Expert Says a Politician’s Fib Isn’t Always a Lie--Honest!

So, after 18 months, the time to vote is upon us. Your interest is quickening, you’ve watched the candidates during this long trial and you probably have a favorite. But you still think they’re lying to you, eh?

Maybe it was Bill Clinton on the draft? George Bush on raising taxes? Ross Perot on the charge of GOP dirty tricks?

Don’t be so sure.

But if you’re right and they have deceived you, then the lie should be the foremost measure in this whole fitful matter of character, yes? Maybe not.

It seems plain enough to everybody--and certainly to me after talking with dozens of voters about it--that these are suspicious days in politics. In 1992 Americans don’t see it as Mark Twain did, that truth is such a precious commodity that it should be conserved.

As usual, my sample of interviews is too small and anything but random, and thus rashly non-scientific. But how can you argue with 90%-plus? Which is about the share of people I met along the way who figured they have been lied to by at least one of the men who would be President.

So I have come here to San Francisco, to the walk-up residential house that is the laboratory of Paul Ekman, who has made a life’s study of lying, liars and how to catch them.

He’s a professor of psychology at the UC-San Francisco School of Medicine, and director of what is listed on his letterhead as The Human Interaction Laboratory. He also wrote the book, “Telling Lies.”

Here is what he says: “You don’t have a chance at detecting deceit from the demeanor of these guys.”

That is, if you’re a person of ordinary abilities. According to Ekman, most of us believe we’re clever at sniffing out baloney. But only a rare few of us are.

Ekman has produced a videotape of people as they talk about their political beliefs, their private lives, crime and so forth. Some are telling the truth and some not. He has shown the tape to 2,000 people, regular folks as well as judges in four states, agents of the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service and various police officers, lawyers and psychiatrists. Pretty much all of the viewers thought they were well-endowed lie catchers.

“All of them, except for the Secret Service, turned out to have no better than chance odds at telling if someone was lying,” he said. “That is, they were just as likely to get it backward.”

Two-thirds of the agents of the Secret Service, curiously, are superior at detecting liars.

For the rest of us, Ekman continues, “It is a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good in this treacherous, ambiguous world we live in that we can tell when someone is misleading us. In point of fact, most of us can’t. Even those of us who make our living at it. . . . I estimate that 80% to 90% of us cannot tell whether we are being deceived.”

The problem is compounded when you go from the regular folk who are the subjects of Ekman’s videotape to precision performers, like candidates for national office. These guys have spent years drilling their skills in bluffing, slanting, coloring--or at least they better have.

Imagine a President without the ability to lie. Jimmy Carter looked into the eye of the camera and promised point-blank he would not lie. Which of course was itself a deceit because he ended up lying about preparation for a military rescue attempt of American Embassy hostages in Iran.

“We want our guy to be a good liar,” Ekman says, then cringes at the thought of the crank mail such an observation will bring.

But suppose, for instance, our President personally dislikes the leader of a friendly, competitive nation. How could the United States negotiate favorable trade and cultural agreements and the like if “the President’s face is an open book?”

But, of course, our Republic rests more or less firmly on the agreement between the government and the governed that we will get information truthfully most of the time, and particularly when we need it.

Having said that, Ekman believes none of the three major candidates for President is a bald-faced liar. To paraphrase his reasoning:

Clinton, like most of us, doesn’t remember the parts of his life he is least proud of. He has engaged over the years in retrospective reconstruction, the sign of a healthy mind, someone who maintains a good self-concept. People who remember and dwell on unpleasant parts of their past are not so healthy.

Bush should be judged a liar on taxes only if he intended to break his read-my-lips pledge. Odds are that he did not; it was a promise he believed he could keep. Promises sometimes express hope.

Ekman says Perot is the most difficult case. His story of doctored photos, wedding threats and bugging conspiracies may not be true or believable, but he no doubt believes it. Just like the convert who says Judgment Day is coming next week, he may not be telling the truth, but he is not telling a lie either. He is expressing a belief.

Ekman says, in fact, that lying isn’t foremost in judging character.

“On this issue of character, we need a character who is a good bargainer, who has compassion, who holds the ability to inspire and can withstand the stress of office. Those are important measures of character. The issue of being a deliberate liar is the least relevant. First, we’re unlikely to need to know if we’re being lied to. And second, it’s unlikely we will be able to tell, at least until later, when someone comes forth to explain what really happened.”

But suppose you’re stubborn and you want the truth. Tantalizingly, Ekman says that over the years he has found people with the nearly unfailing ability to spot a lie.

“I can identify 50 people in the U.S. who are flawless lie catchers. Would you like to have the TV networks each have one as a commentator each night? Would we be better off? Would our democracy be better off? I’ll leave you with that question. But I don’t think so.”