Dr. Rebecca Wilcoxon

Oh, that's so funny.

Yes, I was.

I was making it up.

It's just that I had hard evidence.

And, yeah, I was just being nasty and said it to him.

But then...

Yeah, every now and then he'd be telling me something to hold his face really still and go, you're lying.

That's when I knew I wanted to study psychology, I think.

Your lie detection ability, it approximates chance.

Judging lies via non-verbal behaviour is, has, will be connected to wrongful convictions.

So the behaviours that people associate with lying include

is overshifting, like in your chair or when you're standing, so posture shifting, not looking someone in the eye, so gaze aversion, and nervous type behaviours, so... Fidgeting.

Brushing off, you know, yeah.

Yeah, but any nervous type behaviour is particularly like shaking.

So it seems people worldwide, including people in the criminal justice system, believe that you can tell lying from non-verbal behaviour.

So it's a really curious thing because we can tell a lot from non-verbal behaviour.

So if you and I are...

At my husband's funeral and I look over to you and sort of smack a bit and wink, you're going to want to call the police immediately and you're going to be very concerned.

We all have people in our lives where you can just give them a certain look and they know what you're thinking.

But when it comes to lie detection, it is a very, very dangerous means of detecting lies.