He Said/She Said Dispute: Truth Eludes Even Experts

Who lied?

Experts say we may never know where the truth lies between Judge Clarence Thomas and Prof. Anita Hill. The clues we rely on are fallible, and even professionals do little better than flipping a coin in catching liars in the act.

What’s more, the question may not be that simple. Maybe no one lied and no one told the truth, psychologists say. Maybe it was a mix--say, one exaggerated, one minimized. Or something else happened between them, quite different than what either has described.

Either way, psychologists say the behavior of the Supreme Court nominee and his accuser was entirely human. If they lied or distorted, they did so because the stakes were high. Put in a similar spot, experts say many Americans would have done the same.

“Do you have to be psychotic, crazy, delusional?” asked Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at UC San Francisco Medical School and the author of two books on lying. “No. You just have to be normal.”

In a series of interviews, academics specializing in deception said they were as baffled as anyone over what really happened between Thomas and Hill, but the experts offered several competing explanations for the discrepancies in the conflicting accounts:

* One or the other was lying but no longer knew they were doing so; they had come to believe their lie--perhaps through simple force of repetition or because the lie enabled them to view themselves in a favorable light.

* Both were lying, or shading the truth. Something had happened between them--in Ekman’s words, “not as much as she now claims and a lot more than he admits.” It may have been impossible, in a televised hearing, to address honestly what went on.

* One was deliberately deceiving the U.S. Senate and the public and knew it. If it was Thomas, psychologists say, he reacted as many people would with so much at stake--meeting an accusation with a flat-out denial, knowing that anything short of that would not work.

“If he at one point even explained a little bit, it would all fall apart,” said David C. Raskin, a University of Utah professor of psychology. “Any intelligent person knows, if you’re going to lie about a thing like that, you’d better stick to the simple story.”

Most outsiders are ill-equipped to detect lying, psychologists say. They put their trust in visual clues. They look for shifty eyes and sweaty brows when, according to Ekman, “the simple fact is that most people can’t tell from a person’s demeanor.”

Furthermore, people become better liars with time. A spouse lies more effectively about the fifth extramarital affair than the first. And the more distant in time the events in question, the more difficult it is to detect a distortion.

“The best opportunity to tell a lie from a person’s behavior is the first time they tell that lie,” Ekman said.

The more telling evidence of deception is what people say, contends Raskin, who is developing a systematic approach to assessing statements and doing interviews in sex-abuse cases. In examining the content of statements, Raskin looks for a handful of indicators.

The first is consistency: A person telling the truth tells the same facts again and again, though every fact may not be included every time. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee characterized Hill’s adding of details in her testimony as a revealing inconsistency, but Raskin said: “Memory is a complex mosaic and we don’t always access each piece of information each time we search our memories.”

The second indicator, for Raskin, is good detail.

“A person who is fabricating something tends to talk in generalities and, when pressed for details, doesn’t have them,” he said. “ . . . The unusual detail is the kind of thing that reinforces (the truth). Because people tend not to be able to invent things like that.”

Thirdly, Raskin looks for “contextual embedding”--a convincing sense of the context in which alleged events occurred.

Finally, Raskin looks for signs of motivation: “When people are fabricating to cause a problem for someone else, it is very common for them to show these negative attitudes towards the person and to ‘pile it on.’ ”

Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at the University of Washington in Seattle, contended that neither Thomas nor Hill may necessarily be lying. Instead, one or both may be suffering from a phenomenon called false memory.

Loftus, whose book on the role of false memory in the conviction of innocent people was published this year, said she has done hundreds of experiments in which she has “injected” information into people’s minds and got them to believe that things happened that did not.

False memory usually results from “suggestive and leading questions” from police, investigators and others, she said. Through that process, people have come to believe “that red lights were green, people with straight hair had curly hair” and other falsehoods.

In Hill’s case, Loftus suggested, her recollection of her encounters with Thomas could have been enhanced or distorted over time and in recent interviews. “I see a mechanism that could explain how someone could have a recollection of Coke cans with pubic hair, and Long Dong Silver, when in fact it didn’t happen that way,” Loftus said.

In Thomas’ case, his memory could have become distorted to allow him to see himself in a positive light.

“We have memories that make us look better to ourselves--that we gave more to charity, our vacations were happier, our kids walked and talked earlier,” she said. “ . . . So, is Thomas minimizing, denying, revising his past to make himself feel better?”

Ekman described a similar process: People can initiate a lie, tell it repeatedly and come to believe it. He said that is particularly true “when emotions are so involved” and when the stakes are high.

“Look, people have an extraordinary ability to kid themselves,” said Dr. Laurence Loeb, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Cornell University College of Medicine. “ . . . Have you not had the experience of telling a story so often that you began to wonder whether it was true?”

Many of the psychologists interviewed said there is nothing terribly unusual in the behavior of either Thomas or Hill if they were distorting. They said such distortions are not uncommon and their behavior under the circumstances might be expected.

“I have no doubt that both of them are being exceedingly--in the conscious domain--honest,” said David L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University. “And both of them are distorting.

“I think something is going on there with both of them, and neither of them is telling,” he also said. “I think there is a relationship that has to be accounted for and that neither has accounted for it.”

The forum itself--a televised Senate hearing, under withering national scrutiny--encouraged distortion, some said.

“If you were a candidate for the Supreme Court, do you think being on national TV would be the place where you would come perfectly clean?” Rosenhan asked. Similarly, would Anita Hill choose that setting to “soften, deepen, rethink” her memory of whatever happened?

“All of us would distort under those conditions,” Rosenhan contended. “ . . . They are both behaving in a very human way under these conditions. They have a terrific amount at stake and they’re not going to endanger that stake.”