There are other exploitable neurological loopholes as well—for example, there’s the mirroring effect. Mirroring is when specialized cells in your brain called “mirror neurons” cause you to imitate the gesture, posture, or subtle movements of whomever you’re interacting with. Someone smiles, you s...

Your visual cortex—the part of the brain that processes electrical signals from the retina and turns them into images in your mind—functions with a 0.1-second delay. So you can’t believe your eyes, because while your eyes may work, your brain is processing everything your eyes pick up about one-t...

Jefferson Randolph Smith was a con man who set up the first telegraph office out of Skagway, Alaska. For the price of five dollars, settlers, frontiersmen, and prospectors could send a telegraph message to anyone in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there were lines around the building every day...

People lined up and paid for over a year to send important messages that went as far as the wall of Smith’s office. So why were people so ready to believe that Smith could send out telegrams just because he said so?

In the absence of evidence, humans tend to believe that whatever we’re presented with is true—be it someone’s name, a random fact, a complex explanation, even something as obvious as the presence of a physical object we see Neurologists refer to this tendency as the “honesty bias,” and it’s how w...

It’s also the single adaptation that has allowed humans to develop speech, literacy, history, science, and civilization itself. You don’t have to discover, confirm, or even understand every fact or idea you learn, because you are biased to just accept them as true and keep climbing. This is the m...

So in the long run, we benefit more from the honesty bias than we risk in being overly trusting. Our honesty bias may be exploitable, but it’s also indispensable.

As Rutgers Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences Robert Trivers put it, “Our most prized possession, language, not only strengthens our ability to lie, but greatly extends its range.” Consider that when you lie with your scent, your pattern, or your petals, you can only lie about what...

Your brain also doesn’t have the bandwidth to process everything you see, so it fills in most of what’s around you with what it expects to be around you. It’s only when something changes radically that your brain notices, and loops back around to see what’s going on.

In 1898, four Denver reporters from different newspapers went to a bar, got really drunk, and made up a story. They all claimed in their separate papers to have met a team of four American engineers on their way to China. The engineers, they said, told them that they’d been hired to destroy the G...

The point of this story is not that a single fake news story may have radically altered the course of 20th-century Chinese history—though it did—it’s that the Boxer Rebellion occurred just as it would have had the news been real. The cause may have been fictitious, but it had the same effect as i...

We all lie, all the time—including you. Human deception is no different from its animal equivalent of camouflage, spots, and stripes. Charm is our very own version of frilly fins and peacock feathers. Like a stick insect adapted to hide among twigs, the effort to deceive, from camouflage to creat...

It was a multi-person hoax, and unfortunately, other newspapers picked up the story, and it went viral. Within weeks, a major east coast newspaper did an entire special Sunday spread about the fake destruction of the Great Wall, including elaborate illustrations and further exposition about the C...

Seeing may be believing, but it really shouldn’t be. Your brain doesn’t actually have the processing power to deal with all of the sensory data available at every second—so, like all gamblers, it cheats. As a result, we often end up seeing what we expect to see.

Take shell games; everybody ...

5 key insights from the new book, The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

Because this was a respected newspaper, the story quickly spread to Europe, then to Asia, and finally to China, where political tempers were already running high. In fact, this fiction allegedly contributed to the Boxer Rebellion, a destabilizing and violent disaster that hastened the decline of ...

Why we lie and how we believe are so inextricably intertwined that there can be no faith without fraud, no truth without lies, no civilization without cons. Whether they’re the lies we tell each other, or the subtler and more complicated lies we tell ourselves, deceit and belief are two halves of...

Trickery is fundamental to interaction, and the instinct to misrepresent objective reality to suit our needs is fundamental to communication. In the evolution of deceit, language only came about quite recently, billions of years after more basic and more effective tools of the con. In fact, human...

Reality, in other words, is circumstantial. In the greater scheme of things, it matters less whether or not a thing is actually true, but rather whether or not it is believed to be so.