Author: Matt Grant

It’s a scenario familiar to all parents: You put your child down in her crib so you can do the dishes or get some other household chore done. She immediately becomes hysterical. You can hardly focus on the task at hand with all of her crying.
Eventually abandoning your fruitless efforts, you start walking toward her and she puts her arms up, begging to be held. As soon as you give in and scoop her up into your arms, the crying stops. Peering at her cheeks, you notice there isn’t even a hint of tears. Believe it or not, your child just deceived you.

According to Dan Ribacoff, a private investigator, credibility assessment expert, and polygraph examiner, children learn to deceive their parents when they’re as young as 2 months old. “[Children] learn at a very young age, ‘Hey, I’d rather be in mommy’s warm arms than in this cold bed,’” he says. So they turn on the fake waterworks to get what they need.

Why We Lie

Ribacoff defines deception as anything that might be seen as deliberately misleading: lying, trickery, and even telling “white lies” to make oneself look better. According to Ribacoff, there are three main reasons people lie: “They don’t want to hurt you, they don’t want to look bad, or they want to scam you.”

“In an average 10-minute conversation, a person will lie at least one time.”

For instance, if you ask someone what they think of your new jacket, they might hate it but tell you they like it to spare your feelings. Or someone who wants to look more impressive in front of peers or a romantic prospect might say they are the manager of a business when they’re really just assistant manager.
And then there’s someone like Bernie Madoff, who can create an entire scheme just to defraud others.

While it might seem like a big jump to go from innocently commenting on someone’s clothing to Bernie Madoff, it’s all part of the same process. “Deception is part of survival,” Ribacoff says, “and that instinct is built in.” In fact, he says that deception is so ingrained in us, “In an average 10-minute conversation, a person will lie at least one time.”
And so finding out whether you’re being lied to becomes a survival mechanism as well. “Everyone needs to know if they’re being told the truth,” Ribacoff says. “You have to protect yourself against being victimized by people that will deceive you.”

The ability to discern truthfulness keeps you from spending a lot of money on a product that turns out to be a scam or from meeting someone from the internet in person who may be a serial killer. Everyone has human intuition that alerts them if they think someone isn’t being completely honest.

Trust your gut. Or not.

But too often, Ribacoff says, we want to believe the best about people, so we wind up suppressing that intuition. “We have human intuition built into us from caveman days—fight, flight, freeze, or surrender,” he says. “And people wind up killing that [intuition], and that’s how they become victims. They’ll actually turn their own radar systems off.”

“When you give me the truth, your brain is not working very hard, because it’s accessing information that is already there or not there. When you want to lie, your brain must work harder.”

So how can you tell if someone is being dishonest? Ribacoff says that there are physiological changes that happen in your body when you lie. The polygraph machine is an instrument that was created to measure these changes.

“The polygraph is actually several medical instruments that were put together to detect physiological changes that take place in the human body when a person lies,” Ribacoff says.
“The truth is in your memory. Your memory is like the hard drive in your computer—record found, no record found,” he explains. “When you give me the truth, your brain is not working very hard, because it’s accessing information that is already there or not there. When you want to lie, your brain must work harder. You have to create the lie, usually by accessing information that is already in your brain, and mixing the two: lie and truth. And then you have to express the lie in a way that seems credible.”

Brains and Lies

Ribacoff says that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans show that when someone tells the truth, they use only about seven parts of their brain. But when they lie, they have to use about 15 parts of their brain.

“Your brain really goes into ‘rev the engine’ mode when you lie.”

He compares the experience of watching a polygraph machine work to watching a mechanic check a car engine. “Your brain really goes into ‘rev the engine’ mode when you lie,” he says.

In fact, the human brain and a car motor are actually quite similar in what they need to operate. Just as an engine needs fuel, oxygen, and cooling to run properly, the brain needs blood, oxygen, and cooling.
“When you lie, you call for more blood, your blood pressure increases, your heart rate [increases], your oxygenation of that blood has to increase,” Ribacoff says. “And your sweat glands have to activate, otherwise your brain will overheat.” These bodily changes, all medical in nature, are how the polygraph does its work. “You can’t feel it, you can’t control it. But we can measure it.”
Obviously, you’re not going to be able to hook everyone you suspect of lying up to a polygraph machine. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. The process is tedious. A lot of preparation goes into a polygraph interview, and the test often has to be done three to five times. And although it’s not true that a polygraph machine can be “beat,” it is possible to deceive an inexperienced examiner.

“There’s only one reason to try to beat a polygraph test: You’re lying!”

“There is no way to beat a polygraph instrument,” Ribacoff says. “[But] you can defeat the examiner.” The internet is full of misinformation on how to “beat” a polygraph. “Really, none of it works, because an experienced examiner will see that [the behavior is] not natural,” says Ribacoff, adding, “because there’s only one reason to try to beat a polygraph test: You’re lying!”

Low-Tech Detection

So for someone who doesn’t have a polygraph, how can they detect mistruths in someone they’re talking with? Ribacoff says there are a lot of telltale signs that can give someone away. All of these behaviors are what polygraph examiners look for when interviewing a subject.
To start with, latency, hesitancy, and repeating the question usually means the subject is trying to fabricate their answer. “Repeating the question allows for time to fabricate the lie,” Ribacoff says. “A lot of ‘ums’ and ‘non-ums’ [show] hesitation also.”

There’s body language clues, like if a person is sweating or shaking or if they cross their arms. That’s usually out of a self-conscious desire to protect themselves. “If someone’s sitting in front of you, they will actually lean back and perhaps stretch their legs out, to try to get maximum distance between you and them,” Ribacoff says. “If I ask you a question, and within five seconds you shift positions in your chair, I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
All of these signs are ways to polygraph with your eyes and ears. Ribacoff adds that someone who’s lying will often either not answer the question or blame someone else. “Touching your nose also means, ‘what I’m telling you stinks,’” Ribacoff says. “These are all ways that humans are programmed. The sensory portion of the brain goes towards the nostrils when you say something that smells like crap.”

The best way to detect deception, however, is through written or spoken language. Examiners will often ask for written statements and look for the details a person includes or neglects to include. This process is called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis. Ribacoff told the story of a woman who was accused of causing serious harm to her husband but kept referring to him as “Mr. Smith.” “Who the hell calls their husband ‘Mr. Smith?’” This lack of pronouns, he says, allowed her to dehumanize the situation.
Even with these telltale signs, finding the truth can be complex. For Mary (not her real name), a former judge and arbitrator in the Chicago area, finding the truth in the courtroom was her profession.
In a courtroom, she says, “each side is doing its best to distort the truth in its favor. …This is very unlike the medical scenario, where everyone is trying to find the right answer and working collaboratively to find it… So in the trial arena, the fact finder is always very suspect of anyone who has something to win or lose in the trial.”
For Mary, it was rare to see visual or auditory signs that made it clear someone was lying.

“Personally, I always found it difficult to just decide that someone was telling a lie by just looking at them and listening to their testimony in a vacuum,” she says.
“A number of court reporters over the years thought that they could make that determination. I never questioned them about their opinions. But I’ve always wondered whether their position in the courtroom was helpful. By that, I mean their actual physical position, because they are in front of the witness and watching them as they transcribe their testimony.”

“People want to confess.”

Mary says that knowing whether she made the right decision over credibility assessments was one of the most difficult aspects of her job. “At the end of the day, it was very hard to say, ‘I got that right,'” she says. “You have to just make your best judgment, and I imagine I got it wrong from time to time. I imagine most people get it wrong from time to time.”
Still, Ribacoff maintains that if you take your time and are patient, you can get to the truth eventually. Guilt is a powerful motivating factor, and people want to share the truth. “People want to confess,” Ribacoff says. “There’s a saying in SCAN: ‘Everybody wants to tell you everything, you just have to be able to get them to tell you.’”

Any school child knows the three “Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. It seems a given that these three skills will always form the backbone of a child’s educational development. Yet for students who graduated from elementary school before 2010, visiting a modern-day classroom may contain some noticeable differences.

In particular, one might notice the absence of cursive, the style of penmanship marked by conjoined letters. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCS), a set of benchmarks in math and English designed for kindergarten through twelfth grade, has set off a debate over handwriting and cursive and when—or even if—such skills should still be taught.

“The Common Core State Standards were developed through a state-led effort in 2009 and 2010 and published in June 2010,” says Olympia Meola, press secretary for the Council of Chief State School Officers, an organization that co-sponsored the standards.

“Since then, states have voluntarily chosen to adopt the Common Core, or chosen to develop other standards that prepare students for college and careers. There is not a standard specific to cursive writing in the Common Core; instead, these standards give schools and teachers the flexibility to teach cursive writing in the classroom. States also have the flexibility to adopt standards above and beyond the Common Core State Standards.”

To date, 42 of the 50 U.S. states have adopted the CCS, but only 14 have passed laws requiring cursive proficiency. Everyone from local, state, and federal officials to educators, psychologists, and scientists are sharply divided on the issue. Cursive’s defenders say it’s a valuable skill and can aid in word proficiency; its detractors call it a waste of time and want more relevant skill building, like keyboarding.

Steve Graham, Warner professor at Arizona State University’s School of Education, says that the benefits of handwriting can be boiled down to a few essential elements. “There’s different styles of handwriting: there’s manuscript, which is a stick and ball; there’s cursive, which has joined letters; and there’s italics,” he says.

“There’s other forms as well, but the two that have dominated this country are manuscript and cursive.” Graham says that in looking at these two forms of script and considering their benefits, it’s helpful to think in terms of reader and writer effects.

There’s evidence that suggests if your handwriting is less legible, then people form negative opinions about what you’re saying.

“By reader effects, what you’re really talking about in terms of handwriting … is if it’s hard to read what’s written because the handwriting is not legible or less legible, then that influences the reader. And second, there’s evidence that suggests if your handwriting is less legible, then people form negative opinions about what you’re saying.”

Knowing this, Graham says, the question becomes which is more legible: cursive or manuscript? “If you ask a person on the street, usually they’ll say manuscript,” he says. “But the reality is that there’s not much real difference in terms of legibility, if you have an equal amount of practice in both.”

In terms of writer effects, Graham says the thing to look at is automaticity. “The more automatic you are, usually the more fluent you are,” he says. “If you’re writing something by hand or you’re typing it, and your ideas are coming really fast but you’re not such a good typist or you’re not really quick with handwriting, then ideas might slip away out of your working memory as you’re trying to write them down.”

Graham points out this is something that happens to all writers, no matter how efficient they are. But it highlights the fact that someone’s dexterity with handwriting can interfere with other processes, like content generation.

Do we need to teach two forms of handwriting, or should we just teach one?

“So the question [now] is, which is faster: cursive, or manuscript?” Graham says. “If you ask the typical person on the street, the answer you’ll get is, ‘cursive’s faster.’ But when you actually look at the data, as long as there’s an equal amount of practice, then there’s not much difference. You might get a little edge for cursive for the speed issue, and for the legibility issue, you get a little bit of an edge for manuscript. …So, the question becomes: Do we need to teach two forms of handwriting, or should we just teach one? My opinion on this, given that’s such a crowded curriculum, is we should teach one.”

Graham’s assertion is that people are overreacting over the loss of cursive. “I think too much has been made of this issue,” he says.

In Arizona, you have state legislators passing a law that you have to teach cursive handwriting.

“In Arizona, you have state legislators passing a law that you have to teach cursive handwriting. Come on, give me a break—they don’t have anything better to do, that they need to be legislating what teachers teach in terms of … handwriting? I think this is one of these things [where] we assume we’re losing something, and I’m not exactly sure what we’re losing by teaching one versus teaching two, as long as we teach one well.”

Yet Virginia Berninger, an experimental and licensed clinical psychologist and professor emerita at the University of Washington, says that the loss of cursive puts students at a real disadvantage, particularly those with learning disab
ilities. Berninger has been involved in a number of studies that she says show the unique benefits of cursive on understanding letter formation.

For instance, a longitudinal study showed that when comparing manuscript, cursive, and keyboarding from students from grades four to seven, “It was the cursive that was uniquely contributing to [children’s] spelling and to their composing quality,” she says.

“We think that’s because with cursive, there are connecting strokes that link the letters, and we think that helps with creating those word units representing what you need for spelling.” Since cursive was originally invented to speed up writing, being able to write faster may have given students a composing advantage.

Berninger goes on to say that for students with learning disabilities in reading and writing, the physical act of handwriting is often beneficial. “What we’ve learned in our research in the last six years, is that even if a learning disability involves reading, like pronouncing words or reading comprehension, it still has writing problems associated with it,” she says.

This correlation between reading and writing in learning disabled children has largely been ignored. “Dyslexia is not just a reading disability,” she says. “In addition to word reading, the more persistent problems … are spelling problems. That can affect [a child’s] composing.”

Berninger’s recommendation then, contrary to Graham’s, is that children should be taught to be hybrid writers. “You teach manuscript first for two years, and then you teach them the cursive,” she says.

In due time, cursive will help with spelling and composing.

Teaching manuscript alone has its own benefits. “Teaching printing, we found in several studies, transfers to improving your word reading. We think because the production of the letters enhances perception of the letters. So that helps with reading, and in due time, cursive will help with spelling and composing.”

Berninger says it doesn’t even take that much to teach a student good handwriting. “People say, ‘With everything else we have to do, how can we possibly find time to teach handwriting?’ Well actually, it only takes five or 10 minutes a day, or even three times a week, and you really can accomplish a lot,” she says.

In other fields, like medicine and law, you do have members of the community that more actively participate in making the standards. For whatever reason, we have not accorded that privilege to the teachers.

Part of the issue for Berninger is that the Common Core standards are not written by actual educators. “We have people who are legislators, government regulars, educational policy people … they’re the ones that are writing these standards,” she says.

“Rarely if ever have they been classroom teachers, actually working with kids. We do think this is a critical issue—we’re not getting enough of the voice of the classroom teacher into making these standards and policies. In other fields, like medicine and law, you do have members of the community that more actively participate in making the standards. For whatever reason, we have not accorded that privilege to the teachers.”

One area in which Graham and Berninger agree is that there needs to be more keyboarding taught in the classroom. “It’s a changing world in terms of how we compose,” Graham says. “If you’re not at school, most composing isn’t done by hand now, it’s done digitally, or by spoken word when you speak into your phone.”

But Berninger says that in her research, she found that students don’t usually start to see benefits from keyboarding until they get to seventh grade.

This idea that we just need to use the technology, we don’t need our ‘old fashioned’ tools, it’s a mindset that we need to be a bit more cautious about in general.

She believes this might be because handwriting uses only one hand, but keyboarding uses both. Developmentally, right brain/left brain myelination doesn’t mature until early adolescence. It could also be due to the fact that keyboarding skills are neglected in the classroom. “Schools in general are not teaching kids to use the computers, the keyboarding part,” she says. “And so it may just be there hasn’t been as much instruction.”

Still, Berninger doesn’t believe that typing should ever replace handwriting. “Every problem we’re going to solve, we’re going to create technology for it,” she says. “So this idea that we just need to use the technology, we don’t need our ‘old fashioned’ tools, it’s a mindset that we need to be a bit more cautious about in general. That’s led to the dismissal of the importance of handwriting.”

But Graham says the real problem is a myopic focus on handwriting as just one of many skills students need to be good writers. He says that out of 20 or so interviews he does a year on the subject of
writing, eight out of 10 of those focus on handwriting alone. Only two are about writing more generally.

“That’s an odd balance, to be honest,” he says. “Handwriting is one of many skills that one needs to master to become a skilled writer. Students don’t write very well, and we don’t do a very good job of teaching it in schools. But we seem to be maniacally focused on handwriting.” He adds, “I don’t want to take away anything from handwriting, but it seems out of balance.”