The science of lying: Why the truth really can hurt"This is what makes it so easy for people to be successful in their lies," says Robert Feldman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. "Some people are good liars and some are bad, but they all use different signals. Unless you have known them for a long time, it's very difficult to tell if they are lying." Feldman has spent some 25 years studying the science of deception. A fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, he has authored Liar: The Truth About Lying. In it, he argues that we all lie a lot of the time. He introduces a number of psychological principles to explain this, the most important of which is 'Liar's Advantage', a tactical leg-up made possible partly by the difficulty of lie detection and partly by our own inherent gullibility.
"We don't expect to be lied to," he explains. "And often, people are telling us what we want to hear: that we are doing a good job, or that we've been successful. The liar is trying to lie successfully and we want to believe them, so we do. There are no obstacles."
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