

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By Markham Heid
Men's Health

A little snap judgment goes a long way toward making friends: According to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, all it takes is 20 seconds to decide whether or not a stranger is trustworthy.

Researchers recruited 24 couples and asked each person to talk about a time when he or she had suffered. Meanwhile, cameras recorded the reactions of the speaker’s partner. A separate group reviewed the videos, and was able to identify fake compassion in the reacting partners within 20 seconds.

How to Earn Her Trust

After researchers took DNA samples of the study participants, it turned out that 60 percent of the least-trusted participants lacked a gene receptor, GG genotype, that may control your compassion and empathy. The receptor helps regulate your body’s level of oxytocin, which past studies have linked to feelings of trust, empathy, and generosity, explains Alexsandr Kogan, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author.

Of those rated most trustworthy, 90 percent carried the gene. But since the gene is only linked to perceptions of sincerity, it doesn’t mean you’re unsympathetic if you don’t have it, the study authors say. Observers could weed out the sincere from the dishonest because, Kogan says, “there are certain behaviors that are found to be signals of trust and support.

Whether you’re dealing with a salesman, a new colleague, or a blind date, you can identify bogus behavior if you know what to look for, says Marc Salem, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist and the Men’s Health resident expert on non-verbal behavior. Look out for these signs:

1. Inconsistent behavior
“If normally someone is very still, and suddenly they become very animated, or vice versa, that change-up is a red flag,” Salem says. The same goes if a person is speaking smoothly and rapidly, but suddenly their speech becomes more deliberate or clipped. “Shifts from the norm are red flags for deceit,” he adds.

2. A steady gaze
“When people think or contemplate, it’s natural for them to break eye contact and look around,” Salem explains. If a person’s gaze is too constant, they’re either not listening or consciously trying to earn your trust. Both are signs of insincerity.

3. Not enough mouth
Coughing, clearing the throat frequently, or any other gesture of covering the mouth can indicate that a person is trying to hide something, Salem says. The same goes for a shoulders-down, hunched-body pose. That’s a sign of caution, he adds, and indicates a person is not opening himself up completely.

4. A quick smile
A genuine smile changes a person’s whole face, Salem says. Their eyes light up, and their cheeks and eyebrows rise along with the corners of their mouth. That smile also takes a few seconds to fade. A fake smile appears in an instant, and disappears just as quickly.

How to Spot a Liar

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How to Detect a Liar

How to Spot a Lying Politician

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Wondering if that fabulous man you've been chatting with online is really a mountain-climbing astronaut fluent in six languages, including Latin?

According to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, chances are he's simply one of the many people who can't help stretching the truth when they hit the keyboard.

"I wouldn't say that human beings are a big pack of liars," says Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "But I would say that it's very easy to lie."

This is especially true when we go online, according to Feldman's research.

In a new paper entitled "Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire:  How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior," Feldman found that the closer people are to each other, the more difficult it is to lie to each other. And the further apart we are, the more the lies fly.

In his most recent study, Feldman (who's studied deception for about 30 years) put together 110 same-sex pairs of University of Massachusetts students, asking them to "get to know each other" for approximately 15 minutes. One group of students talked face-to-face, another chatted via IM and the last emailed back and forth. Then Feldman asked the students to go over a transcript (or recording) of the conversation and identity each time an untruth -- even a white lie -- was told.

"At first, almost everybody said there are no cases where [they weren't] being truthful," he says. "So we said, humor us. Eventually, what happened was that 70 percent of the people found something they said was not accurate. It was a lie. And the rate of lying was about three times greater for email than it was for face-to-face conversation."

Why is it so much easier to lie via email (or even IM) than it is to fib face-to- face?

"It's easier to lie online primarily because the psychological distance between the two people communicating is greater," he says. "When you're face-to-face, you see the person, you see their reactions to what you're saying, you know they can see you. But when you're online, you're talking to a disembodied person. You don't see their reactions to what you're saying and I think it gives you a kind of freedom to be more deceptive."

Feldman says that in his study, most of the falsehoods were of the "little white lie" category, like agreeing with someone that you liked a movie that you didn't really like. But other lies were more ambitious.

"Some would say they'd been to a certain place they'd never been or say they were a captain of their high school track team and they weren't," he says. "The lies varied in terms of how profound they really were. Some were small lies, but others were total whoppers."

Rebecca Price, a 34-year-old development officer from Seattle, admits she practiced some heavy duty online deception back in her college days.

"When AOL chat rooms were popular, I used modeling shots of Meg Ryan as my profile picture," she says. "And not one of [the guys I wrote to] ever noticed. All that mattered was that the girl in the picture was hot. I also used tell them that I was a retired model. Or sometimes I would tell them I was a single mom working at the local Dairy Queen or Whataburger. This was my favorite story."

Feldman says that lying not only comes easily to human beings, we almost come to expect -- and want it.

"We don't necessarily want to hear the truth," he says. "A lot of the time, there's almost a kind of conspiracy between people. If someone says you did a terrific job on a presentation, you don't want to question them. You totally accept it. You might have suspicions that it wasn't such a great presentation, but why delve into that?"

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