Noah Zandan: The language of lying

The language of lying

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we've spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach? Noah Zandan uses some famous examples of lying to illustrate how we might use communications science to analyze the lies themselves. [Directed by Nadav Arbel, narrated by Noah Zandan].

People encounter up to 200 lies each day, yet traditional lie-detection tools, from polygraphs to brain scans, often miss the mark. Research shows that deception changes our language, not just our physiology. When telling a lie, individuals use fewer self-references, more negative words, and tend to oversimplify or convolute their statements. Famous examples reveal that real confessions sound more personal and direct, while lies distance the speaker from the truth.