Security screening at the Clinton Engineer Works. Lie detector test (Ed Wescot ~1945)
I’m a die-hard fan of the show “lie to me”. First there’s Tim Roth, who is absolutely great at any role, but that’s not the reason. I’m also a fan of shows that would intuitively be rejected by critical psychiatry advocates. After all, they rely on that same psychiatric nosology that we have been showing to be scientifically unsustainable. But I like them. I even re-watch many episodes. Examples are “Criminal Minds” and “Mindhunter”. And why do I do that? Because I am fascinated by deceptive behavior.
Yes, profiling is a highly controversial issue at the societal level and here I stop discussing it. Because all neurotypicals are equipped with the ability to perform deceptive behavior, lie and con, detect lies in others’ speech and profile them. Yes: neurotypicals can profile.
“Criminal Minds” was the first of my obsessions. Is picking up on subtle behavioral cues a trainable skill? If so, how can I learn that? Can I become a profiler without some innate ability to identify social tells?
When I watched “Lie to me”, I downloaded everything I could about micro-expressions. If people were discourses, not only I could learn the interpretive methodology but I could excel in it. Because one thing I know is that I’m an exceptionally good analyst.
That was years ago. In theory, I could learn to profile, to detect lies and even to create lies. However, for both tasks - lie detection and lie production -, neural abilities other than deliberate observation and reason are recruited. I don’t have those. I could memorize 200 micro-expressions and still be the same sitting duck for scammers that I am. They happen faster than my rational abilities.
I still watch the shows and I’m still fascinated by deceptive behavior, which explains why I’m fascinated by psychopaths: they excel in it. We, autistic people, however, will never be good: lying is not a skill. It’s an ability, a capacity. It can be developed or not into a skill, used, overused or underused. It cannot be easily acquired by those of us not neurologically equipped for that. This is also called “mind blindness” or an inability in “perspective-taking”, which would depend on having a functional theory of mind.
Can some lie detection ability be developed by autistic people? Research suggests that it can, but through a completely conscious and effortful reasoning about the liar’s mind. While research suggests that deceitful behavior requires higher executive functions, that autistic people have an executive function deficit, the findings that suggests autistic people can train themselves or be trained to rationally detect lies poses a dilemma: which is it? Do autistic people lack executive cognitive functions or do they use them even more than neurotypicals?
Whether the autistic spectrum deficit is in neural functions associated with “mindreading”, or with other manifestations of controlled behavior, is unclear and requires not only more evidence but also better conceptual constructs.
Deceptive behavior’s innate, implicit nature is not just detecting and making efficient lies. Deceptive behavior is at the core of social skills, professional success and control over interpersonal relations. The ability to constantly and effortlessly monitor ongoing social interactions, modulating one’s response to specific situations, means making fast decisions as to how much true content to disclose, to conceal and even what possible false information and clues to reveal. These abilities are “social lubricants” for everyday activities, like social rituals, and strategic competitive weapons in situations such as professional interactions.
Yang and Baillargeon (2013) argue that difficulty in understanding social acting (but not false beliefs) mediates the link between autistic traits and ingroup relationships (that’s the title of their article). “Social acting” is defined as “the prosocial pretense that adults routinely produce to maintain positive relationships with their ingroup”. Yes, social acting, the actual functioning of social life, depends on the ability to deceive.
There it is, then: everything relevant in the neurotypical world depends on deceitful behavior abilities and efficiency. They regulate everything from friendship, defense against hostile approaches in school, to the social aspects of a professional life, which is everything that happens between actual productive work periods. No wonder the rate of bullying (bullies have great social skills and highly developed deceptive behavior), social isolation (and consequent depression, anxiety and suicide) and unemployment are so much more prevalent among people in the autistic spectrum.
Something that is foundational to neurotypical success is missing in us. There is a lot of controversy concerning what is missing. One of the things that are not missing is moral judgement. The strong reliance on moral judgement combined with the difficulty or complete inability to concoct a lie and to participate effectively in social acting results in a strangely sublime behavior: the moral truth-teller. Autistic people are predominantly moral truth-tellers.
Society pays lip service to the superiority of the moral truth-teller. In fact, moral truth-tellers are penalized by their behavior. Since they suck at social acting, people in the spectrum have a hard time making sense of why they are being mistreated or dismissed when they are doing “everything right”.
Let me give you an example: after you defend a Ph.D. dissertation, you, the candidate to the title, must leave the room and allow the committee to discuss your performance and the quality of your work. In my alma mater, when I defended my dissertation, we received a score (from zero to 10) and qualified accolades. The two possible qualified accolades were: “with honor” and “with distinction”.
My dissertation defense looked like a party at the pub with friends: fun and entertaining. When it was finally over because the sadistic secretary started to harass the committee to end the session, before I was told to leave the room, I was asked whether "the candidate had anything to add”. Up to this point everyone looked happy and relaxed. Well, I had something to add and I honestly thought it was necessary: an institution can only improve through constructive criticism. So I described how the changes in the federal higher education ranking system had created a detrimental situation for graduate students, who found themselves without an advisor overnight (when their advisor supervised students in more than one university). To make things worse, I went on and on about how inter-institutional competition couldn’t be allowed to impair the educational and research missions of the university. The previously happy and relaxed faces became serious and tense. I didn’t even notice that. Maybe being serious was the appropriate thing at that point of the ritual, what do I know? Finally, in a perfectly silent room, I finished and was asked to leave.
When I came back, the committee chair announced that I had been approved with “ten and distinction”. I thought it was great, thanked them and proceeded to pick up my stuff when one of the committee members approached me:
- What the hell were you thinking? Why did you have to say those things? You lost the “honor”!
- I lost the honor?
- Yes! You’ve been approved with ten and distinction!
- … and is that bad?
- Yes, it is bad! It means you screwed up!
Twenty-seven years later this sounds comic (at least I think this is hilarious). However, it was an obvious situation in which neurotypicals ask you a rhetorical question, you are supposed to know it is rhetorical and you must lie and reply: “no, sir, I have nothing to add”.
How failure to understand the logic of local cultures’ social acting impair our ability to obtain and hold a job will be the topic of a different article. Right now I’m interested in the mandatory deceitful behavior in important social interactions.
Another interesting example: when I registered my sole-proprietor business in Brazil, a representative of the City of Osasco came to my house (the address for the business registration) to inspect it. My accountant had told me it was just a formality. When the City guy got there he immediately started to ramble about a certain law and no matter how much I asked him to get to the point and tell me whether there was a legal violation or not, he wouldn’t say anything that I could understand. So I held my hand as in “silence” and called my accountant, whom we will call Peter:
- Peter, the City guy is here and I can’t understand what he’s saying…. yes, he is speaking Portuguese, I understand the words… no, he doesn’t answer any of my questions, he just rambles about some law…
- Marilia, that’s the bribe line. Give him a hundred bucks and that’s it.
- Ok. Thanks.
So I hung up, looked at the City guy and said:
- Sir, why didn’t you tell me that it was the bribe business? You kept rambling and wouldn’t answer any question, I thought you weren’t feeling well. My accountant says it’s a hundred, is that it?
I thought the man was going to have a heart attack. I had never seen anyone that scared. He ran away with lots of “sorry, ma’am”, hopped into his car and disappeared.
- Peter, I think that guy is not well: I offered him the money, he had a fit and ran away.
- … you didn’t say anything about a bribe, did you?
- Of course I did! That’s what you told me it was.
- No… That’s not how you do it…
- What do you mean?
- You have to be more subtle, ask him if there isn’t a way for you to “help him help you”…
- What? I ask him to help me help him to help me?…
- You know what? Let me handle this.
This kind of thing happened to me all my life. I’m sure it’s funny from your side of the screen but my inability to participate in “social acting” has cost me my (traditional) career and a lot of money. One day my sister asked me:
- Why would you say something like that?
- Because it’s the truth? What else can I say?
That’s when I realized that there was something actually different with my perception of reality. All those jokes my friends made about me? There was a deeper truth there.
There are initiatives to help autistic children to lie when it’s socially appropriate. I don’t know how these programs work. I do think that if my mother had told me the truth, that the world was not nice and that there is a social game to play that requires a lot of attention, sometimes concealing the truth and other times even telling a lie, I would be at least a happier person. A less confused person. Instead, she spent her life trying to fix me. She was a master of deception. She could invent as many euphemisms as she wanted. She could twist and bend language according to need. She could lie beautifully.
I never understood why.
Deep inside, I condemned her behavior. I still do. There’s more: if neurotypical social life is founded on deception, who needs to be fixed? Us, the moral truth-tellers, or the dominant neurotypical social acting, based on deception and structured to protect the status quo, oppression, and exploitation?
With this, we come back to the neurodiversity issue. People in the spectrum are not deficient or disabled. We are just differently abled. Perhaps we are differently abled in ways that would be more beneficial to society than the neurotypical standard.