ScienceStuffIs your feline friend fibbing? Is your dog duplicitous? Jorge dives into the world of animal lying and finds out if they have the same tells as humans. Special guest: science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal.
Hey, everyone, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My name is horthe Cham and today in the program, we'll be asking the question do our pets lie to us? It's a question that pet owners have been asking themselves for centuries. Is my feline friend fibbing? Is my dog duping me with deceit? We're gonna tackle the general question of whether animals can lie, and we're gonna ask if they have the same tells that humans do, can you catch them in the act. We're going to talk with a biologist and also a brain scientist to get to the bottom of this. Now, this is a special episode because today's question comes from a friend of mine, and not just a friend, a famous friend. Mary Robinette Kowal is a well known science fiction writer. She's only one of eighteen people in history to have won all three major science fiction awards, that's the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locusts. And she's asking this question for a very peculiar reason. She's taught her cat to talk, but now she's wondering if her cat is lying to her. So here is my chat with science fiction author Mary Robinett Kowal, answering her question of whether our pets are being perfidious that means they're lying anyways, enjoy.
My question is I want to know about animals lying and if they have the same kind of tells that humans have.
Yeah, that's a great question. What made you think of this question?
What made me think of it is I have a cat who uses buttons to talk. Were part of a study. There's thousands of animals in this study out of University of San Diego. But we're also part of this very large movement of people whose animals use buttons to talk. It's called augmentative inner species communication. It started with a woman named Christina Hunger in twenty nineteen. She was a speech language therapist who basically thought, what happens if I use the same techniques that I use with my nonverbal patients if I use them with my new puppy. And she spawns this global movement. So, Elsie, my cat, has one hundred and twenty word vocabulary, and she, to all appearances, will lie to me. For instance, I had just given her the button for sleepy, and you model it for them the same way you'd model for a child. And then she said bedroom lie down, sleepy, and you know, I'd been in the kitchen. I was making my lunch. But I'm like, I'm going to abandon lunch. I'm going to model this. Let's go lie down. And so I walk into the bedroom and I lie down. I'm like, why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch.
She fooled you, she fooled me to the bedroom to leave the room. I feel like you're living in a science fiction world.
I am.
I am, yes for that story from up the Pixar movie with the dog with the speaker.
Yeah, it is like the way I describe it is, I am living with a non he an intelligence who is an el toddler covered in fur and an alien.
Oh man, I feel like I could spend the rest at the end of you just asking you about this movement and your pet. Yeah, but if I'm going to try to answer your question.
We should get to it.
Yes, please do Okay?
And now I'm not an animal expert or psychologist, so I didn't know the answer. But fortunately I do know someone who happens to be both of those things. So I reached out to my friend Katie Golden, and Katie is a podcaster. She's a host of a podcast called Creature Feature, and she's a trained behavioral biologist and a trained psychologist. I thought perfect person to ask this question. Okay, so here is her first part of the answer.
There's obviously a ton of deception in nature. You look at a leaf insect or stickbug, it's being deceptive, right, It's disguised.
As a leaf or stick camouflage.
Yeah, it's camouflage. So like, there's there's so much deception in the natural world. You know, there's even deception on the microbial level, like viral DNA tricking the immune system into allowing it to go through the body. You know, there's so many levels of deception. But I feel like what your question and what Mary's question is kind of getting at is lying, which to me feels different from like passive deception. Like if you're born as a leaf insect and you look like a leaf, you're not trying to trick anyone necessarily, that's just how you are. But evolution has pushed you into this state. When you look more and more like this leaf or like the stick, you tend to survive more. So it's a type of deception. But to me, it doesn't feel like lying. Lying feels like I am communicating something to you directly that is false and intentionally, so like I am intentionally misleading you to get what I want or to avoid consequences.
So I think you're saying the concept of lying in this context of the question, it's more about playing mind games. You're not just like wearing some sort of suit to help you hide. If you're you're intentionally aware of the other organism or person out there, and you're intentionally doing something to mess with their minds.
Yeah. One of my favorite examples of lying without any vocalization is in squirrels, where squirrels will bury a ton of nuts and they have to do this to survive the winter, so that they have these nut caches, and so once things are barren and there's not as much food, then they can dig them up and eat them. And one thing that squirrels will do is they'll try to steal each other's nut cases, because why spend all this time looking for nuts when you can just see another squirrel bearing a nut, remember where they buried the nut, and then steal it. And so squirrels have come up with a way to combat the thieves, and that is by deceiving them intentionally with a behavior which is pretending to bury a nut while a thief is watching and then leaving the area, and as the thief is busy sort of trying to dig up that nut for itself, then it buries the nut for real. So it's this intentional perception of like, look, I'm bearing a nut, and then the thief goes there and looks for it and then.
Doesn't find anything, and then it gets ah nuts eggs.
That's the one squirrel joke that they make.
Yes, So then a squirrel will pretend to hide a nut because it knows that it's being watched by another squirrel. Now is that proven would only do this fake hiding nut behavior if it knows it's being watched.
I believe they've found that they do more of the hiding behavior when they think they're being observed.
When we come back, Katie will tell us an example of animals actually telling a lie, and then she'll tell us how she thinks her dog is lying to her. You're listening to sign stuff. Welcome back to science stuff. Katie had another interesting example, and this one does involve telling a lot.
There's another animal, which is maybe one of my favorite liars, and this one is actually lying verbally, so we're getting really close to kind of human lies. Right. So, alarm calls are done by an animal to warn its family that a predator is about. And sometimes it's really specific. Sometimes they're like they'll have a call that's lookout. It's a hawk, look out, it's a snake, look out, it's like a coyote, you know, different calls for different predators. So there's this animal called the fork tailed drongo, which sounds kind of like an insult, like, does not sound nice. There are a species of bird that lives in South Africa. They look kind of like a blackbird, but they have a little bit of a thicker beak and a forked tail. And so these birds will watch other animals handling a food item and then issue an alarm call. But this is a false alarm. They're crying, they're saying, I see something, uh oh, And it's either mimicking the alarm call of that species, like say a meer cat alarm call, or they're using their own alarm call. And something that's kind of interesting about alarm calls is animals learn the alarm calls of other species because that helps them. Right, if you hear some other animal using an alarm call, you're like, oh, well they think something's up, so I should also run. And so these birds, these drongos, learn that they can either mimic an alarm call or use their own type of alarm call and animals will run away. And they do this when they are observing their targets, they're victims eating food or handling food. And then once their victims have run away because basically they've been lied to, they've been told there's a predator, then the drangle goes in and eats the food. And in this case, I know for a fact that they have done research where they've found that they do more of these false alarm calls when they are watching an animal handling food directly. So it is very linked to an awareness of like, look that's food I want. I can get it to run away if I fake an alarm call.
Wow, that is amazing. It makes me sort of have any immediate humanizing reaction. It makes me not trust this animal, or it makes me think of this animal as being deceptive or not a good person.
Yeah, we make a moral judgment.
So birds lie too, Mary, that's so cool. They literally cry wolf.
Yes, that is amazing. This is a surprise to maybe and also a moment of like, well, of course some bird would have gone like, oh, that worked, well, let's do that again.
And I like this example because it's sort of like the classic hey, look behind you, or like well there's a tiger coming for you to fool somebody you're trying to take advantage of.
Yeah, oh no gods.
In terms of verbal lying. So I don't have a study here, but I do have an anecdote of my dog. She will verbally lie to me about danger when she sees something outside the window. She does her job as a little guard dog, even though I didn't hire her. I don't know who did. But she barks at pigeons, at whatever, like any birds, any activity, another dog barking. She has a certain sound, a certain tone to that bark. Her hackles raise, her tail is stiff. It's alertness, right, like I am in a protective mode and there is something out there and I am alerting you, which again is not something you see in wolves. This is a dog specific trait that we've bred into them. And so she'll do this right, But if I'm about to leave the apartment, she'll bark, but her tone's very different. She's relaxed, her tail's down, but she's looking out the window, and her body language is otherwise very like relaxed and calm, but she barks, and her tone is different when she's barking and she's staring out and there's nothing there, right, there's nothing out the window. And I think she's doing this every time I'm about to leave, to basically say like, don't leave. There's something weird, there's something interesting or weird over here. You should stay. So she's trying to lie to me about there being something at the window.
What are you doing, Katies, there's a pigeon out there. Pigeons are dangerous.
Stay in exactly, which I find is so interesting. And the fact that her tone kind of is different, so it's like she's trying to make it sound convincing, but I can kind of tell the difference. She has a different sort of tone, a different sort of like body language. Everything's a little bit different when she's lying and I see there's like literally nothing out there, versus when she actually sees something. I look out and there's like a pigeon, which you know, big deal, thanks.
Cookie, meaning Cookie is not good at lying, Like she tells that you can tell she's.
Lying, right, which I only know because I know her baseline behavior, and I also know dog body language, right, like tail being stiff and the hackles being raised. There's a lot like the stiffness in the body can show you like how anxious or alert a dog is, and whereas if the tail's lower and they seem more relaxed, but then they're barking and like running around in a circle, you're like, hmmm, it's interesting.
It's like smart enough to think about lying to you so that you don't go out, but not smart enough to notice her own tails.
Well, it's probably hard to control those too, because like a lot of those tells are not something that she has executive control over, right, Like the same thing with humans. We can't control everything we do. Maybe with practice, we can control our heart rate and our sweating or something, but it is really difficult for a human to control everything, right, Like you can't. If you're like I is twitching a little bit, you can't turn that off necessarily. So we don't have complete control over our body language, nor do I think dogs don't have complete control, but they have some control, and sometimes they'll manipulate that to get what they want.
Wow, what if you put Cookie in like acting lessons, you never leave the house.
Yeah, you know, if Cookie got an oscar, I would stay home with her all day.
One of the reasons I was curious about this is that there are self soothing actions that humans will do when they're lying. Not always, but often people will fidget a little bit more, or they will fidget less because they're aware that they need to look super calm. So there are these things that people will do. There's a study that people tend to look up into the left a little bit when they are telling a lie versus when they're accessing a memory that really happened.
Yeah.
The part of your question was do animals lie? Do they have tells? And do they correlate to tells in humans?
Yeah?
Right, If there is something common we have with animals when we lie, does that mean that it's genetic and we can fight it or is it just cultural? Part of your question was or tells cultural or not?
Yeah?
Okay, Yeah, So I got really interested in this question also, and so I reached out to a psychologist at the University of Oslo who's been publishing a lot recently on the kind of neuroscience of lying.
Oh, I'm so excited by this.
Okay, this is Tim's description what he does.
Yes, I'm a psychologist. In my area is cognitive psychology, so memory and mental processes, how we think, And more recent years I have spent time doing research on how cognitive processes link up to emotional processes, more recently specifically looking at light detection, which is pretty important task or job throughout the legal system. You know, from the time a crime is committed, when the police turn up and they want to look for witnesses or victims or perpetrators. You know, the task of deciding, well, you know, is this person telling me the truth or art is quite important all the way through the detective work into the court system. You know, you have witnesses there and the jury or the judges have to decide, you know, well they can't both be telling the truth, so which one is it? So it's an important topic, you know, obviously important in a practical sense.
Yeah, so Tim, doctor Brennans are as a psychologists. But then when the lawyer approached him and said Hey, you're someone who knows about emotions and things like that, can you come and be an expert on this case? And that's how he got a really interesting idea of lying, because it's so crucial in a legal case, right, like two people are saying different things. Who's telling the truth? How do you determine who is guilty? In some cases a matter of life and death? Right, Yeah, although he says in Norway they don't have death penalty, so it's a matter of life in prison.
I guess does he talk to you about ways he can tell?
Yeah?
Yeah.
The basic question I asked him was what's going on in your body when you're telling a lie? Neuroscience psychology point of view, what's your body doing?
So, what's happening in our body and brains when we're telling a lie? We're deliberately trying to deceive. Most of us on a daily basis, we know how it feels to tell a lie, and so from the inside you can feel a bit of stress and you're wondering, is this person understanding that I'm not quite telling the truth here? And so on. That's one of the main things is that the stress is associated with lying and mental effort, because it's much easier just to tell the truth and retrieve from memory rather than having to keep track of what you've said to whom and which details you've made up and so on. There's more mental effort involved. One line of research it hopes to be able to pinpoint, for example, where in the brain this extra effort is being expended. And generally people are looking at the cognitive load hypothesis and to say, okay, is there a way for measuring cognitive load or rather imposing cognitive load. So if you're telling the truth, you should be all right, but if you're lying, you've already got the extra cognitive blowed and this will tip you over the edge so that it all collapses. And there's some research in favor of that sort of idea that you can distinguish between liars and truth tellers by imposing cognitive blow to a certain extent.
Wow, that's cool. And then there's another part of my brain that's like every ADHD person is just going to look like a liar if you're just putting more targahiveload on us.
Yeah, yeah, it seems like you know the way he looks at it, And I guess scientists look at it is that this idea of tells, it kind of boils down to what your brain is trying to do. Right, You're trying to tell a story that you know is not true, and so therefore there's two things associated with that. One is stress. One is that he might be worried about the consequences of lying. You might be worried about what if I get caught? How is it going to look? And you also have to think more than you would if you were telling the truth, because when you telling the truth, you're just maybe recalling and then spitting it out. When you're trying to lie, you have to think about what is the lie? What was the actual thing that happened? Might be self consistent? How do I make sure that I'm telling the right lie? Yeah, And so that can then manifest as some of these things that we call tells. If you're thinking extra hard telling you lie, you might stammer more, or you might say oh more, or you might feel the stress, and so you avoid the other person's gaze.
Yeah.
So that because the information that I have about lying comes from reading about basically spies, cia interrogators and things like that, where they're looking at the external behaviors, whereas doctor Brennan is looking at the root causes of those behaviors, which is so interesting.
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You can talk about tells, but really it's helpful to just think about what is your brain trying to do when you're trying to lie? Right?
Oh yeah, I'm so excited. This is very cool.
Now, an interesting thing about that is if you offer people around the world and there's this big study being done a few years ago asking people from seventy five different countries and people agree around the planet that if you don't look me in the eyes and you're looking a bit shifty and possibly lying, you know, this is deemed to be a q to deception. And in all these different countries, over all these different languages, was finding huge similarities.
This is this international constortium of basically lying scientists or scientist that's dirty lying. And they did this huge survey where they send the questionnaires to like forty people in each of seventy five countries and across the world there are a lot of similar answers, meaning like this thing cuts across cultures in South America and North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and so The number one thing that most people say that is a tell is that you're avoiding eye contact.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, you're verting gaze. And so something like seventy percent of all cultures in the world mentioned this as a clear sign that you're lying, which I think makes me wonder is it easier to lie over zoom?
Then right?
Nobody expects you to the eye.
Yeah, oh, that is interesting.
A lot of these cultures mentioned nervousness. You're a little incoherent, You're not making a lot of sense, you're making too many body movements, too many facial expressions, you're sort of inconsistent in your story. You're saying um a lot or uh, you're pausing a lot. There was another one of the signs that people mentioned.
Interesting. Do you know if in that study that's seventy percent with the eye contact and being important, do you know how that relates to the culture's overall relationship with eye contact.
Yeah, that's a great question. An interesting fact about the study that they found was that it was very universal except in cultures for which direct eye contact is considered maybe rude. So, for example, some parts in the Middle East, I think it's considered rude to look someone directly in the eye, maybe if you don't know them, or if you're supposed to be showing some respect to them. And so in those countries, eye contact was not high on the telltale signs of line.
Interesting. So it's something that crosses a lot of different cultures. But if you have a culture where people are socialized to think that eye contact is impolite, then that que becomes not a meaningful queue, right.
Because they know that if you're not looking in the eye just means something else where. I imagine like if there's a culture where people move their arms allot when they talk, or they say oh a lot, or they take a lot of pauses while they talk, then definitely those are not going to be things that people say are clues about lying. Don't go anywhere you're listening to science stuff.
So this makes me think that dogs, which are an evolutionary bye product of humans being like, let's tinker with this wolf, but bread to cohabitate with us, and eye contact is very important for dogs, that dogs would also have eye contact as a potential tell, but that cats, which are not as interested in eye contact might not have eye contact as a tell.
Well, There's an interesting study that I found related to dogs, which is that, you know, dogs didn't evolve out their nature like elephants or lions. What we call dogs really kind of evolve from walls with us. Yeah, they wouldn't be dogs without humans kind of basically. Yeah, And so dogs evolve ways to gain our sympathy, and one of them for those ways is to look at us in the eye. But more importantly, some scientists think this ability to kind of shed tears on sort of on cue whenever they need to get something from me or gain your sympathy.
Wow.
So if they want to connect with you or they have connected with you, it will trigger some hormone and then that hormone will trigger them to shed extra tear or so there at least to have sort of like watery Wow, I know the way they're sort of lying to you when they with puppy eyes. I don't know's I know, a blurry line.
Yeah. Like I had read that dogs had developed eyebrows basically to be more appealing to humans. Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, that they have significantly more muscles around their eyes to create the iron show more white as well than wolves. And the speculation is that it is something that happened specifically because it makes them more appealing, right right, yeah, not expressive, whereas cats who did not do that. Having a conversation with a cat is like talking to someone whose entire face has been botoxed.
Like they don't care.
Yeah, yeah, they would be good poker players, right, exactly.
There's a CTV these commonalities between animals and humans just from the idea of what lying is, which is that you're pretending that to do something, or to say something, or just state something that you know it's not true. So there's a common base and we sort of see that with Katie and her dog and how she can tell that the dog is maybe lying because the dog is not a good actor. Yeah, and we see that also. It seems in humans. It appears that there are common adalytes, even among cultures. However, the plot to us here is that Tim doesn't believe in tells at all. Oh wow, yeah, here's what he said.
So there's really dissociation between what people believe and what the research shows. So we have solid research showing that nonverbal cues are at best faint, you know, faint cues to deception. Can't there so far from being usable in the forensic context, the sort of figure that we would normally throw around is fifty four percent, where fifty to fifty is the chance level. Right, So it's as if we humans can pick something up, but just very little, you know. And the research has been done in a whole wide variety of situations, also situations that are really meaningful for people, where it turns out some people have been lying in a press conference about whether they knew anything about the disappearance of one of their loved ones, you know. And then afterwards you can when you've got a set of those press conferences, and you can determine, Okay, this group of people, well, they have nothing to do with it, this group of people, they turn out to be the perpetrator. The question can then be asked of independent observers participants in experiments, what can you tell which of these people are lying? You know? And we just can't.
Wow. Yeah huh, But like I hear that, and I understand it, and I don't question it. And also I think everyone has experienced a thing where you've been talking to someone and you know that they're lying to you, and you're right about it.
Yeah, there's sort of this conundrum right where intuitively we know that tells exist and sometimes you can tell if someone's lying, and yet people like Tim are saying these non verbal cues, this idea of being able to tell someone's lying is not true. Like at best, he said, we can guess if someone's lying fifty four percent of the time.
I wonder this is such a semantic split. It is a difference between lying and acting.
What do you mean?
So there's a really famous quote by Marlon Brando when people ask him, you know, what the secret to acting was, and he's like, I'm just lying. That's all I'm doing. And when you think about it, that is what an actor's job is. An actor's job is to fake an emotion in order to convince you that they are experiencing the things that they're experiencing, but none of it's true.
Yeah, So I talked to Tim for quite a bit, and I think that's his main point.
You know.
The idea is that when we're telling a lie, we do have this connective break in our heads that might manifest itself in your body doing things that you can't control. But the problem is is that liars are also very smart, and basically, if you're a liar. You've learned very early on in your lying career, perhaps that if you don't look at people in the eye, then they're going to know you're lying. Right, So good liars know to look people in the eye when they lie, or you know, they're smart enough, unlike Katie's dog, to pick up on the fact that they have these tells, and so good liars they're good at hiding these tells. Basically what actors do to just kind of convince their bodies that they're not in a stressful situation. And so what the translations to the data is that basically you can't really rely on these tells, or that if you do, you're going to be fooled by good.
Lifety four percent.
Yeah, yeah, and it's not just tells that Tim also has looked into things like polygraph tests. Oh and so his general perspective is this.
But the question is to what extent can people adjust these and compensate and hide the fact that they're lying and they play the system, And the empirical evidence as it stands would suggest that sort of machine is not reliable enough to what would one want in the legal system. Ninety nine points something percent you know, but we're just not there, partly because of the issue of what it called countermeasures that you can take when taking a polygraph, so you can confuse the machine. You can trigger your own physiology either by thinking something if you just at random moment start thinking something horrible or exciting, or if you have a stone in your shoe that you press your big toe on every now and then you get the same sort of activation. You know, so I'll be ooh, there's something here, but you'd just be confusing, adding noise to the whole system, you know.
Interesting, So then what's the average accuracy of something like a polygraph test?
Yeah, I mean there are different variants of it, different uses, but to put one figure on it, it's around seventy percent. So it's higher than you and me observing people and guessing. So it's obviously picking something up. But like I mentioned about the brain data, it's pretty messy data and there's lots of loopholes in there.
Yeah, so I think that's where it stands. It's like tells do exist if someone is it a novel liar, Like kids are not good liars because they don't have a lot of experience lying for you, know the kinds of things that Tim looks at, which is like ego cases, These things are basically useless in a courtroom to say that someone didn't pass a polygraph test, or to say they look to the right or they look to the lab. Basically you can't really use that because even though you might have statistical data that says, oh, you know, sixty percent of the time that someone looks at the right, they're lying, that's not going to fly in a corner. Right, Or even I guess with your cat, right, your cat could also be becoming a better liar as you interact with your cat, right, Like, if your cat tries to lie and sees that you didn't buy it, then the cat might be learning like, oh wait, maybe it's because I press it too hard or went too quickly to press it or something, and your cat maybe is intelligent enough to figure out that, oh, if I do this, then Mary robin Att is going to believe me.
Yeah that's terrifying.
Yeah, I mean that's basically Tim's point is that there's really no way to tell someone's lie. I mean, you might get a sense of, well, I'm fifty four percent sure they're lying, but really, if you need to make an important decision based on that you can.
Huh, So I guess then the answer to my question is that animals do lie, but that tells just don't exist.
Yeah, basically, animals lie. They might have tells. There is a sort of physiological connection between line and some sort of non verbal cue or some sort of things that you do. But it's so easily hackable, especially for humans who are really smart and can learn after the first lie what works and what doesn't work, that you probably don't want to bet the house on thinking that someone is lying based on the tell.
This is amazing to me. I am absolutely in love with all of this.
Well, there is a little bit of hope. So Tim has been thinking about this a lot, and so his basic solution, or the thing that he proposes is basically the only way you can really tell that someone is lying is by catching them in a lie. So he thinks, you don't waste time with polygraph tests in the court system, just do good detective work. Yeah, ask the person what happened, and then hide some of the information that you have, Like you know, you have cameras that were pointing at him when that person did it. But don't tell me. I have the footage and then ask them what happened, and then you can catch them in a line, and then that can then tell you if they're lying about other things.
Oh interesting, Yeah.
Like data, basically have data or try to outsmart the liar in some way.
Yeah, Like Elsie has tried to send me out of the room on a couple of other occasions to go after my cheese sandwiches. And so now I know that if I am preparing food and she suggests that I need to leave the room, that I need to put whatever food I'm preparing in the microwave so she can't get to.
It, right right, Yeah, yes, I'm sorry to say, Mary Robinette, you can't trust your cat.
No, No, I can trust her on a lot of things, but unfortunately nothing involving food.
All right, Well, thank you so much, Mary Robinette. It's been a pleasure to explore the idea of not telling the truth.
Yeah, thank you so much for doing all of the research on that. That was fascinating and I have a feeling that it is going to turn up in a novel at some point.
All right, Hey, that's cool. Which part the cat or the squirrel, the.
Squirrel, the school cat, the cat has already turned up, and so many things.
Well, that's fascinating to see process that in real time and to see that seed being planted for maybe a future novel.
So interesting. Thank you so much for this.
Oh, thank you for joining us. Thanks to Mary Robinett Kwal for being on the show. You can find her award winning book The Cut Collating Stars wherever books are sold. You've been listening to Science Stuff, the production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me Or hitch Ham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. Can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast, and please tell your friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
