How do you tell when a politician is lying? The tics, tells and tricks to watch for
They may exaggerate, evade or embellish the truth. They may bloviate, or bluster or blame their memory. But, experts say, smart politicians rarely outright lie.
“People tell each other lies,” the former cabinet minister Christopher Pyne said this week at the start of the ABC documentary Nemesis. The first of a three-part series, it covered Australia’s Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years between 2013 and 2022.
And scattered among the various insults lobbed were many striking examples of politicians directly contradicting each other’s versions of events.
Meanwhile, accusations of lying are being levelled against Labor after it rejigged the stage-three tax cuts.
Perceptions of dishonesty can mean political death, but – as “truth coach” Elly Johnson points out – there is a vast and complicated continuum between “the truth” and “a lie”.
Johnson, who trains people – including in government agencies – in security vetting, is working on a book documenting the 50 (or 60) shades of grey between truth and lies.
“The purpose is to really understand how complex the topics of truth and lies are and how nuanced are the ways that we avoid telling the truth,” she says.
Everyone thinks they’re fundamentally honest, even if they lie, she says. And most prefer to tell the truth – unless it gets in the way of achieving their goals. Then they venture into the grey zone.
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“It might not be a blatant lie,” Johnson says, but it will fall into two main types of mistruths – concealment and fabrication. And there are plenty of subtypes.
“It could be ambiguity, embellishing, being evasive, exaggerating, glossing over, misleading, even things like partial truths. It might be selective amnesia (‘I just can’t recall’).” Other categories “that can happen in politician land”, she says, include:
Deliberate confusion (a deliberate tactic to create confusion, intentionally creating a state of uncertainty or misunderstanding. “Detailed programmatic specificity”, anyone? ).
Diverting attention (redirecting focus away from a specific topic or issue).
Exaggeration (overstating or magnifying the truth to make something appear more significant).
False emotions (displaying an emotion to display or mask the true emotion).
Telling the truth falsely (by accepting an outcome but blaming the wrong thing for it).
“They do exist on a continuum,” says the University of Western Australia cognitive psychology professor Ullrich Ecker. “There are objective truths … but in the middle there’s a lot of grey.”
His research has shown that, at least in the 2018 pre-election prime ministerial contest between Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull, it was hard to find actual lies. “Australian politicians don’t tend to do that, compared to Trump,” he says.
“They’re pretty good at dancing around the actual question, dodging things and not saying things that can be factchecked.”
There’s also a distinction between lying and being a bullshitter – the liar knows the truth or could work it out and chooses not to. The bullshitter simply doesn’t care.
The former prime minister John Howard had core and non-core promises. Abbott once said that the statements of his that should be “taken absolutely as gospel truth” were “those carefully prepared, scripted remarks”.
Political observers often note that politicians answer the question they wish they were asked instead of the one they were actually confronted with.
This can lead to awkward non sequiturs, while others might try “bridging”; glossing over the initial question to get to what you want to talk about. The federal MP Bob Katter gave a memorable example of this in 2017.
When asked about same-sex marriage, he replied: “Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom, as far as I’m concerned, you know.
“But I ain’t spending any time on it because, in the meantime, every three months a person’s torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland.”
The consultant and former Liberal adviser Damon Hunt says, done properly, bridging is an “art form”.
“Smart, experienced politicians do not outright lie,” he says. “The consequences are too dire if they get caught, and it’s too easy to check information these days.
“Lying is politically stupid and will catch up with you eventually, whether it’s the media doing the background checking, or advisers, or the opposition.
“That said, there are lots of other ways of getting your message across, including negative and difficult messaging.
“Bridging is a media technique where you acknowledge the question that has been asked but answer it in a way where you’re really talking about what you want to talk about. You can see experienced politicians do it very well.
Hunt also says that whenever multiple people recount an event, they are likely to all report slightly different versions of what happened. But saying “I can’t recall” doesn’t go down particularly well with the public.
“The advice I give clients is that most of the time the truth comes out,” he says.
“If you tell a porky pie, chances are you’ll get caught out and make things worse. Tell your story, and tell it as strongly as you can, but there are certain parameters you have to work within and being truthful is one of them.”
Ecker says there is plenty at stake with untruthfulness. Globally there are leaders who blatantly lie and some who dispute the very existence of objective truth. “It threatens the whole fabric of democracy, which relies on candid debate in good faith,” he says.
So can we spot a political liar? A psychologist, an ex-FBI agent and a fraud investigator have given their top tips for spotting a liar. The list includes looking out for self-soothing gestures such as facial touching; odd noises or random words; nervous tells. But they also warned that most people can’t spot deception.
Ecker says to watch for politicians avoiding questions, using emotive language and fearmongering.
“Look out for [where] it’s quite obvious that they’re being fed a narrative that is meant to instil fear of a potentially negative outcome or a group of people … where the argument is divisive and pits one group against another,” he says.
Johnson says to look out for “incongruency”, where somebody’s movements don’t reflect their words. Liars might display “deception stress” such as a shaky voice, or avoiding eye contact – but she warns that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
Someone looking stressed doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying. And somebody whose words and actions look congruent could be.
“A liar can still pull that off,” she says. “They can mislead you.
“Especially if they’re practised at it.”
Lying is politically stupid and will catch up with you eventually
Damon Hunt, former Liberal adviser