Fun Fact

The psychology of habitual lying has fascinated researchers for decades, and the findings are consistently counterintuitive. Studies show that skilled liars don’t exhibit the nervous behaviors most people associate with deception — increased blinking, gaze aversion, fidgeting — because those behaviors are products of anxiety, and practiced liars simply aren’t anxious about lying. Research by psychologist Bella DePaulo found that people lie in approximately one fifth of their social interactions, most of them minor. The mendacious outlier isn’t someone who lies more often — it’s someone for whom the distinction between truth and falsehood has simply stopped being meaningful.