JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, podcast listeners. Before we begin this episode I want to let you know that this story, one of the stories in this episode includes conversation about sexual assault and suicide. Just to warn you.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

GORDON BURGHARDT: Some people like roses and others tulips. I've always liked snakes.

[snake rattles]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And our show today is about deception. And we thought, where better to start than with snakes?

ROBERT: Snakes.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Oh.

JAD: This is where you keep all your snakes?

GORDON BURGHARDT: Well, we keep some of them here. We have a variety of some of the lizards we're working with.

JAD: This is Gordon Burghardt. He works at the University of Tennessee. I paid him a visit recently.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And I have several rooms here where we keep a variety of different reptiles, turtles ...

JAD: And he's got this one little snake that he likes to show off—small guy, about the size of a pencil.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Called a hognose snake.

GORDON BURGHARDT: These are the hognose snakes. You can see this guy's already starting to go into the display.

JAD: And Gordon pops the top off the cage and then does something interesting.

GORDON BURGHARDT: What I'll do is take a ...

JAD: He puts a chicken puppet ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: ... sort of a puppet of a chicken ...

JAD: ... on his left hand.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Right.

JAD: And then with this puppet, he begins to kind of attack the snake or mock attack.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Simulate ...

JAD: Like, peck near it.

GORDON BURGHARDT: ... a bird that might be attacking it.

JAD: What happens next is kind of shocking.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And you can see now how it's hiding its head a little bit. It's coiling its tail.

JAD: First, the snake flips over on its back.

JAD: Oh, there he goes.

GORDON BURGHARDT: There he goes upside down.

JAD: And then it vomits blood.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Blood will even come out of the mouth.

JAD: Then it poos itself.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And now if you notice, he has started to defecate a little bit. It's writhing.

JAD: And then it gets really, really ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: And it'll finally stop.

JAD: ... still.

GORDON BURGHARDT: In fact, it'll stop breathing. And it's all a bluff, all a show.

JAD: Wow.

JAD: I was like, wait. That is—that is no bluff.

JAD: Can I touch him?

GORDON BURGHARDT: Sure.

JAD: But as soon as we took a few steps back from the cage, the snake pops its head up, goes fwoop, unflattens itself ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: And if you come close ...

JAD: ... and there it was alive again.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Yeah. And then it'll start to breathe and gaze around.

JAD: It was lying, basically.

ROBERT: That's pretty good.

JAD: Thank you very much.

ROBERT: Although, you know, as the world turns, it was kind of an ordinary lie, really.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: It was. Sure.

JAD: When was the last time you pooed yourself for a lie?

ROBERT: Well, I could lie to you so beautifully, you would be on your back, tongue out.

JAD: No way, 'cause I would catch you.

ROBERT: And that—no, you wouldn't catch me.

JAD: Yeah, I would.

ROBERT: No, you would not.

JAD: I would totally catch you.

ROBERT: I'm so sorry to tell you this. that's not happening.

JAD: [singing] I would catch you.

ROBERT: No. If it were me, no, you wouldn't. So that's our hour, people who lie ...

JAD: And the people who catch them.

ROBERT: Not.

JAD: To get things started in earnest, let us go to every New Yorker's favorite spot.

ELLEN HORNE: I love that we're at the airport. [laughs]

JAD: John F. Kennedy Airport, of course. Just a little place I like to go to get away from it all. I ended up there with our producer Ellen Horne. We hadn't actually meant to come, but the guy that we had been interviewing ...

PAUL EKMAN: In order for a lie to be betrayed by demeanor ...

JAD: This is him.

PAUL EKMAN: ... there has to be a high emotional ...

JAD: Right in the middle of the interview he had gotten a call.

[phone rings]

PAUL EKMAN: Hello. Hello.

JAD: Said he had to run.

PAUL EKMAN: Oh, that's my ride.

JAD: And we were like, crap, we have more questions. What are we going to do? So we decide to jump in the car with him and there we were in the relaxing presence of men with big guns.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, yes. There's these guys who look like they're in combat uniform for Iraq, and they have automatic weapons.

JAD: In any case, this is Paul Ekman.

PAUL EKMAN: Ekman - E-K-M-A-N.

JAD: He's a security expert. That's what he would be called nowadays. And speaking of security, the reason he's here today at JFK Airport is to talk with JetBlue security, teach them a few things about how they might do their jobs better.

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: We haven't.

JAD: But ...

SECURITY GUARD: No reporter in a building. That's it.

PAUL EKMAN: How about over in the restaurant?

SECURITY GUARD: Not on JetBlue property.

JAD: ... security kicks us out.

PAUL EKMAN: We are leaving their terminal.

JAD: And the only place it seems we're allowed to stand ...

JAD: How about right here?

JAD: ... is on the concrete median between two lanes of traffic, where Ekman finally pulls out the thing he'd been hoping to show the folks at JetBlue.

PAUL EKMAN: So ...

JAD: So here we have your ...

PAUL EKMAN: My little ...

JAD: ... your very stylish little laptop.

PAUL EKMAN: Yeah.

JAD: Just starting up.

JAD: It's a simple computer program that he promises in about 40 minutes will teach you to peer into a person's soul.

PAUL EKMAN: So we're gonna start.

JAD: Click start. All right.

PAUL EKMAN: And click on the start button.

JAD: Okay. So I'm stepping forward to the computer here. It's loading images. Please wait.

PAUL EKMAN: Stepping up to the bat, waiting for the pitch. [laughs]

JAD: Okay. Whoa! I need to see that one again. That was so fast!

PAUL EKMAN: A-ha.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: What is that?

JAD: I promise I'll tell you, but let me just keep going with this, all right?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: To explain, Paul Ekman studies faces—the human face. He's probably studied the face more than anyone.

PAUL EKMAN: Up until my work that was published in '78, we didn't really know how many expressions a face could make, and there was nothing like a musical notation for the face.

JAD: So about 30 years ago, he began by examining his own face very closely to see how many muscles are in there—and there are roughly 50. Then he spent the next couple decades trying to figure out how many ways those muscles can combine to form a facial expression.

PAUL EKMAN: And I developed something called the facial action coding system, basically, a muscular scoring system that you can apply to photographs, film or real-life behavior. You just did a one-two for me.

JAD: I—you're numbering my facial expression?

PAUL EKMAN: The one-two is the most common thing in the world. Just raising your eyebrows up is one-two. Five is just raising the upper eyelid. Seven is tensing the lower eyelid.

JAD: All in all, the human face is capable of 3,000 different expressions. That's what he thinks. And as we sat in his publisher's office in midtown Manhattan—this is about an hour before the airport incident ...

PAUL EKMAN: Do you want an example?

JAD: Yeah.

JAD: ... he demonstrated a few.

PAUL EKMAN: Okay. If you fabricate anger, it's very unlikely you'll put in what we call the anger-reliable muscle, which most people can't voluntarily move.

JAD: The anger-reliable muscle.

PAUL EKMAN: Do you want to see what it is?

JAD: Yeah, I want to see where it is. You're tensing your ...

PAUL EKMAN: I'm tensing the red margin of my lips.

JAD: You just look—you look fierce when you do that instantly.

JAD: So if you want to know if someone's mad, look at their lips. Conversely, if you want to know they're happy—like, genuinely happy and they're not just faking it—he says look at their eyelids.

PAUL EKMAN: The skin in between your eyebrows and your upper eyelid in a genuine, spontaneous enjoyment smile, that skin moves slightly down. Hard to detect, but visible if you know what to look for.

JAD: You just did it when you said that.

JAD: Anyways, the reason that we are talking about him here in an hour on lying is because with all the attention that's being paid these days to finding lies by using fancy brain scanners, Ekman is kind of on a crusade to remind us that you don't have to do that. You don't have to look in the brain because the brain is actually directly connected to the face in ways that we can't control.

PAUL EKMAN: All of these muscles are activated involuntarily when an emotion occurs, without your choice.

JAD: Are there things happening on my face, on her face, on any face ...

PAUL EKMAN: That you don't even know about?

JAD: ... that we don't even know—we don't know about?

PAUL EKMAN: And I am seeing them. My God, the naked face! [laughs]

JAD: Which brings me to my new favorite word: leakage.

ROBERT: Leakage?

JAD: Leakage, yes. It is a word you will hear again and again when you talk to anyone in the field of lie-catching. Take, for example, Barry McManus.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Barry L. McManus. M-C-M-A-N-U-S.

JAD: He's a longtime CIA interrogator.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Physiological leakage could be anywhere from sweat gland activity,when someone knows that they're misleading you and they break out in a sweat, that's because of the autonomic nervous system that you have no control over.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Basically, telling the truth is easy.

JAD: That is the crux of it, according to Steve Silberman, a reporter for WIRED Magazine.

STEVE SILBERMAN: The truth is kind of sitting there in your brain. Your brain knows it, you say it, no problem. But your brain has to work harder to generate the lie.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: There is an effort. And with that, there's always leakage.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Even in an instantaneous moment.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Sometimes you even hear it where a person's breathing pattern will change or the sighs that people do. At what particular time did they do it? If you're not trained to look at it, most people ignore it. But ...

JAD: If you've been trained and you know what to look for, according to Barry McManus ...

BARRY L. MCMANUS: It will strike you right in the face.

JAD: Speaking of faces ...

PAUL EKMAN: You're usually talking about ...

JAD: ... the particular brand of facial leakage that Paul Ekman specializes in has to do with something that he calls ...

PAUL EKMAN: What we call a micro facial expression, a very fast facial expression, about 25th of a second.

JAD: Okay, just to—just as an example, let's just imagine, Robert, that you're smiling. Okay?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: But on the inside, as those of us who know you can attest, maybe you've got some rage.

ROBERT: A little. A little bit.

JAD: Yeah, just a little bit. But on the outside, you're smiling. Now a microexpression is when, for the tiniest, tiniest moment, a little bit of that inner rage slips out onto your face.

[sharp screeching sounds]

JAD: And these are just little —like, just fleeting expressions on your face.

PAUL EKMAN: They're usually pretty extreme, but they're very fast.

JAD: It happens constantly, he says. But it's so fast that most of us don't see it at all.

PAUL EKMAN: Most of us don't. And when I say most, I mean about 95 percent of us miss them. But once you learn it, you don't miss them.

JAD: And once you don't miss them ...

[sharp screeching sounds]

JAD: Oop, there's one—according to Ekman, you wake up to the startling possibility that ...

PAUL EKMAN: Lies are everywhere.

JAD: It's enough to make a man obsessed.

PAUL EKMAN: When my daughter was born 27 years ago, I decided that I would take on as a life task to see whether I could lead my life without lying.

JAD: To see whether you could lead your life without lying?

PAUL EKMAN: Yeah.

JAD: That sounds impossible.

PAUL EKMAN: It's very tough. But I'm always looking to see whether there's a way I can solve the problem. It makes it more interesting. I mean, just telling a lie is really dull.

JAD: But you could argue that telling a lie is—it's just what we do.

PAUL EKMAN: No, we don't just do that. Most of the time we lie out of laziness or timidity. I got put in a terrible situation by a friend who had invited me to a dinner party, and the company was dull, and the food was worse. I sure didn't want to go again. So he invites me again about two months later. And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't make it." I'm being polite. It's not true. I could have made it. And he said, "Oh, but we enjoyed having you so much. Tell me a date when you could make it."

JAD: Ooh.

PAUL EKMAN: Now how am I going to get out of that in a polite way?

JAD: Yeah, how do you do—how do you stay true to your principles there?

PAUL EKMAN: I'm prepared. I'm prepared. So I said to him, "Look, the truth of the matter is that at this point in my life, I'm very busy. And there are friends I've had for decades that I don't get enough time to see, and I really can't pursue new friendships."

JAD: But that sort of shows it takes a lot of work not to lie. And for why? For what purpose?

PAUL EKMAN: One, you feel like a Zen hero.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL EKMAN: Oh, my God, did it again! I can stay truthful. I didn't take the easy path.

JAD: When Paul Ekman began to walk the path of the honest man, he was faced with a question that has plagued other honest men for centuries, which is: what exactly is a lie? Like, how do you define it exactly? Like, I mean, there are different kinds, clearly, and some are definitely more okay than others. Where do you draw the line? Eventually, he settled on two criteria.

PAUL EKMAN: A lie is a deliberate choice ...

JAD: A deliberate choice.

PAUL EKMAN: ... to mislead a target without any notification. So according to that definition, an actor is not a liar, although a good actor—I saw a good actor last night in a play, and I was, for a time, misled.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL EKMAN: I even had tears because he had misled me. But I was notified.

JAD: Right. So criteria number two is canceled out.

PAUL EKMAN: So that's just not a lie. It's deception.

JAD: In a similar way, bluffing at poker? It's not lying because bluffing is in the rules. It's understood. That's part of the game. So therefore, you are quote, "notified."

PAUL EKMAN: But it depends. Maybe there are rules. With my wife, we're entering our 28th year. My wife taught me that what I'm supposed to say when she comes in with a new dress, I'm not supposed to say, "Gee, that's not a flattering cut," or, "The color is wrong," or, "That's for someone 20 years younger." All of which might be true.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

PAUL EKMAN: I'm supposed to say, "Smashing." So okay, I've agreed to those rules. And the rules I've agreed to is that I will not tell her the truth. And since we've agreed about that, I'm not lying.

JAD: So is this like the poker game where you're allowed to bluff?

PAUL EKMAN: I'm required to.

JAD: You're giving yourself a loophole, though.

PAUL EKMAN: No, no, because she's notified. She knows she can't count on me.

JAD: [laughs] That sounds, like, very lawyerly to me.

JAD: Just then, his phone rings.

[phone rings]

PAUL EKMAN: Hello. Hello, hello. Oh, that's my ride.

ELLEN: So ...

PAUL EKMAN: You want to ride out to JFK with me?

ELLEN: Yeah, absolutely.

JAD: All right. You know how this goes. We pile in the car, go to the airport, get kicked out.

SECURITY GUARD: No reporter in our building.

JAD: So there we were on the median, the center strip at JFK. Coldish winter day, and Paul Ekman finally pulled the thing out of his bag, this new technology that he thinks was gonna help our chances of catching liars at the airport. Basically, it is a computer game.

JAD: It's loading images. Please wait.

JAD: You're shown a face on a screen. The face is fixed in an expression, like a smile, let's say. And then ...

PAUL EKMAN: Waiting for the pitch.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: Pow! Another different expression flashes for a moment.

JAD: Whoa. That was so fast.

JAD: So fast. And then on the screen you're asked, "What was that microexpression?"

PAUL EKMAN: What was it?

JAD: Surprise?

PAUL EKMAN: You got it right. Look at that.

JAD: I was right?

PAUL EKMAN: Hey. Let's try another. Are you ready?

JAD: Okay.

PAUL EKMAN: Whoa!

JAD: I need to see that one again. No, wait. Actually, no, no no. Angry, angry. I think it's angry.

PAUL EKMAN: All right. Let's go and try anger. Whoo!

JAD: I was right?

PAUL EKMAN: Two in a row.

JAD: I started out pretty strong.

PAUL EKMAN: Okay, here we go. Are you gonna get three in a row?

JAD: But then it was all downhill.

JAD: Oh, I didn't even begin to catch that. Contempt? Wrong.

JAD: In the end, after several minutes of this, I ended up getting more wrong than right, which put my microexpression-identifying powers at less than chance. I could have flipped a coin and I would have done better.

ROBERT: But what if you were good at it? What if you were able to identify the particular expressions? What would you know?

JAD: Well, I would know—I guess all I'd really know is that they were concealing something, some emotion.

ROBERT: That's it.

JAD: That's it, yeah. And in fact, on the way over in the car, Ekman said it point blank: if you are looking for some surefire dead giveaway sign of lying, it's just not there.

PAUL EKMAN: Because we don't have a Pinocchio's nose.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Pinocchio: Oh, look! My nose!]

PAUL EKMAN: We don't have something that only occurs when people are lying.

JAD: Really? So there is not, say, muscle number A19, that if it twitches in a certain way, is a bulletproof hallmark of lying?

PAUL EKMAN: Nope. It doesn't exist. That's Pinocchio's nose.

JAD: Is there something close to it on our faces?

PAUL EKMAN: No. There are signs of unusual cognitive load or emotional load, and that can occur for a lot of reasons. And you've got to find out the reason.

JAD: So you're never gonna be able to have an idiot behind the machine, in other words.

PAUL EKMAN: Nope.

JAD: Radiolab will return in a moment.

[LISTENERS: Hi, this is Vanessa and Crystal from Pittsburgh. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks!]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today our topic is liars and the people who try and catch them. And we've got a tale for you now from our own Ellen Horne, a story that she heard from a friend of hers.

ROBERT: Robert Krulwich.

JAD: No. So, Jude, your friend Jude.

ELLEN: Yep.

JAD: Describe him real quick for us.

ELLEN: Jude is a sweet guy. We used to work together. He's kind of a slight fellow with auburn hair, and he's just a really thoughtful, trustworthy guy.

JAD: How do you know?

ELLEN: What do you mean?

JAD: How do you know that he's trustworthy?

ELLEN: Well, you just know. I don't know.

JAD: Huh. Okay. Tell me about the story that Jude told you.

ELLEN: Well, this is a story about someone that he dated, and someone who changed him.

JAD: It's a girl?

ELLEN: It's a girl, and ...

JAD: And how did he meet her?

ELLEN: He met her at a barbecue.

JUDE HOFFNER: A friend's party. And incidentally, it was my birthday.

ELLEN: Right. He was at this party. It was his birthday. He meets this girl.

JUDE HOFFNER: Sandy blonde hair, blue eyes.

ELLEN: And after the party ...

JUDE HOFFNER: A couple days later ...

ELLEN: ... he gets a phone call from his friend, saying ...

JUDE HOFFNER: Do you remember Hope, who was at the party on Sunday? She was asking after you. Is it okay if I give her your phone number and tell her how to get in touch with you?

ELLEN: Were you flattered?

JUDE HOFFNER: Of course. So she calls.

ELLEN: He asked her out, and they went out on a date.

JUDE HOFFNER: I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, this girl is—she's kind of electric, vibrant." We're saying yes a lot to each other. We're laughing a lot. Yeah, she just had a wonderful smile. She would look you right in the eye. I mean, she just had a way of connecting right through to back behind your own eyes. And you just felt like you were ...

ELLEN: So they went out again, and then they went out again. And pretty soon they're spending all of their time together.

JAD: And then what happened?

ELLEN: Well ...

JUDE HOFFNER: I don't remember when it turned.

ELLEN: At some point, she started to have a lot of problems.

JUDE HOFFNER: Small crises started to come up.

ELLEN: A whole series of things.

JUDE HOFFNER: They were ...

ELLEN: Knee problems, insurance problems.

JUDE HOFFNER: You know, I've got a situation where I need to move out of the place where I'm currently living, and it's because my roommate's, you know, crazy.

ELLEN: He felt himself sort of pulling back.

JUDE HOFFNER: Yes. Yes.

ELLEN: Until one evening, he gets a call from Hope. And she's totally panicked.

JUDE HOFFNER: She said, "You have to come over. We have something we really need to talk about." And at this point I have no idea what it is now, at this time. But she said, "Hey, I'm pregnant. I think I'm pregnant."

JAD: Wow! What does Jude do?

ELLEN: Well, he basically stood up and did the right thing.

JUDE HOFFNER: There really was a part of me that was thinking, "Well, here's the test of a person."

ELLEN: He was gonna stand by her and support her through the pregnancy. And he said, "Okay, let's go to the doctor together."

JUDE HOFFNER: I would say, "Where? When? I want to be there." And she would say, "Three o'clock at the doctor's office." Then I would say, "Okay." And I would go. Be there early, you know, 2:45. And she would not be there. And 3:15 would roll around, and 3:30 would roll around. There I am, sitting sort of alone, and the receptionist would sort of be going, you know, "Can I help you?" She would say, "Oh. Well, that appointment was at one o'clock." Or I would notice on the sign-in sheet that she had actually signed in, and I could see the handwriting. It was—indeed, it was Hope's. And she had signed in two hours earlier.

ELLEN: So then did you confront Hope about giving you the wrong appointment times?

JUDE HOFFNER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And as this continued, I would say, "Repeat that for me. Three—okay, so three o'clock." I mean, these are moments in crystal clarity of life. You're not losing track of stuff.

ELLEN: Then he gets a call from a woman named Leslie.

LESLIE NUCCIO: I met Hope off Craigslist, actually. I put out an ad for a roommate, and she moved in with no furniture. She showed up with just all of her stuff in trash bags, and then she disappeared.

ELLEN: Leaving the bags behind.

LESLIE NUCCIO: So it was right around that point where her check bounced. And I was like, "Oh, no."

ELLEN: And so through a mutual friend she tracked down Jude.

LESLIE NUCCIO: I was kind of like okay, well, she has this boyfriend.

ELLEN: She called him.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Called him and sort of wondered, like, is he in on this?

ELLEN: Jude had no idea what she was talking about.

JUDE HOFFNER: No.

ELLEN: He didn't even know she had a roommate named Leslie.

JUDE HOFFNER: I mean, who the hell was who? You know, who are you? You owe me money. No, I don't. And she—you know, it was all very confusing.

ELLEN: Not knowing what else to do, Leslie decides to go into Hope's room and start looking through her stuff.

LESLIE NUCCIO: And I just thought, you know, I'm just gonna go through this, see what's in here. And that's when I found those notebooks.

ELLEN: Spiral-bound notebooks, and inside ...

LESLIE NUCCIO: Literally pages upon pages of different names with different socials next to them.

ELLEN: Credit card numbers, mother's maiden name, birthdate. Page after page of that kind of information.

JAD: What exactly was this?

ELLEN: These are, like, crib notes for a con woman.

LESLIE NUCCIO: That's when I called Jude, and I said, "Get over here."

JAD: What did Jude do at this point?

ELLEN: Well, Jude knew he had to do something.

JUDE HOFFNER: And I finally got up the courage to confront Hope and say, "This is over, my own responsibility here notwithstanding to the—you know, the pregnancy."

JAD: Well, and what about Leslie at this point? Was she ...

ELLEN: Well, Leslie wondered how many of those people in that notebook Hope had met through Craigslist, which is where Leslie met her. So she went back to Craigslist and started posting warnings many times a day.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Think "Single White Female" meets "Pacific Heights" meets "The Grifters" meets—if you meet a late-20-something, Gap-clothed, 5'3" blue-eyed blonde, run away. Run away. In fact, warn your hairdresser.

ELLEN: She's posting warning after warning.

LESLIE NUCCIO: If you have any information about this person or simply want some empathy, please email at connedbyhope@yahoo.com.

ELLEN: And Craig took them all down.

JAD: As in Craig from Craigslist Craig?

LESLIE NUCCIO: Yeah.

CRAIG NEWMARK: Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

ELLEN: He thought that they were inappropriate.

CRAIG NEWMARK: Yeah.

ELLEN: That they were unfair.

CRAIG NEWMARK: I want to do the right thing. But everyone has rights.

ELLEN: She would post.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Nope, the drama is not over.

ELLEN: He would take it down. She would post.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Fact of the matter is that Hope is out there somewhere.

ELLEN: He would take it down. But within a few days, in those moments where Craig was in the bathroom, away from his desk, people responded.

CRAIG NEWMARK: I was starting to get multiple reports that she ripped people off.

ELLEN: Every different kind of person from all over the place: yoga instructors, landlords, car mechanics, banks, flower shop owners, spas, a veterinarian, car rental agency, check cashing place.

WOMAN: $50.

MAN: About $500.

WOMAN: $1,000.

MAN: Approximately $10,000.

ELLEN: And everybody with the same story.

CRAIG NEWMARK: She is one good actor.

LESLIE NUCCIO: Her MO seems to be to move in with tons of stuff, sans furniture. Pass a check out of a closed account, then bolt when it comes back.

ELLEN: Over the course of several years, there were postings on Craigslist, and there were people who were trying to find and stop Hope. She got kind of a celebrity following.

LESLIE NUCCIO: By the way, we used to get emails, like, every day from people who were just like, "Is there any news? Dude, I love seeing those posts. Can you tell us anything?" I'm like, "No, she's in hiding. Sorry."

ELLEN: Who was this woman?

ELLEN: Terry, can I get you to introduce yourself? Just say who you are and what you do.

TERRY ALARIO: My name is Terry Alario. I'm a special agent with the Louisiana Department of Justice.

JAD: Louisiana? How did we get to Louisiana?

ELLEN: Well after a few years, Hope resurfaced in New Orleans.

TERRY ALARIO: We had a call-in complaint from a lady down in the New Orleans area. Her credit card had been used. Someone had tried to purchase Dell computers, and it just started from there. Every time we talked to one victim, it led to one or two other victims. Hope has almost like a cult following. You know, her MO was that she knew them, she got to know them really well. I talked to a lot of victims, and they just don't trust people anymore. A lot of these people did some good, human, open-heart things with her and said, "This poor girl. I've gotta help her out." And they were really let down, and they just don't trust people anymore. And it's sad. You know, not only do you have to worry about clearing up your credit and getting your money back from your banks, you know, you've got to deal with people on this Earth now that you don't know, you know, who you're standing next to.

ELLEN: Jude had had that feeling—and for good reason. In one of the houses that Hope had blown through in San Francisco, he had found something that was really upsetting.

JUDE HOFFNER: I had come across a letter that she had written to my parents but never mailed, just saying some very, very terrible things.

ELLEN: Which Jude says were totally untrue. In this letter to his parents, Hope wrote ...

JUDE HOFFNER: That at one point during the pregnancy, she was having complications, and the main symptom was, like, severe vaginal bleeding. And that this—that she was on somebody's living room floor, either mine or hers, in this terrible condition. And that I had just left, totally abandoning the situation and my responsibilities. Just a graphic and ugly depiction of an awful scene.

ELLEN: Jude was traumatized. The whole experience he compared to an earthquake. Have you ever been in an earthquake?

JAD: No, never.

ELLEN: Well, one of the things that happens is that there's these aftershocks after the earthquake. And so for a little while after the earthquake, you're not sure that when you put your foot down, the ground is still gonna be in the same place as it was a minute ago.

JUDE HOFFNER: There were days—I can tell you there were days when it was significant to hear anybody say anything of any consequence that was just true. You know, to say, "I have a carton of milk in my refrigerator that expires on September 17," and that was true. [laughs] It didn't say September 19 or September 15. It said September 17.

TERRY ALARIO: I've had people crying on the phone talking to me about this situation. And they were victims six, seven years ago. People are embarrassed. They're embarrassed, and then they become mad. You know, and that's when they become detectives. [laughs]

ELLEN: I'd make a lousy private detective.

JAD: Where are you now?

ELLEN: In front of Hope's mother's house in a bad neighborhood in New Orleans around midnight.

JAD: What's her name, by the way, her mom?

ELLEN: Oh, Marcia Ballantyne.

JAD: And why are you there, exactly?

ELLEN: I had kind of gotten a little obsessed with Hope.

JAD: You'd gotten obsessed?

ELLEN: Yeah.

ELLEN: I can't see any house numbers. 623 ...

JAD: Why?

ELLEN: I have no idea. [laughs]

ELLEN: There's, like, this heavying tightness in my chest. I'm so nervous.

ELLEN: There was something about imagining how she was doing all this.

ELLEN: I'm so nervous.

ELLEN: It was, like, really fun to imagine. But maybe that's what happened to Leslie, too, that, like, once I started looking, I was able to find a lot of victims, a lot of information. And I wanted to meet her.

MAN: Who are you looking for?

ELLEN: Do you know Marcia Ballantyne?

MAN: Who?

ELLEN: Marcia Ballantyne.

MAN: I ain't never seen you around here.

ELLEN: Yeah, I'm not from around here.

MAN: You're standing on the corner looking like that, boy, you'll be having people spooked around here.

ELLEN: I'll come back later.

ELLEN: Okay, next day.

JAD: All right, wait. Hold up. What did you know about Hope at this point?

ELLEN: Well, I knew that she had had a daughter.

JAD: Really?

ELLEN: Hello? Is anybody home?

[dog barks]

JAD: Jude's?

ELLEN: No, not Jude's. The timing was all wrong. And I had located the father.

ELLEN: Well, I'm standing outside of Hope's mother's house. There's three plastic tricycles piled up against a gate. I don't see anyone inside the house.

ELLEN: The next morning, I went out to find a woman named Ruby.

RUBY MOON: Ruby Moon. I live in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ELLEN: Ruby owns a coffee shop.

RUBY MOON: I live down the street from Hope's mother. And when Hope came to New Orleans, her mother, you know, introduced us.

ELLEN: Ruby has a kid who's about the same age as Hope's daughter, and they go to Montessori together. And when Ruby opened her shop a year ago, Hope did carpool duty.

RUBY MOON: She would pick them up. And when we got home about 5:30, 6 o'clock, we'd all eat dinner together. And she would spend the night sometimes. And quite frankly, I enjoyed having Hope around.

ELLEN: A few weeks later, the cops show up to arrest Hope. She had printed a check on her home computer with a made-up account number to buy a $12,000 used car.

RUBY MOON: Here you are. You really like this woman. Your kids love her. And you can't believe it. You don't believe it. And I wanted to stand by her. I wanted to help her. You know, and she hadn't screwed me over. She hadn't done anything to me. So maybe she's turning around.

RUBY MOON: Well, then my husband finds that she's taken a credit card off of the shelf that he put away because the credit card was maxed out, and she'd been buying gasoline and paying her phone bills. Wasn't much. It was, like, $250. It really wasn't much. And my husband was like, "Hope, why? Why didn't you just come to us? Here you are. You're living in our house. You're our nanny. You're our friend. We would've given you the money."

ELLEN: And here's where Ruby's situation is so different from the other victims I talked to. She loves Hope's daughter. She can't just walk away. When Hope went to jail for four months, Ruby helped care for her.

RUBY MOON: It's a very, very difficult situation, especially when you're trying to do the right thing.

ELLEN: Trying to do the right thing, Ruby hired Hope's mom to work at her coffee shop, even though she's kind of been an awful waitress.

RUBY MOON: I mean, she's worked here for three months and she still forgets how to do things. I mean, I don't know.

ELLEN: But here's the thing: the effect of a lie, like, the real impact, it isn't just that it makes you question that piece of information that you were lied to about. It's that it makes you question everything. What happened next was that I watched Ruby completely unravel because of something that I said.

ELLEN: Do you understand that Hope's father was a doctor?

ELLEN: Which the detective had told me.

TERRY ALARIO: Her father was a doctor.

RUBY MOON: My understanding was that he wasn't really a doctor.

ELLEN: According to the attorney general's office he was.

RUBY MOON: Then Marcia's a liar, too, because she says he was a con man.

ELLEN: She says that Hope's father was a con man?

ELLEN: It's funny how a piece of information can take on a life of its own. The ground was shifting under Ruby's feet.

RUBY MOON: So then Marcia's lying. Marcia says he wasn't a doctor. If they say it turned out that he was really a doctor, then Marcia's lying.

ELLEN: And I mean, that may not be information that means anything at all, you know?

RUBY MOON: And now you're telling me that he really was a doctor.

ELLEN: She began making call after call.

RUBY MOON: Hey, baby. It's Ruby, the henna lady. Can you give me some information?

ELLEN: She phoned anyone she knew with a connection to Hope.

RUBY MOON: Can I ask you a question, and you just say yes or no? Hi, Scott. This is Ruby. I live in New Orleans. You don't know me. I heard some disturbing news that I would like to verify. It's very, very important that you call me back. My number is—please call me back. Hey, I'm freaking out.

ELLEN: That's her talking to her husband.

RUBY MOON: Well, I'm sitting here talking to the reporter, and there's things that Marcia's told me aren't true, that Hope's dad wasn't really a doctor, and he was.

ELLEN: I still really don't understand why that one detail shook Ruby so much. I guess betrayal makes you doubt yourself. But it explains something that Jude had told me—that he has no new friends, literally. That everyone he feels close to is someone that he met before he met Hope. As if he never trusted his judgment about people again, but that he had no choice but to rely on it from before. I mean, how could you live in the world without trusting? What sort of world would that be?

ELLEN: So I am in front of the Jefferson Parish Courthouse.

ELLEN: Hope has a trial this morning.

ELLEN: It's 8:40. I've been here since eight this morning. And I haven't as yet seen Hope.

ELLEN: I have been trying to reach her for a week and a half. Left her phone messages, mailed her a letter, left her a note at the door. Nothing.

ELLEN: I'm starting to feel like she's not coming.

ELLEN: Okay, inside the courtroom, I am watching the door at every person who walks in, wondering, is it her? Is it her? And then she walks in.

JAD: She walked in.

ELLEN: And she's ...

JAD: Had you ever seen her before this moment?

ELLEN: I had seen pictures of her.

JAD: What did she look like?

ELLEN: What did she look like? Well, strawberry-blonde hair, blue pinstriped suit, pointy-toed high heels. She sort of looks like an attorney.

JAD: Hmm.

ELLEN: Very well put together. And I watch her look around this courtroom at all of the intimidating and scary-looking people in the court. And I see her see me, and she just makes a beeline right for me and walks up to me and says, "You're Ellen, aren't you? You've been trying to reach me, and I'm so sorry I haven't been in touch." And she just sits down next to me, and we end up spending the next four hours together.

JAD: What did you talk about?

ELLEN: The weather, mostly.

JAD: Huh!

ELLEN: She was very charming. She told me all sorts of things about New Orleans, New Orleans history. And when it comes time for her to stand before the judge and plead guilty, I find myself rooting for her. She gets sentenced to two years in hard labor, but she also gets a couple of days to make arrangements for her daughter. She has to report to prison at 9:00 am on Friday morning.

JAD: Do you ever get her on the record?

ELLEN: Well, I couldn't have my equipment in the courtroom, but while we were in court, she agreed to an interview.

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: But then a few hours before the scheduled interview, she called me and told me she couldn't make it, moved it to the next morning, then the next day and the next. And while I know I can't trust her, I don't know what else to do. I decide to run to the drugstore and buy a tape recorder and bring it to her. So I go to her mom's house, and spend a few minutes at the gate, talking.

ELLEN: Hey there. Huh?

HOPE: At least it's a little bit better weather for your entire thing.

ELLEN: For my dress. Yeah, totally. I was freezing yesterday. Hey there.

HOPE: This is my mother.

ELLEN: Hi, I'm Ellen.

MARCIA VALENTINE: Hi, Ellen. How are you?

CHILD: Hi, Ellen.

HOPE: Cleaning up. We get dog poop.

CHILD: Hi, Ellen!

CHILD: Hello, Ellen.

ELLEN: Hi there.

CHILD: What's your name?

HOPE: Well, you just called her by her name.

ELLEN: You just said my name.

MARCIA VALENTINE: What's her name? Ellen?

ELLEN: So I'm trying to make it really easy. There's a cassette recorder. It's got batteries. It's got a cassette in it. I tested it out. It works.

HOPE: Okay.

ELLEN: And ...

CHILD: For the battery? For the bubble?

HOPE: Yeah, we got to put batteries in your bubble thing, too. I know.

CHILD: In the bubbles?

ELLEN: And my other thought is if you want to just record your thoughts and what—I mean, you know, like, I just want to ...

HOPE: Right.

ELLEN: ... give you some space to say what you want to say. So ...

HOPE: Okay. And it's all addressed and ...

ELLEN: It's got postage. It's all addressed.

HOPE: Thank you.

ELLEN: Just seal it up and ...

HOPE: Okay.

ELLEN: Yeah.

HOPE: I'm sorry ...

ELLEN: It's okay.

HOPE: ... I couldn't give you better—more quality time than ...

ELLEN: That was it. That was my only on-the-record interview with her. However, before she went to prison, she did send me that cassette tape. It was a really crummy tape, and so we had to use this voice—what do you—what do we call that?

JAD: Noise reduction, yeah.

ELLEN: We had to use a noise reduction filter to clean it up so you could hear her voice. And it makes her sound kind of ghostly and strange.

HOPE: I have a child who is happy and healthy and bright and beautiful. And I don't think she could be all of that if I was this horrible monster that people think that I am.

ELLEN: On this tape, Hope talks about her daughter a lot.

HOPE: My life is now her.

ELLEN: I wish she said something more satisfying, something that explained why it was that she chose to live this way for so long. But she doesn't.

HOPE: I'm sorry.

ELLEN: Hope mailed this tape to me, reported to prison. She was released due to prison overcrowding, and during Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana lost her. About a month after the hurricane, I wrote to the attorney general's office and asked if they had any idea where she was. I got a one-word response. No.

JAD: Radiolab's Ellen Horne. All right, so let me ask a question to get us to our next bit.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Why—why exactly would Hope lie the way she does? I mean, there was a point in the story where Ruby, one of the characters, said, you know, I would have given her everything she wanted, would have given her the money, the credit cards, whatever, and yet she still did it. So why ...

ROBERT: Haven't you met people who lie all the time? Like, they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. It's like they can't stop.

JAD: Right.

YALING YANG: Yeah.

JAD: Exactly.

YALING YANG: They just can't help it. They feel this impulse that they cannot control.

JAD: Yeah, the lie just tumbles out before they can stop it.

ROBERT: And that is who?

JAD: Oh, that's Yaling Yang. She's a researcher at the University of Southern California.

YALING YANG: In the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. And I'm a new mom. [laughs]

JAD: A really new mom.

YALING YANG: [laughs]

JAD: Her baby's about two months old, and she was nice enough to let us barge in on her maternity leave to talk with her.

YALING YANG: To talk a little bit.

JAD: Because when she's not playing with her new baby ...

YALING YANG: Say something.

JAD: ... she is studying the mind of pathological liars.

ROBERT: Ooh. Which by the way, means—I mean, when you use that phrase "pathological lying," what is—is there a definition of that?

JAD: Yeah, I just said it a moment ago. It's people who can't stop lying. It's habitual. It's compulsive.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Yaling's question was: is there something about their brains, their anatomy, that might explain this compulsion? And she thinks she may have found a clue. In any case, getting ahead of myself. First thing she had to do is find a group of people who lie a lot.

ROBERT: Why? Oh, to study them, you mean?

JAD: To study them, yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs] How—where do you find sitting pathological liars waiting to be studied?

YALING YANG: We actually recruit our subjects from the temporary employment agency.

JAD: Like a temp agency where, you know, you would go if you typed 60 words a minute kind of place?

YALING YANG: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: This is her notion that she'd find a bunch of liars at a temp agency?

JAD: Well, her ...

ROBERT: That's so ridiculous.

JAD: It's not ridiculous. I mean, her idea was that liars would be overrepresented at a temp agency.

YALING YANG: As you can probably imagine, you know, people who need to go to the temp agency are usually people who cannot remain in one job for a very long period of time.

JAD: That's not true of all people who work at temp agencies. Most of them are just fine. But some of them, she figured, keep ending up at the temp agency because they just have this ...

YALING YANG: Problem with their—you know, their lifestyle.

JAD: A truth problem.

ROBERT: All right, let's keep going. I want to hear how this comes out.

JAD: Okay, good. Okay, so Yaling and her crew went to a couple of temp agencies in the LA area, interviewed 108 people, asked them all kinds of questions—not just about their employment history, but about their past.

YALING YANG: You know, their childhood history.

JAD: About their families.

YALING YANG: Very personal information.

JAD: She checked their answers to those questions against their family and friends, against their court records, just to see if she could find people whose stories had, you know, inconsistencies, big ones.

ROBERT: And in the 108 folks that she queried, she found a pathological liar?

JAD: 12, actually.

ROBERT: 12?

JAD: 12.

ROBERT: Out of 108 samplers? Whoa!

JAD: Are they pathological liars? I don't know. It depends on how you define it.

ROBERT: I would hope so.

JAD: But she found 12 people that she wanted to look at further. She said to them, would you be willing to come, you know, on a purely voluntary basis, into the lab and let me scan your brain?

ROBERT: [laughs] Just another day at the temp office.

YALING YANG: So basically, we put people in the MRI scanner, and then we scanned their brain.

JAD: She scanned everyone's brains, all 108 participants—the liars and the non-liars. No one knew which group they were in.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And she was looking at a particular part of their brains just behind their forehead called ...

YALING YANG: The prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that processes information.

JAD: This is where the real thinking happens.

YALING YANG: Making decisions and moral judgment, for example.

JAD: Now if you zoom into that place just behind your forehead, what you will see are two kinds of brain tissue. You've got gray matter, and then you've got white matter.

ROBERT: I've heard of gray matter.

JAD: Yes. Well, we think of the brain as being gray, but actually it's two things. It's gray and white. The gray stuff, you can kind of think of it as, like, the computer processor part.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: It's these little clumps of neurons that process information like computer chips. That's the gray, whereas the white ...

YALING YANG: The white matter is, like, the connections between all these computers.

JAD: The white matter, in other words, is what moves the thoughts around.

ROBERT: Gray is where the thinking happens, and then white is when you move the thought from here ...

[whoosh]

ROBERT: ... to there.

JAD: Exactly.

YALING YANG: Yes. They transfer information from one end to the other.

JAD: Okay, so you've got your gray, you've got your white. What Yaling thought she would see when she looked into the brains of people who lie a lot ...

YALING YANG: I thought we would see a reduction.

JAD: Just some piece of it not there.

YALING YANG: Yeah, they're missing something.

JAD: Specifically, she thought she would find less gray stuff, less of the thinking stuff.

ROBERT: Why would—why?

JAD: Because that's what she's seen in other mental disorders that are kind of like this. And if you think about it on a really simplistic level, the gray is where you think your thoughts. And it's also, among other things, where you crunch your moral calculations. And liars, she figured, have trouble in this department, so maybe they have less gray. That was her notion.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: But when she got the pictures back, what she saw was ...

YALING YANG: Such a great increase. It's ...

JAD: More. And not the gray.

YALING YANG: More white matter.

JAD: More white stuff—a lot more.

YALING YANG: 25 percent. It's a quarter.

JAD: So they have 25 percent more connections in their head than non-liars?

YALING YANG: Yes.

JAD: Before we get to what that means, what were you thinking when you saw this?

YALING YANG: I was really bubbling. [laughs] I thought this was—this was something.

JAD: Something.

YALING YANG: Something.

JAD: Something.

JAD: Here's her idea so far. Ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: She thinks that these extra connections play a crucial role in a kind of in-the-moment storytelling. That's essentially what lying is: coming up with a story on the fly. Let me give you an example, okay?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: You're leaving work. You're walking down the hall, and you go into the elevator. And an annoying but nice co-worker corners you.

[MAN: Oh, hey, Sally.]

JAD: Corners you in the elevator.

[SALLY: Hey.]

JAD: Asks you out.

[MAN: You know, I've been meaning to ask, do you maybe want to go out with me on Friday?]

JAD: So there you are, question's dangling in the air.

[MAN: You know, I've been meaning to ask, do you maybe want to go out with me on Friday?]

JAD: For most of us, right at that moment inside our head, in our brains, we're thinking ...

[SALLY: Crap! Oh, shoot!]

JAD: ... say you're busy. Say you're busy. Say you're busy.

[SALLY: Say you're busy, but with what? What? What are you doing?]

JAD: What are you busy with? Say something. Think of something. Think! Think!

[SALLY: What should I say?]

JAD: You're just reaching out into the void, trying to form a connection with some idea that can help you come up with some excuse.

[SALLY: I could say ...]

JAD: You know, I could say, well ...

[SALLY: Shoot! What should I say?]

JAD: What? What? What?

[SALLY: I can't think of anything!]

JAD: And really what you need to do at this moment is you have to take a bunch of disparate thoughts on different sides of your brain—like me, tonight, teeth, dentist—and connect them all together.

[SALLY: I'm having some late-night dental work.]

JAD: Like that.

[MAN: Oh, OK.]

JAD: We can all do it given enough time, but for the pathological liar, she thinks that because they have so many more of these connections to begin with, they get there faster.

[SALLY: My mom is visiting that night. I'm meeting a friend for sushi. I am performing in the circus. Friday night book club. Ice hockey practice. Yoga. I have to polish the silver. I've got chemo.]

YALING YANG: Like, the more connections ...

[SALLY: Sorry, beekeeping!]

YALING YANG: ... the faster the speed of the processing can jump from one idea to another and you can come up with more random stories.

JAD: She thinks that in the brains of most of us, we have trouble making those connections. We have ...

ROBERT: Would you have trouble? If I said to you, like, come on. Come on, go out with me on Friday night, would you not be able to come up with a wowzer?

JAD: I would say, well, yeah, I ...

ROBERT: I have to count straws. See, Thursday night is straw-counting. We always—we have about 316 straws so far, and I'm only doing ones with little red circles on them. So that's Thursday night. Sorry.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I don't know where this comes from. It just happens. I just—yeah.

JAD: There you go. See? You've got—you've got extra white matter, perhaps.

ROBERT: So she's saying this is a cause of lying or an effect of lying? Like ...

JAD: Well, she's not sure—and this is a big debate.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: What she can say is that children, as they grow ...

YALING YANG: Yeah. From age two to age 10, there is a big jump in their white matter. And that's actually the same age that they develop the skill to lie.

ROBERT: Among other things, but, you know ...

JAD: To close, let me just ask you: given everything we've just talked about, how do you square this information with being a new mom? I mean, is this your first kid?

YALING YANG: Yes, it's my first one.

JAD: A boy or a girl?

YALING YANG: A girl.

JAD: What's her name?

YALING YANG: Zoe.

JAD: Doesn't it make you wonder a little bit about Zoe and what's going on inside her head?

YALING YANG: Oh, yes. I wonder about that all the time. It's still too early to scan her brain, but eventually I will do it. [laughs]

JAD: Are you serious?

YALING YANG: Yes! [laughs]

ROBERT: There is a moral to this: never, if you're a little baby, have a social psychiatrist as a mother. It's a very, very dangerous thing. Anyway, if she does this, maybe we'll know a little bit more about the nature and nurture of liars. But until then ...

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we'll be back in a moment.

JAD: I'd like to scan your brain.

ROBERT: [laughs]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

JAD: Hello. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert.

JAD: And this is Radiolab. Today on our program, the topic is liars.

ROBERT: All kinds of liars. And now it's time for the liar we haven't yet mentioned, a liar which might actually be one very familiar to you, Jad.

JAD: What's that?

ROBERT: This is the self-deceiver.

JAD: Hey, what do you mean?

ROBERT: [laughs] Somebody—somebody who lies not to others but actually lies to oneself, if you get my drift.

JAD: Thanks, Krulwich. Thanks a lot. Anyhow, what does that even mean, to lie to oneself? How would you ...

ROBERT: It's tricky. Let me give you a classic example. Let's say that you are madly in love with somebody.

JAD: Who?

ROBERT: Just conjure up whoever you really, you know—I don't know who.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: So now you're in love with her, and strange things start to happen. You're at home. The phone rings. You pick it up.

JAD: Hello?

ROBERT: And the person on the other end of the line is breathing and then hangs up. Next, she's suddenly staying late at the office many nights a week. Didn't used to.

[WOMAN: Jad, honey. I've gotta work late tonight again. Don't wait up.]

ROBERT: Then your friends tell you that they see this woman ...

[FRIEND: So who's this guy?]

ROBERT: ... in the company of a man ...

[FRIEND: Does she have a brother, maybe?

ROBERT: ... repeatedly.

[FRIEND: Dude, come on!]

ROBERT: In short, all the signs are there. And yet despite the evidence, you, Jad, continue to believe—and I mean, you truly, truly believe that the woman is being faithful.

JAD: Well, maybe in this little scenario that you've created for me, I'm just stupid or clueless.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, I'm not gonna take that away from you. I'm not. But in this case, though, for the sake of argument, let's say you're not clueless.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Let's say you believe both these things in some different compartments in your head. You believe that she is faithful, and at the very same time, you know. You know what's really going on here.

JOANNA STAREK: What self-deception really is is that you have two contradictory beliefs, and you hold them at the same time, and you allow one of them into consciousness. And that you have a motivation for allowing one of them into consciousness.

ROBERT: That's Joanna Starek. She's a psychologist, and we're gonna hear more from her later.

JAD: All right, so how does that work then?

ROBERT: What?

JAD: What she just said, like, to have two contradictory thoughts in your brain at the same time, and yet you're only letting in one?

ROBERT: Well, there's an experiment on this subject, kind of an interesting one. And so ...

JAD: [sighs] Another experiment?

ROBERT: [laughs] Let me introduce you to the two guys who did it, okay?

HAROLD SACKEIM: I'm Harold Sackeim. I'm a professor in the departments of psychiatry and radiology at Columbia University.

RUBEN GUR: Okay. My name is Ruben Gur. I'm a neuropsychologist by training.

ROBERT: Harold Sackeim and Ruben Gur are friends. They met back in 1974.

RUBEN GUR: '73.

ROBERT: Ah, make that '73. One was a grad student—that would be Harold. One was a professor. That's ...

RUBEN GUR: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... that's Gur.

RUBEN GUR: And we started talking, and ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: To make a long story short, we did a couple of experiments. In one of them, we played clips of one's own voice and the voices of other people.

ROBERT: Here's the experiment: you, the subject, are sitting in a room, okay?

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: And we're gonna give you a big red button, and you can press it.

JAD: Okay, press the button.

[buzzer]

ROBERT: Not yet.

JAD: Oh, sorry.

ROBERT: And out of the speakers in this room, you're going to hear 10 different voices.

HAROLD SACKEIM: And everybody was saying the same thing. The words were the same.

[VOICES: Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here.]

ROBERT: And one of the voices in this group—one of the many—is you, Jad. You saying ...

[JAD: Come here.]

ROBERT: Right there. That was you. Now when you hear yourself saying "Come," press the button ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: Press the button: me or not me.

ROBERT: ... when you hear your own voice.

[VOICES: Come here. Come here. Come here.]

JAD: So one of these is mine?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

[VOICES: Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here.]

JAD: Nope. No.

[VOICE: Come here.]

JAD: Yes.

[buzzer]

[VOICES: Come here. Come here.]

JAD: Not me. Not me. Not me.

[VOICES: Come here. Come here.]

JAD: Me.

[buzzer]

JAD: I think.

[VOICES: Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here.]

JAD: Not me.

ROBERT: Now if you listen very closely, it's gonna come in three, two—that's it!

JAD: Not me. Not me. Not me.

ROBERT: He missed it.

JAD: This is hard!

ROBERT: You're right! And the people in Harold's study, many of them didn't do too well, either.

JAD: So they had some trouble recognizing their own voice.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: All right. Bring it home, Robert. What's the point of this?

ROBERT: Here's what I didn't tell you: when they did this experiment in real life, the real subjects, in addition to having the little pusher button thing that we gave you ...

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: ... they also had diodes all over their body measuring ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: We recorded their physiology.

ROBERT: ... perspiration ...

RUBEN GUR: Skin sweating, heart rate ...

ROBERT: ... heartbeat, stuff like that.

RUBEN GUR: ... blood pressure.

ROBERT: And what they found is that when a person failed to recognize his or her voice, nevertheless, their bodies—the sweat, the heartbeat ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: Most often, the body is going "Ahh!"

ROBERT: Their bodies seemed to notice their voices, even though their conscious minds missed the voice. The body knew. The conscious mind didn't. Two thoughts in the same person.

JAD: Oh, come on. No. I mean, I'll give it to you. That's kind of interesting.

ROBERT: Thank you very much.

JAD: But that is not the same thing as lying.

ROBERT: Well, we're just starting here. We're just—this is—now at least grant me this: you can have two different experiences simultaneously.

JAD: Yes. Okay, I grant that you've just ...

ROBERT: Okay, so we're on our way. We're on our way. Now okay, step two: Harold and Ruben decide to leave the laboratory and go to a bar.

RUBEN GUR: Yeah, I believe it was Smokey Joe's.

ROBERT: Just to sort of talk things over.

RUBEN GUR: Kick back a bit. [laughs]

ROBERT: And to deal with your very question. Like, so let's really get to the core of what lying to yourself is about.

RUBEN GUR: Exactly.

ROBERT: So they're in the bar, and they're getting kind of drunk.

HAROLD SACKEIM: We were probably pretty drunk.

ROBERT: And Ruben proposes, we need to come up with some way to get test subjects to have one thought and instantly have a contradictory thought. Maybe we could do that with embarrassment. Maybe we could embarrass them into having two thoughts at the same time.

RUBEN GUR: And—yes, and at some point, I said, "Let's ask people questions."

ROBERT: Questions so ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: So threatening ...

ROBERT: ... so uncomfortable that you don't want to tell the truth about them.

JAD: Like what? What questions would those be?

ROBERT: Well ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: I mean, we had to get down and dirty.

ROBERT: They got drunker and drunker and drunker, and they came up with a whole bunch of them.

RUBEN GUR: Started writing them down.

HAROLD SACKEIM: It was fun.

RUBEN GUR: Right there in the bar on a napkin.

ROBERT: We were curious. So we took their questions off the napkin, so to speak, and we brought them out onto the street.

ELLEN: Can I ask you some questions while you're waiting?

MAN: Yeah, sure.

ROBERT: So here's one.

ELLEN: Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?

MAN: Ooh!

ELLEN: No.

ROBERT: And ...

MAN: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... another.

STAFFER: Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?

JAD: [laughs] Enjoyed my bowel movements?

STAFFER: Yep.

WOMAN: I think most normal people do.

MAN: No.

ROBERT: Here's another.

STAFFER: Have you ever thought of committing suicide in order to get back at somebody?

JAD: Yikes!

MAN: No.

ROBERT: And another.

STAFFER: Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by somebody?

JAD: Come again?

WOMAN: No!

WOMAN: No.

MAN: Absolutely not.

WOMAN: No.

MAN: Oh, no.

MAN: Well, yeah.

JAD: Have I what?

ROBERT: Jad? [laughs]

JAD: What kind of question is that?

ROBERT: If you answered no to any of those questions, they would say that you're lying to yourself.

JAD: So they are assuming, then, that everybody enjoys their bowel movements secretly, everyone secretly has rape fantasies.

ROBERT: That's what they are assuming.

HAROLD SACKEIM: Yes, it was a supposition that these things are universal truths, but it was a supposition that seemed to work.

ROBERT: Because that night at the bar, Harold and Ruben stumbled across something: it turns out that how you answer those questions predicts some very surprising things about the kind of person you are, about the course of your whole life. First of all, remember that previous study we talked about with the voices?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: It just so happens that the people who were very bad at the voice test, failed the voice test, they were the very same people who did very badly on the embarrassing questionnaire test. They didn't want to admit to stuff.

STAFFER: Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by somebody?

MAN: No, not at all.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: However, when other scientists got ahold of Harold and Ruben's questionnaire—and they used it a lot in lots of situations ...

HAROLD SACKEIM: It's been given to thousands and thousands of people.

ROBERT: ... they dug deeper into the question of what do these people have trouble with truthiness, what happens to them in life?

JAD: Yeah. And?

ROBERT: And it turns out that they do a whole lot better in all kinds ...

JAD: Better?

ROBERT: Yes. Better, better, better, in all kinds of things.

JAD: Like what?

ROBERT: A whole lot of stuff.

JAD: Like?

ROBERT: Can we now say, by the way, that these people are liars?

JAD: I'm not quite ready to say that. But let's ...

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Okay, fine. Let's just call them liars. And can you please tell me what the hell you're talking about? What sorts of things did they do better at?

ROBERT: Well, just to start, let me introduce you to someone.

JOANNA STAREK: Okay. My name is Joanna Starek, and I'm a psychologist.

ROBERT: Psychologist and athlete.

JOANNA STAREK: I was actually a swimmer. I was a competitive swimmer at Colgate University. And I think one of the questions that I was really interested in is: how can you have two people who have the same physiological capacity, and then one person over and over again would consistently win or outperform the other?

ROBERT: Joanna had heard about Harold and Ruben's questionnaire, so she and her research partner, Caroline Keating, decided to give the embarrassing question questionnaire to the swim team ...

JOANNA STAREK: Yes.

ROBERT: ... just to see what they'd find.

JOANNA STAREK: So we gave them that questionnaire at the beginning of the season, and then they trained, trying to qualify for the Eastern Athletic Conference championship.

ROBERT: That's the big race at the end of the year.

JOANNA STAREK: And it's a very objective measure. You either swim fast enough during the season to qualify or you don't.

ROBERT: And when, at the end of the season, Joanna and her research partner Caroline looked at which swimmers did the best, which ones qualified ...

JOANNA STAREK: We did find a bizarre relationship.

ROBERT: ... the swimmers who said—the ones who were the liars, who said no to all these questions ...

JOANNA STAREK: Do you enjoy your bowel movements?

WOMAN: No.

JOANNA STAREK: Have you ever thought about killing yourself?

WOMAN: No.

JOANNA STAREK: Have you ever thought about raping someone?

MAN: No.

ROBERT: ... consistently ...

JOANNA STAREK: They were the winners.

ROBERT: The fastest and most successful swimmers were the ones who, on the questionnaire, according to Harold and Ruben, lied to themselves.

JOANNA STAREK: Yes. I do think a little bit of deception is not necessarily a bad thing.

ROBERT: It might even be a crucial thing. Just for example, I want you to listen to these Olympic track athletes. We got these interview clips from the sound artist Ben Rubin. And listen to how these athletes describe the process of getting ready to race.

[MALE ATHLETE #1: We believe we're invincible because if we go in there with any other thought, there's no chance of us accomplishing our goal.]

[FEMALE ATHLETE #1: Well, of course, I always win in my thoughts. [laughs]]

[MALE ATHLETE #2: I have the ability to catch this person. It's gonna happen.]

[FEMALE ATHLETE #2: Take your head off. Leave your head at home. Leave your brain at home today.]

[FEMALE ATHLETE #3: When I step on the runway, I just relax myself. You are the best. And I go.]

ROBERT: And more than sports, denying certain facts about the real world around you, according to any number of new studies, produces people who, turns out, are better at business and better at working with teams. And now here's the real kicker: they turn out to be happier people.

HAROLD SACKEIM: We—the questionnaire served a couple of purposes. One of the things that it taught us is that people who were happiest were the ones who were lying to themselves more.

JOANNA STAREK: The people who are the most realistic, that actually see the world exactly as it is, tend to be slightly more depressed than others.

ROBERT: Time and time again, researchers have found that depressed people lie less.

HAROLD SACKEIM: They see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves: what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people. And the problem is they're right. And so maybe it's the way we help people is to help them be wrong.

ROBERT: It might just be that hiding ideas that we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by.

HAROLD SACKEIM: We're so vulnerable to being hurt that we're given the capacity to distort as a gift.

JAD: Well, that's it for us. If you want any more information on anything you heard this hour, check our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And this is Radiolab.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: You have two new messages.]

[JUDE HOFFNER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad with Lulu Miller, Rob Christiansen, Ellen Horne, Justin Paul and Soren Wheeler. Production support by Amber Seely, Lasca Kebbell, Jed Teres, Sara Pellegrini, Arielle Lasky, Heather Radke, Michael O'Ryan McManus and Sally Herships. Special thanks to me, Jude Hoffner, Jane Dumestre ...]

[RUBEN GUR: ... and Scott Robinson. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio. Bye.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.