If you follow this link it will take you to ten short videos that were created as part of a study to see to what extent people give off cues as to whether they are lying or not. Each person was told to either tell the truth or lie in response of a question.
I got 7 right. Of course, random guessing would expect to result in five right but what surprised me was that in the cases that I got right, I was pretty confident of my choice. Of the three I got wrong, I was ambivalent about two and only reluctantly made my selection. Only in one case was I completely bamboozled.
Clearly there were clues that I was picking up on but I could not quite put my finger on what they were. This surprised me because I do not consider myself to be a very observant person nor that sensitive to people’s body language.
Maybe I am underestimating myself. This skill would come in useful for poker if only I enjoyed playing the game.
Sssshhh! You don’t want Ed Brayton to hear that kind of heresy, do you?
I also got 7/10 and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we missed the same ones. Just like you, I was pretty confident of 8/10 of them, of which I got 7 right, and the other two I basically felt like I was guessing at random.
Also, for what it’s worth, I didn’t base any of them off of body language. I’m pretty sure I could have done just as well without the video.
Interesting quiz. I got 7/10 too… and if we’re all seeing the same videos (I’m not certain that’s the case) I’d bet that two of my misses are the same as yours (the 4th and the 8th). All of my choices were at least informed by body language, especially the movement of the eyes--which I know is supposed to be a popular (if discredited) way to tell if someone is lying.