“How would you forget how much you got paid to shoot the president of the United States,” Maltin asks, “if you can remember the color of the gun, and the date, time and place you met with Lee Harvey Oswald?” He shrugs slightly, alters his tone, halts in his speech. At that moment, Files exhibits a cluster of behaviors not seen elsewhere on the tape. Where Files trips up, Maltin says, is when the interviewer asks how much he was paid to kill Kennedy. “You look for all the indicia of dishonesty – change in tone, pitch, hesitation, change in body language, perspiration. “He is fantastic,” Maltin says, with grudging admiration. Files, an Illinois prison inmate who claims he shot John F.
Pathological lisr how to#
Phillip Maltin, a Los Angeles lawyer who lectures on how to identify people who are lying, was once asked by a group of conspiracy buffs to examine the videotaped confession of James E. In fact, the people who think they’re good at it actually score lower. Studies show most of us aren’t very good at identifying liars. A successful lie requires at least two parties, one to tell it and one to believe it. Korean stem-cell pioneer Hwang Woo-suk, his career in ruins, recently apologized for claiming to have cloned a human embryo.īut as much as we castigate people for lying, some of the blame lies with ourselves. Rosie Ruiz has become a punch line, still insisting she won the 1980 Boston Marathon, 26 years after she jumped into the race near its end. But we have less tolerance for people who refuse to come clean when the evidence against them is overwhelming.įor years, Pete Rose maintained he never bet on baseball – and was banned from the game. Answering in the affirmative doesn’t prove that you’re honest – it proves you’re a fool. If your wife asks you if she’s getting fat, there is but one correct reply. Our culture accepts a certain amount of deception – even demands it.
Pathological liars had a surplus of white matter, the wiring that can provide tools for deceit, and a deficit of gray matter, which helps restrain the impulse to lie. Recently, University of Southern California scientists offered a possible physical explanation, finding proof of brain abnormalities among people who habitually lie and cheat. “The so-called pathological liar has learned from an early age that they get punished more often for telling the truth than they do for lying,” says John Rooney, an emeritus professor of psychology at La Salle University. They develop the moral compass known as a conscience. But most kids, as they grow older, go to school and interact with peers and come to learn the difference between truth and imagination, right and wrong. Young children are notorious liars – and that’s normal, psychologists say, given their difficulty distinguishing fact from thought, dream or desire. But some people step beyond the polite lies that color everyday discourse and into pathology. How could Coleman have lied so long and so well to so many?
His guilt was definitively proved only last week, through new DNA tests. He lied as he sat strapped in Virginia’s electric chair in 1992, proclaiming his innocence with such sincerity that his backers pressed on even after his death. He lied to the courts, to his attorneys, to the news media, to the aunt and uncle who stood by him, to thousands of supporters who took up his cause. For more than 11 years, from the moment of his arrest to the moment of his execution, Roger Keith Coleman lied.
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