Piece Description

A snake pulls one over on Jad and sends us on a journey to explore the lies we tell and the people who try to spot them. We take a close look into the faces of liars, explore the lives, and the brains, of people who can't stop lying, and we follow two psychiatrists to a bar as they try to uncover the lies we tell ourselves.

Catching Liars We begin with Gordon Burghardt introducing us to a snake who plays dead. Then, from a highway median at John F. Kennedy Airport, Paul Ekman tries to teach Jad how to catch a liar the old-fashioned way: with your eyes. Because if you know where to look, he says, the truth leaks out. We learn more about this truth "leakage" from CIA interrogator Barry L. McManus and Steve Silberman, reporter from Wired magazine.

People Who Lie What's going on in the mind of a liar? Producer Ellen Horne tells the story of a con woman and the trail of mistrust she leaves in her wake. Then we delve into the brains of pathological liars with Yaling Yang, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. She tells us that pathological liars have a surprising advantage over normal people: they are better at making connections between ideas in different parts of their brain.

Lying to Ourselves Can we lie to ourselves? If you are the liar, wouldn't you know the truth? In this segment, we explore the confusing and contradictory idea of self-deception. We go back to the early 70s, when psychiatrists Ruben Gur and Harold Sackeim and came up with a set of embarrassing questions that they say reveal the lies we tell ourselves. Psychologist Joanna Starek tells us that swimmers who lie to themselves swim faster than those who do not. And we explore the power of self-deception to make us more successful, and happier, people.