EXCLUSIVE: In Stan’s Poker Face, series star Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale who solves various mysteries with her uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying.
While Charlie’s story is fictional her lie detecting ability isn’t.
Steve Van Aperen is a real-life ‘human lie detector’. First working as a Victorian police officer, Steve has worked on 89 homicide cases and received training from the LAPD, FBI and US Secret Service.
Stream Poker Face only on Stan.
While your average Joe will find it difficult to spot a fib, with researching showing a 48 percent success rate, Steve has it worked down to an exact science.
Speaking to 9Entertainment, Steve started by settling a gender debate: Who make better liars, men or women?
When asked the question, Steve’s response was instant.
“Women make better liars, there’s no doubt about it. There’s clear research on that,” he confirmed.
“Women are much better at body language and reading body language. Even when a woman is interested in a man, she will bombard him with behavioural cues that subconsciously signify interest. The problem is often men have no idea,” he laughed.
As for who lies more often, that is still up for debate.
Steve also explained that a common misconception people have about lying is that the same rules and behaviours apply to everyone – so many of us presume if somebody breaks eye contact they are lying.
But that’s not always the case.
That’s why, in his FBI training, Steve learned about baselining or benchmarking, a practice where you assess an individual’s normal behaviour and then look for deviations from that to indicate a potential lie. It’s different for every person.
That’s not to say there aren’t some common themes. In the 89 homicide cases he’s worked on, Steve noted the recurring signals that more often than not meant somebody was being misleading.
An influx of unnecessary filler words like ‘um’ and ‘ah’, a lack of personal pronouns in your story, hand to face concealment, lack of emotion and facial expressions all made the list.
Steve could understand why there are skeptics of the lie detector science.
We’ve all read them, tabloid articles where a so-called body language expert tips off a celebrity couple is about to divorce based on a single paparazzi shot.
Steve recalled a scenario where he was asked to do exactly that when a magazine contacted him and presented him with a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie when they were reportedly breaking up.
“They asked me, ‘What does this picture show to you?’ I said ‘nothing’ because that picture was taken in a one hundredth of a second. It showed me they were looking in two different directions at the time, that’s all,” Steve recollected.
“I need to look at the context. I teach intelligence agencies and homicide detectives not about how to act on intuition, but how to use neuroscience and how to understand behavior to look for inconsistencies in recollection of events and narratives.
“There is a lot of science that underpins it. I’m not interested in opinion, I’m interested in fact,” Steve concluded.
Working around the clock as an expert in human behaviour, Steve admitted it was hard to take that ‘lie detector’ hat off, even in his personal life.
When it comes to ‘pro-social’ lies like saying you like a gift (when you really don’t) or saying you’ve done a house chore (when you really haven’t) Steve says he chooses not to call out those little fibs even when he has a gut feeling something is off.
“I look at the intention of the lie. It’s a white lie, nobody is going to get into real trouble for that,” he said.
What was interesting to note about the white lies we all tell is that they are actually more difficult to detect.
“When the consequences for the lie are greater, the more tells there are from the person,” Steve explained.
As far as whether Charlie Cale’s lie-detecting abilities on Poker Face get Steve’s tick of approval. He confirmed they did.
Season 2 of Poker Face is currently streaming on Stan with new episodes dropping weekly until July 10.
New episodes of Poker Face drop Thursdays 9pm (AEST) only on Stan.
Stream Poker Face only on Stan.
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