Quirkology

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Authors: Richard Wiseman
three men said that they had been asked by the People’s Republic of China to discover the remains of a prehistoric “Peking Man.” The researchers then showed the clips to groups of people. One group watched the show as normal, hearing both the sound and seeing the images. Another group heard only the soundtrack of the shows; a third saw only the images. The results demonstrated the importance of the language of lying. Those who saw just the images were terrible at spotting the bluffing contestants, whereas those who heard just the soundtrack were surprisingly skilled at working out who was about to be revealed as the truth-teller.
     
    It is time to test your new lie-detection skills. A few years ago, a science show called The Daily Planet, which aired on the Canadian Discovery Channel, asked me to help conduct another national lie-detection experiment. They persuaded one of my childhood heroes, the Hollywood actor and comedian Leslie Nielsen (star of Airplane, Naked Gun, and Police Squad! ), to be our guinea pig. Nielsen was interviewed twice by the show’s host, Jay Ingram. In each interview, Nielsen was asked about his favorite food. As with the Sir Robin experiment, one of the answers was a complete pack of lies and the other was the honest truth. Can you spot the lie this time?
     
    Interview 1
     
    What is your favorite food?
     
    What is my favorite food? What is my favorite food? And I can take my pick out of absolutely anything? Hmm . . . boy, that’s a toughie, I tell you. It really depends. I guess . . . my favorite food is ketchup.
     
     
     
    Ketchup! Why do you like ketchup so much?
     
    I don’t know. I think I am one of those people who is capable of putting ketchup on absolutely anything, or everything, whichever way you want to look at it. Yes, ketchup.
     
    I am thinking really mainly about something that is a holdover from the time when I was a little boy. You know, how you go looking for it—you say, “Hey, Mommy, give me a piece of bread and jam.” And I remember the time when my mother, she said, “We don’t have any jam, Leslie, we don’t have any jam.” I said, “But, but, but.” And she said, “I’ll give you something.” And she had a piece of bread and butter, and she put ketchup on it. And smoothed it over and so on. I’m addicted to it, and, I know I would catch myself, when I was . . . if I was feeling good around the house, no matter what it is, and I got hungry, I would head for the refrigerator and get out a piece of bread and butter and put ketchup on it. It made me feel even better.
     
    Interview 2
     
    So, Leslie Nielsen, what is your favorite food?
     
    It’s becoming a favorite for me . . . it’s at the head of my list . . . I’m really only going by what comes into my mind first. And . . . you know, sour cream.
     
    You take a dollop of sour cream and you put it on guacamole, for example, or . . . I think it is because I have got into a Mexican tinge here, and I can remember my mother, for example, when I was a kid, she would eat a tomato sandwich with mayonnaise on it. Well mayonnaise, later on, it looked like sour cream, it would be the last thing in the world that I would want to touch.
     
    And . . . errr . . . so I really stayed away from it, but today . . . it’s a very unusual flavor, and you can get it more or less low fat, which I am very careful and cautious about, and it is a new taste for me, but it is something that I am growing very rapidly to like very much—sour cream.
     
     
     
    As you might already have guessed, Leslie loves ketchup and hates sour cream. The transcripts contain the linguistic patterns that are typical of lying and truth telling. First, the lie is far shorter than the truth—Leslie used about 220 words when he spoke about ketchup and roughly 150 when he described his “love” of sour cream. The transcripts also contain evidence of the “psychological distancing” associated with lying. When Leslie tells the truth, he

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