"Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm Sicilian. My father was the world heavy-weight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guys got seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen… but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell. Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin', but you're tellin me everything. I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won't walk away from." Vincenzo Ciccotti

 

So begins one of the more memorable exchanges in modern cinema, as gang boss Vincenzo Ciccotti, played by Christopher Walken, tries to get Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper) to reveal the whereabouts of his son.  You can see the scene here on YouTube if you want.

Now Sicilians may be great at spotting a liar, but the rest of us kinda suck.  A study in 2006 suggests that we're generally no better at spotting a liar than we would be by guessing.

A study published recently looks at just why that is.  They found that we are generally pretty good at spotting the tells that someone is lying to us, including things like:

• Vocal immediacy, i.e. the extent to which someone replies directly to questions. The vaguer someone is, the more likely they are to be lying.
• Indifference: if the speaker seems unconcerned then this is associated with lying. It's probably because they're trying to play it cool.
• Thinking hard: lying is hard work so when a person has to think hard about a question, it might indicate they are lying.
• Being uncooperative: pretty obvious, but still being uncooperative is often a cue that someone is trying to conceal something.

Yet we still suck at detecting a fibber.  The research suggests that whilst we're good at spotting tells, we often overhype their importance and fail to account for other reasons why the person could be doing those things.  For instance if I'm tired or hungry then I'm generally not the most co-operative person in the world, but that doesn't mean I'm lying, or I might be indifferent because I simply couldn't care less.

Reading other peoples thoughts is incredibly tough, and anyone that tries to suggest otherwise is probably a liar.