To catch a liar....

Numerous laboratory studies have found that people often cannot see through the lies of others. And don't expect a "how-to" manual for aspiring deception detectives anytime soon. A new study indicates that the best lie catchers display no awareness of their rare ability or the strategies they use to ferret out fabricators.

"We don't know what makes a person a good lie catcher," says Mark G. Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, who directed the study. "No personality characteristic has yet been linked to this ability."

Frank's team videotaped 20 male college students telling lies to an experimenter described to them as an expert in lie detection. Volunteers first devised an alibi for the mock theft of $50 left in the laboratory and then offered an opinion about a controversial social issue, such as capital punishment, either consistent with or contrary to their actual sentiments.

A total of 79 male and female college students carefully perused the videos and most of them correctly identified liars about half the time, a rate that could be achieved merely by guessing, Frank asserts. But a few participants nearly always separated liars from truth-tellers. Those who excelled at detecting lies about the mock theft proved equally adept at separating true from false opinions. However, they reported no awareness of their skill and could think of no specific reasons for their success at sniffing out liars.

Good lie catchers may track facial expressions and other nonverbal signs with particular ease, Frank proposes. Studies are now underway to investigate this possibility.

"For now, our data suggest that the ability to detect other people's lies generalizes across situations," he contends.