Research suggests that most people cannot tell from demeanor whether someone is lying or telling the truth.
Such poor performance is not because lies are told flawlessly. Most liars make mistakes, which could be detected, but usually are missed.
Both perpetuating a lie and detecting a lie, in most people, seem to be poorly developed skills. I offer six explanations for why most of us do not catch liars from demeanor.My first explanation of why we may be such poor lie catchers is that we are not prepared by our evolutionary history to be either very good lie catchers or lie perpetrators.
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