The Infinite Monkey Cage - Deception

Episode Date: January 19, 2015

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by author and journalist David Aaronovitch, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman and neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott as they tackle the science of deception. They'll be asking why we seem to be so good at telling lies, but not very good at spotting them, and why being good liars could be the secret to our success as a social animal. They will also be carrying out their own act of deception on the monkey cage audience. They reveal the results of an experiment to test the idea of subliminal advertising, carried out by David Aaronovitch for the Radio 4 documentary, "Can You Spot the Hidden Message" . Will they manage to secretly persuade a section of the theatre audience to pick one type of soft drink over another by secretly flashing the name of a certain brand on a screen? All will be revealed.Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, and welcome to You and Yours. I'm Jacques Cousteau. And I'm Valerie Singleton. Today, we're going to ask whether physics is merely a fable to fabricate the ponderings of God's mind and why the most rapidly growing language in the world is sheepdog trial whistling. And is it true that Brian Cox keeps seeing Neil's boar's face in a piece of toast?

For those who haven't realised yet, this week's theme on the Infinite Monkey Cage is deception. Yes, despite his brilliant impression, Brian is not Valerie Singleton. Yet. Do the voice again. Hello Brian is not Valerie Singleton. Yet. Do the voice again. Hello, I'm Valerie Singleton. It's uncanny, absolutely uncanny.

So, today we're asking, is deception a necessary part of the human condition? Is it possible to be wholly truthful and survive in our culture? Once we believe a lie, why is it so hard to be convinced we were misled? How can we spot the lies of charlatans, politicians and greengrocers? Not just greengrocers, grocers, butchers, fishmongers, winkle pickers. To help us out we have a panel of 73 people, two of whom arrived at Roswell in 1947 and one of whom is a robot currently trying to get his Duke of Edinburgh Turing test badge.

See if you can work out which one it is. So, our panel is... I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at University of Hertfordshire and magician. And my best... No, I am. That's not a lie. I am. That's sad, isn't it?

No one's going to believe a word anybody says. That's it. It's weird because no one looks more like a magician than you. You really have. Exactly, yes. A Ali Bongo magic-y face. Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. But, um... Yeah, so that's... Yeah.

And my biggest lie, which is a lie, was convincing a six-year-old child, I was standing by him and there was a wind turbine, and I convinced him that it was responsible for producing wind, and that... LAUGHTER.. for producing wind, and that if they stopped, there would be no more wind ever, and that's the lie I'm most proud of. My name is Sophie Scott, and I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and my biggest lie was allowing people to believe that I was dating the bass player

from The Cure. I'm David Aronovich, columnist with The Times. My speciality is conspiracy theories. I wrote a book about it called Voodoo Histories. It's not fair that I've been asked this question about lies because I'm older than any of you and I've had a considerably longer to lie. How old are you? I'm 43.

What? You're getting a laugh for saying that you're in your mid-40s. It's also the fact that the moment you're near Brian, everyone else who leaves here, you will all look considerably older as he sucks your youth out of you. I'm still gorgeous, but look at those! Just crusts of human beings! And this is our panel.

Richard Wiseman, the magician. Let's start with you. So are all humans... I mean, are we natural liars? Are human beings natural liars? I think we are. We certainly do a lot of it. So in surveys... I mean, it depends what you count as lying. If you count leaving out information, then we're doing it all of the time, pretty much. In terms of big lies, then it's around about one or two lies per day.

We did some work a while ago with asking people, do you tell lies? We had 8% of people that claimed not to tell any lies ever in their lives. So it's the 8% that couldn't even bring themselves to tell the truth in a survey, basically. Pathologically. So we do a lot of it. We've always done a lot of it. There are hundreds of lies being told every moment, and we're not very good at detecting them.

So I think there is something in us that means we are natural-born liars. So how many... You're saying one or two big lies a day. So what kind of lies would they be? If we could just kind of class the... How many lies... I mean mean this survey, it's a difficult survey to do isn't it? How often do you lie in a day? It is because it comes down to what counts as a lie.

So if you meet somebody and you can't stand them and you say, oh hello, nice to see you, is that a lie? Should you have said I can't stand you? And so people wouldn't really class that as a lie. Once it's into lying for your own good and you're withholding information that's clearly exploitative and so on, then you get to white lies, when someone says, does this, you know, whatever, dress suit me? And you go, yes, that's great, and you're thinking, my goodness, no.

So it's a very difficult thing to do, but certainly we're doing a lot of it. And are you good at lying? No. But, Billy, listen to this on the radio. to do but but certainly we're doing a lot of it and are you good at lying no um i'm really not i'm not a very good liar i mean magicians tend to be quite good um but i'm absolutely terrible at it so if you hear it from me it's the absolute truth yeah but david richard said that we're not very good at spotting lies or deception but as a columnist and a political journalist you're surrounded by the professional deceivers I would say I mean does it make you

more sensitive to picking up deception it makes you interested in what people believe and what they want to believe and in the nature of desiring to be deceived. But it also makes me interested. You're talking about politicians. The most successful politicians narrow the gap between what they believe to be true and the thing that they have to say. And if necessary, they change the thing that they believe so that they don't have to lie. So, for instance, Paddy Ashdown once famously said about Tony Blair,

who made some promise or other, which he couldn't then keep, he was asked, did Blair believe it? And he said, well, he believed it at the time he said it. So it's a technique, it's almost method acting in a way then, because they're not actors. And so in order to be absolutely convincing and believable, you change your belief rather than try and act. Yeah, I think that's a thing to do for a very successful one.

But also, quite often this lie is within or what you might call lying or deception is within the game people know what is being done people know that the thing can't be possibly be the way that it is said but they won't have it said any other way take something you know that happened a few months ago the emily thornberry tweet you have to have a whole tissue of lies about what people's attitudes are to a guy who flies England flags outside and everybody becomes incredibly, it's not just hypocritical, they're actually deceptive about

what they think. Ed Miliband says, I've never been so angry about anything in my life. Of course he has. He's been far more angry about things, but at the moment when he said it, he had to make himself angry enough to justify the phrase because it was what he needed to do. Sophie, are we then good or not particularly good at spotting deception and lies if they're outright lies rather than this more sophisticated form david spoken generally we are poor at it

and i think that seems to be for a number of reasons partly because a lot of normal discourse relies on it as richard said we're not saying everything we want to say. When somebody asks how you are, you hardly ever tell them. And also because I think a lot of the... So discourse is predicated on sort of an assumption that people are telling the truth. You want to believe people are telling the truth. Every single person I've ever met

who's encountered somebody burglarising their home, there's been a point when the burglar has just lied to their face. Like, I was looking for Alan. Is Alan not here? here again it's predicated on that notion that you will believe people and there's some interesting work on actually what's happening when people lie exactly like you've already picked up on that if you believe it it's very often your behavior won't be giving clues away because you are you're in the mood you're in the spot this seems like the truth to you when you can pick up things associated with lying is when there's an emotional cost.

So I'm telling you something and I really want you to believe it. And what a psychologist called Paul Ekman has found is that people continuously leak little facial movements that betray the underlying emotional state that you can use in a situation where you suspect somebody's lying to pick up the emotional cost you're still not picking up the lie you're picking up the emotion that might be associated with that so so by emotional cost so you mean a situation like i suppose if you're the captain of an aircraft and but all the engines have fallen off and you're

saying are you going to be okay yeah this is absolutely fine yes absolutely there's some cost to you or um, no, I definitely... She was just in my room to pick up a book or something, you know, something where you're desperately trying to... You really want the person to believe you and for whatever reason, good or bad reasons, it matters to you that they believe the lie and that's what causes the cost.

So what's a poker face, then? Well, a poker face is exactly somebody trying to control all of this. So a poker face is somebody trying to not let anything through either through trying to you know they're not even bothering with a masking emotion they're just trying to keep their face completely straight and it's more or less impossible to do if the emotion is going on bits of it will leak through so the poker face does because that's what fascinates me with poker that idea rich have you ever played are you a poker player i'm not I'm not a car player at all, no. But would you... Because I wonder how much of the ideas of all of the techniques that different poker players have,

that most of that is merely the addition of theatricality to actually a mixture of kind of nerve and luck. Well, I think what they're trying to do is control not only the facial expressions, but all of the non-verbals we give away or we think we give away when we lie, and we're trying to make that decision about other people all the time and there's a lot of evidence that we make it primarily visually so we're looking for people who move around and suddenly rub their hands together and and look sort of strange facially actually there's not very much

evidence that those are very good signals so in fact if you want to detect a lie you're much better off listening to the voice the the words the person's saying, rather than depending on those visual signals. You published a study on this about ten years ago now, wasn't it? In Nature. A big experiment. Yes, this was a big thing we did, originally with Tomorrow's World, actually, which was a BBC science programme,

where we had Sir Robin Day, and I interviewed him twice, once he told me the truth and once he completely lied, each time about his favourite film. And then we played those on television and we asked people to try and spot the lie i had many a thousand people phone up and um you played both of the both the truth and the lie and said you know which do you think is the lie and people as has been shown time and again in experiments you give people two video clips like that one's true one's one's a lie. Which is a lie? They're at 50-50. They're at chance. We think we're really good at it. We're not.

As soon as we stripped away the visuals and played just the audio track on the radio, people were much better, because suddenly you focus their attention on the words and how they're being said. Under those circumstances, we become much better lie detectors. It's not that the radio audience is more intelligent than the television audience and more perceptive.

In this particular experiment, that could be the case, actually, although it was Radio 1. So make of that what you will. That's fantastic, the idea of Robin Day on the Radio 1 roadshow. So in the lab, of course, you can randomise people into the two groups, and you get exactly the same effect. So in terms of the verbal signals, you have people

giving far less detail. They don't mention themselves so much. There's an emotional distance, you know, I, me, my, those sorts of words drop away. They tend to give a longer distance between the end of the question, beginning of the answer. All these things are really apparent when you listen to the soundtrack to the audio not so apparent when you're overwhelmed by the visual signals does that mean you're you're in part disagreeing with what

sophie said about these visual signals the facial expressions you're saying that the the voice and the way we speak is a is a more no so so i'd say so i'm saying the voice is really important most visual signals are distractions. What Sophie's talking about is the microexpressions, which, yes, if you're trained and you know exactly what you're looking for, then that's great, but most people aren't trained in it, so they're going on, oh, does the person look nervous, and so on. You can think of being able to decode microexpressions

as being like being able to do phonetics. So you could listen to my voice and say, oh, I can tell that you grew up in blackburn but your mum's from belgium that kind of you know forensic detail most people can't do it's like that but for facial expression so you have to like train to do phonetic decoding it takes hours and hours and hours of training does this mean if we look back to the origins of deception then so the evolutionary origins of deception we presumably can trace it back all the way through. Are there other animals that

exhibit deceptive behaviour? There are examples. I think sometimes because you're reliant on human observers telling you about these, sometimes these are humans being a little bit romantic about animals like, look at that cheeky little sparrow. She wants to mate with that other sparrow. They've gone hiding.

Oh yes, they're up to something. So you know, that's possible that it might just be some sparrows mating i mean building deception into that but there's a theory quite an interesting theory about primates that says part of what's driven the evolution of very large brains in primates is the sort of social processing you need to do to lie and to deceive so So if you look broadly across primates, you can see primates with smaller brains tend to deceive each other by, kind of, I wanted your water. I'm trying to think of a good way of doing it.

I might sort of scream. You look at why I'm screaming, then I nick your water. So it's kind of quite basic deception that as you move up larger brains, basically, you find more complex patterns of deception. And when you get to chimpanzees, it really starts to look pretty human, actually. So you're suggesting that to operate in large social groups, deception is a necessary behaviour? Well, potentially, particularly for the sort of large social groups that primates

live in, which are very hierarchical. They're not, whatever Russell Brand tells you, they're not large cooperative groups of monkeys who are all sharing a happy life does that mean that the highest form of evolution we've achieved so far is jeffrey archer yes it's also related to the question of what age do we start to lie as humans and there's some lovely studies where you bring kids into the lab and you put them in a room and you say okay we're setting up your favorite toy uh behind you but don't look and then you walk out of the lab and you put them in a room and you say okay we're setting up your favorite toy behind you but don't look and then you walk out of the room and say whatever you do don't look at the toy and then you watch them with closed circuit tv and after a couple of minutes they'll look at the toy and then they'll go back again and then you come back into the room and ask the key

question you say did you look at the toy so you find out whether or not they're prepared to lie you do that with three-year-olds, so they've only just really mastered language. Already 50% of them will lie about looking at the toy. You go up two years to five-year-olds, and I kid you not, this is the result, there isn't a single five-year-old that will tell the truth. So you can look at your angelic children and think, oh, my goodness, you know,

that's what a chocolate man would have in the mouth. But, you know, they are machines that have been programmed to lie and deceive. That is the truth of it. That's what evolution has done to it. That's why you must never trust your children under any circumstances. Good advice there from Radio 4.

Absolutely. Before we go into David's experiment, which we're going to do in a moment, can we just, you've got a system of finding out people's abilities within this area. Can we try this out on the audience? We can, we can try on the audience and listeners as well. If you extend the first finger of your dominant hand, whichever one you'd normally write with,

and if you now, without thinking about it, trace a capital Q onto your forehead. And then just leave it right at the end there. And the key thing is where you put the tail of the cue because you find out how many yeah we can okay so some of you will put it over the right eye your right eye so hands up if you put it over your right eye okay hands down hands up you put it over your left eye oh not so many okay that surprises me but i'm very glad so if you're right eye you're drawing the cue as if you yourself can see it and so the argument is that you look at the world from your own perspective and you're a pretty

honest person. You probably worked out where this is going. If you did the cue with the tail over your left eye then you're all thinking about the world as if someone else is looking at you, and so you tend to be a very skilled liar, dishonest... ..and immoral. So there we go. There's a little insight.

Do you think that's going to have any impact on this? I've no idea. Anyway... You don't tell lies, do you? You were very honest. We did this test earlier on. So you can still believe his programmes, however ridiculous they sound. I'm still going to believe in quantum mechanics, for the time being.

It's only the 11th series. What time did you do it? Did you try that just then, Sophie? Do you know that test? I didn't know it, but I came out as a liar. Right, good. It's a fair call. And that's the difference between physics and biology. And David,

did you do it? I didn't say that. You will in the edit. It's the difference between physics and biology. Dab! Isn't it lovely? Anyway, David, which one did you get? Right down the middle. Over my nose. So you actually did get it. You didn did write a Q then, did you?

No, it was my Q. It was a Greek letter. It wasn't good enough for you, but it was good enough for me. Times columnist who writes Greek. Anyway, so, now, we've been doing some deception on the audience. One of the great areas of professional sleight of hand is in the advertising industry, because we were told our producer said,

don't say they're liars, they might sue. Like the whole advertising industry is going to gather together and declare their honesty. What a wonderful moment that will be. So the question is, how do you lure people to your product? Now, David, you've just presented a documentary on Radio 4 for people who are listening now. They may have just heard it 20 minutes ago.

Subliminal advertising. Now, what did you find? We made a documentary about subliminal advertising because it's one of these things that people are always talking about. It's always present. It's remarkable how long ago this was, if you like, kind of entered the culture, and yet how many people will still go on about subliminal advertising.

They fundamentally believe that you can affect somebody's behaviour by giving them cues that they can't see and understand and that will get people to do something. It's something that we call in the kind of conspiracy theory circles agency panic. It's about whether or not somebody will take control of you in some kind of a way or another. And one of the biggest of these was subliminal advertising.

The idea came from the 50s. The idea that you could be sent a message during the middle, let's say, of a film and somehow or other you would then act upon this message. It's a bit like a kind of a Manchurian candidate except applied to purchasing and so on. So we decided... Now, there's a guy called Wolfgang Struber,

whom God protect of Utrecht University, who has actually actually under laboratory conditions managed to make some kind of impact, which he says is statistically relevant, statistically significant, which suggests that you can actually, by flashing a word at a certain number of milliseconds, you can get them to take a message from you and under certain circumstances, controlled circumstances circumstances act upon that message and so what we have done with the audience here that our section of them is do precisely that thing earlier on before the program began so you showed them a film which said kill

brian cox and then you left a load of crossbows outside um as you know find out the results by the end of the show as you know know, it's the Queen of Hearts which, when it's shown in a game of solitaire, sparks the murder. That's the story of the Manchurian candidate. So, essentially, we showed... The experimental group and the control group were shown...

One was shown a film with the word Lipton stuck in it. Lipton's stuck in it several times. Yeah, you can now see it on the screen behind us where that was shown at an incredibly rapid pace. Now, some people can just about pick up they're being shown something, but very, very few actually would actually be able to read that, and we'll see from the results whether any actually did, and so on.

We gave people the ability to... We gave them crisps so they'd feel a bit thirsty because one thing that we already know is that unless people are already inclined towards the thing that you're doing, then in that case they're very, very unlikely to act upon it. And we found out whether or not putting that word up there made people who'd been eating crisps and who were offered a choice of drinks chose that drink.

Oh, we're going to find out now. Yes, I have the results in front of me. For all participants, the number of test group participants who picked Lipton Ice was 24 out of 52. So that means that's 46%. So it appears that nothing happened. It was entirely wrong. The number of the control group participants who picked Lipton Ice

was 17 out of 46. That's 37%. Now, I think that there's no difference there. Because, I mean, the rule of thumb, isn't it? We talked, Richard, about the rule of thumb in these statistical tests is a so-called root-n rule. So if you've got 50 people, you'd expect the number to be something plus or minus about 7,

for 7 to the square root of 50. So 17 plus or minus 7 or 8 would be consistent with a random distribution, wouldn't it? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, psychologists would look at that and look at what's called the probability value associated with it and conclude there wasn't an effect. Or you might conclude there's a very small effect

there, and if you had more and more people, you might get something interesting. But certainly on the face of it, the experiments didn't show that we should be worried about subliminals. Which is a disaster, because I told the producer to get the iced tea on sale or return, but she didn't. So now we've got... I like the fact that the audience thought, what a lovely gesture they've given us crisps.

No, they were merely potato snacks of manipulation. There was a so-called refined result. So there was another test done in which we removed any participants who strongly liked or disliked Lipton Ice. Oh, poor people. It feels like eugenics based on drinks. They were removed from the group. They weren't killed. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought they'd been removed. Or who noticed the words, actually.

So anyone who noticed what the experiment was. And then the number of test group participants who picked Lipton Ice was 16 out of 30, so it's 53%, so no difference. And the number of the control group who picked Lipton was 17 out of 28, so it's 61%. Which actually, although it's not statistically significant, went the wrong way. I know you can't say that.

All you can say is it's not statistically significant. No, no, of course you can't. But using the point that Richard made earlier, that if you possibly extended the group out so it's huge enough, and assuming that you got the same results, actually you were getting the opposite result of a subliminal effect. No, it's not statistically significant. But it's not statistically significant.

If the effect were, if that negative effect were genuine, you'd actually sell more Lipton's by not flashing it up on the screen. It's a brilliant sales campaign. They've been doing it for years. So, David, what does that say about Strobe's experiment? Well, it does suggest that for all the anxiety that there is about subliminal advertising and the idea of being sold things you don't even know about,

you actually probably can't transfer subliminal advertising from the lab to the cinema. But it is curious, because you go to the cinema, and on the way you're past huge billboards advertising things. Before the film, you'll see adverts. During the film, you'll explicitly see product placement some of the time. And for some reason, none of that worries us. It's the idea they might be putting up words in there.

That's what I'm really worried about. So, no, it didn't get an effect there. What's your favourite in terms of advertising? I've read a few of the different techniques. Once the stuff about the left and right hemisphere, where the idea is that the left hemisphere, we have language and perhaps more critical faculties, and the right hemisphere more about patterns and emotions.

And I was told that the advertising industry went, have less writing in all the adverts, just have the music of Elgar and something pretty, and then the right hemisphere is this kind of Stan Laurel go, ooh, and the left hemisphere is going, no, it's rubbish! Didn't you read the small print? Oh, balls, he's brought it. He bought it. So what's your favourite kind of technique?

What, the advertisers? That has been in terms of the popular psychology or neuroscience used as possible manipulation. It's interesting. My favourite thing that isn't true, of course, is the myth of the 10% of the brain, which is such a brilliant idea that we've evolved not to use 90% of our brain.

Genius. If you get people believing, they say, oh, you only use 10% of our brain. Genius. If you get people believing, they say, oh, you only use 10% of the brain, it's always a good reply to go, it seems that you do, but the rest of us don't. And in terms of advertising, it's pretty straightforward, actually, and most of the results just show that you put a very

good-looking man or woman holding your product, and people buy it. I mean, that's the sad truth of how straightforward. Hello, I'm Julia Roberts. I smell lovely. I'd like to smell like Julia Roberts. Actually, I would a bit, but anyway. I don't know why I've been going through a phase. So, sorry.

Brian. Sophie, what did you make of the results? Were they a surprise to you? I mean, it's not a particularly big sample, but... No, I mean, it's very consistent with a lot of the work on this that exactly, as Richard said, we have a belief that it's a tremendously powerful way of getting ideas into our heads, but it's not.

The effects are weak and they're very variable and they're very affected by exactly how you do it and what people are expecting to happen. David, you've written about conspiracy theories, voodoo histories, and are the conspiracy theories, are those senses, looking at that kind of idea of possible deception, is that another way of us trying to define that something is in charge, there is some structure that exists to give us greater pattern in the world,

the things that have caused, whether it may well be 9-1-1, whether it may well be an assassination, etc.? Yeah, I mean, it sometimes seems to me that quite a lot of our existence is a kind of battle against chaos. Even the kind of structures of hallucinations can sometimes be an attempt to make order and when your body's completely disordered and so on i think that the same is true of conspiracy theories i mean there are lots of other things playing as well the desire to be the one who knows the truth when other people don't sometimes there's a kind of political animosity or an ideological animosity

against the person you think is the conspiracy theorist and so on which makes you choose a particular conspiracy theory than another but one of the things which is really interesting about it is the preference for a particular version of events that gives if you like a kind of higher order explanation that binds things together and which removes essentially contingency and chaos says there isn't such a thing as accident there isn't such a thing as somebody making a mistake or a cock up it was all planned somebody has it all in order and somebody once said if you imply that there is a kind of evil agency that's organizing everything bad it does imply the possibility of a good agency that could organize it all for good somewhere out there. Maybe somewhere at the back of your head that possibility exists.

Whereas the rest of us, most of the rest of the time, particularly as we get older, recognise the power of chaos and accident and things just bloody well happening. In terms of when you've met conspiracy theorists, are there any techniques that if you offer evidence, if you offer things which are grand do you ever see people once it's the old mark twain quote which is it's easier to lie to someone that is convinced them that they've been lied to and uh so once they have that belief do is there a way of dislodging it well i mean it's very interesting

that um quite often people who are the least sceptical people on earth use the term scepticism to describe what it is in fact they're incredibly credulous about other alternative versions it's just that they've decided to believe something else if you've invested in something and there's also the power of community as well I mean conspiracy theorists like other people will form if you like effective communities with each other and give solidarity and substantiation to each other's point of view until it's very, very hard and fast. But take something like 9-11, which is the idea that George Bush made 9-11 happen and that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions.

It is extraordinary. If you go through one by one and demolish in a controlled way those theories in front of in front of people they will come up with another one it's like hydra heads so for instance if you believe that the two the planes went into the two towers in all simultaneously with controlled demolitions which brought the towers down because apparently just the planes going in wouldn't have been sufficient for bush to go and invade the middle east you had to bring the towers down, because apparently just the planes going in wouldn't have been sufficient for Bush to go and invade the Middle East. You had to bring the towers down. And you say, no, actually this happened, this happened, this happened.

You can see it, and this is the explanation for that. And they then take and say, what about World Trade Center 7, the third building in the middle? That came down in Demarche, and it wasn't hit by a plane at all. And you think to yourself, but can't you see that that makes your whole theory actually completely mad? You're saying somebody went to all the trouble to

take two planes into two large buildings to make it, and brought them down by controlling the demolition, to make it look like a tank, but couldn't be arsed to do it with World Trade Center 7. For some kind of strange, capricious reason, or they'd run out of planes. I think, actually, didn't Patrick Moore have this lovely

idea that when he used to receive a crackpot letter with some weird theory, he'd say, I know exactly the person you should speak to, and he'd send that person the name and address of another crackpot letter. Which is a great idea of linking them up. But given that we are constantly lying to each other,

being lied to and deceiving each other almost by the minute, is it not reasonable to believe that we're being deceived constantly? Well, I think we are, but what we have to realise is the reason we can't detect lies is that that's really good for us. Because it's fine when someone's giving an exploitative lie, you know that they're having an affair and they're not telling you whatever of course you'd want to know about that but you don't know the rest of what they're thinking about what they really think

about you and and so it bonds us together and there's an idea which is um uh radical honesty therapy which is you take couples and you say no just tell each other exactly what you think of one another, just for 24 hours. Oh, my God. And that's the end of every relationship. So it bonds us together. It's why we are bad at detecting lies. We should celebrate that, because without it, we wouldn't have a society, I don't think.

Who dreamt that up? It was a German psychologist. Well, how do we find out? It's interesting. We're thinking of some of those conspiracy theories. We were talking about in the Green Room where you watch certain people. I love his name. Alex Jones. He talks a lot about conspiracy theories.

You see him on television shows. I personally find he's so much of a huckster in the way that he... I'm now trying to think how to say this without it being slander. This is going to be harder than I thought. He won't sue you. I'd better just say something about L. Ron Hubbard instead. But no, I've watched his technique,

and I can't help but feel I don't think he believes this. This seems to be a way of making money. Maybe it's not, but that's what I see. And then other people as well. I sometimes watch them and I think, these conspiracy theories that they're using to sell their books and to sell out big you know, big places, Wembley Arena or whatever it might be,

I'm not certain whether they really believe it. And at what point, when they're standing on stage, do they, at that point, like you were saying with Tony Baird, do they at that point go, I really do believe this idea of how the universe is manipulated, or are they inside just going, I'm making a mint? It's been true for a long time that if you want to um sell a book you come up with some really involved conspiracy theories so when i first came up with the idea to my publishers about a book which essentially debunked

conspiracy theories they said yeah that's very good but it would sell more books if you actually were to say they were true so i'm trying to find one that's true. And the main question I get whenever I'm talking about the book is somebody will always say in a kind of hopeful tone of voice, are there any conspiracy theories that turned out to be true? Because they want them to be true, and people on the whole want the story to be true. So there are people who create books to order. But the majority of people I've found who I discuss conspiracy theories with

who espouse them definitely believe them. They do believe them. They make sense to them. They make sense of the world to them. And whilst there are hucksters in any kind of business who've just worked out the percentage and work out you can sell more conspiracy theory books than not, by and large, there are also people putting books out there

of extraordinary nonsense all the time, which they absolutely and fundamentally in their marrow believe to be the truth. And I assume there's a predisposition to believe one, you're much more likely to believe others, or is it generally the case that this is the moon hoaxer

here, and the moon hoaxer will not believe in the 9-11 hoaxer? Do they tend to believe in lots of them well i mean there are strange kind of combinations i mean i'm played at the moment by people who support ukip who also support vladimir putin in ukraine i mean there's strange kind of combination that's nigel farage well and it's all and it's all because of one single complete attitude towards what they see as the establishment in Britain, which is that they disbelieve everything about it.

And once they disbelieve everything about it, they almost take everything it says and reverse it and say it's not true. You've seen this with the climate change deniers. There tends to be a political... They tend to be on the right of the political spectrum, essentially. They tend to be more libertarian people. I think there are very few people on the political left who think that climate change is a hoax and that

one originated but that one originated from essentially american groups who said that um talking about climate change was a way of gaining control of their lives you would then tell them what to drive when to travel what they could, what they couldn't buy, and how to live. And it was all part of a sort of vaguely socialist plot to make you do that. And that, if you like, is the kind of conspiratorial origin. Now, other more sophisticated people

say, well, essentially it's scientists bigging themselves up, but as we know, that doesn't happen. It's not possible. Sophie, how can we try and battle the lies we make to ourselves rather than looking at other people's lives is there a system when you look and you think i want to believe in this i have to realize how partisan i am when i look at this piece i mean i sometimes find reading newspapers you read one particular newspaper you go oh this rubbish is typical of the daily mail and then the other one you go all right well this is my property and if

you swap around the newspapers really quickly, sometimes you go, another typical bit of rubbish from the Daily Mail. Oh, I've forgotten, I'm reading The Independent now. And you have this thing where by doing that, it at least kind of alerts you to the fact that you're constantly changing your reality and your judgement on it. You do, and it can be phenomenally difficult to

disentangle yourself from it. There's a phenomenon in memory research called shared memories, particularly common with twins, you also get it with siblings. So I have one with my sister, and it's where one sibling, it's obviously my sister's done this to me, obviously I'm right, but they take something that's happened to the other

sib or the other twin, and they make it about them. And so I have this something he wanted a family party, it was me, said something really hilarious, and everybody stops and applauds it because it was so funny, party. It was me. Said something really hilarious and everybody stopped and applauded it because it was so funny and it was by me. Unaccountably, my sister thinks it happens to her. I actually found myself trying to Google the answer to this.

Oh, no, OK, it's probably not on Google yet. It's insane. So neither of us... I have to accept that there is at least a 50% chance that it happened to her. The only thing that is always true about shared memories, they are always things that make you look better. They're never like, that's when I was sick on the dog.

It's always good. It's always like you were really funny at the party. So you're appropriating it because it makes you feel better about yourself, which is one of the things we're pretty much doing all the time. And once you've got one, and we're all doing this all the time, it's very, very hard to actually separate it.

So I know it can't be the case that it was both of us, and it probably could well be her. It's not, obviously, it was me. So it's actually, all you can do is bear in mind that it's massively fallible. Our brains are brilliant, and they're hugely excellent at many many things but once they think something's true they will only look to confirm it they will never look to disconfirm it so all your conspiracy theorists never say well hang on let's try and weigh this one up here even you know at a university when you ask people to write essays comparing and

contrast people just follow one argument you we'd like to kind of just choose something and then stick with it so So that bias, all you can do really is remember that you have it. And every so often try and test out the hypothesis that you could be wrong. You've offered us a lovely image by the way today. We've had flirty sparrows and dogs being sick.

And us being all sick over dogs. Thank you very much for really adding to the album of memories for our audience. I've still got you in the kimono, though, so... Oh, I'm really sorry about that, yeah. Yeah. I say. Ding dong.

That's the we'll always have Paris moment. I've always got you imagining you were Julia Roberts in some bizarre remake of Silence of the Lambs, trying to sell a perfume. You mentioned Google there. So, in general, we have access to unprecedented amounts of information now. silence of the lambs trying to sell a perfume you mentioned you mentioned google there so it's a in general we have access to unprecedented amounts of information now so as a society are we drifting are we becoming more um susceptible to conspiracy theories are we

becoming less gullible are we becoming more rational i think it's very very hard to say i suspect we have always been unbelievably gullible and not very rational. And you can see all sorts of cultural phenomena we try to build to limit the chaos that can happen from us just unravelling with what we'd like to believe to be true. So I don't know if there's any evidence that things are getting worse. I think it's just a lot easier for people to tell you about it. You know, people are emailing you and writing you letters and, you know, the stuff's out there and easy to find out about and you can make contact with other you about it. People are emailing you and writing you letters,

and the stuff's out there and easy to find out about, and you can make contact with other people doing it much more easily than you used to be able to do. So you can build a group of people who all believe that we didn't land on the moon or whatever it is. We can, but you can also debunk it more quickly. And that's one... When I was doing my research my book i got

very gloomy about it because there was you know it was obvious that uh you get professors who said i believe that 9-11 like everybody else was like this but then i looked at a few interesting websites you thought you're a professor of theology for heaven's sake you looked at a couple of interesting and you changed your and people did but then it because but then we began i think people began to catch up with it began to become more sophisticated themselves uh authority on the internet is always a problem where to find it who's got it and so on uh and that's going to be i'm absolutely convinced that's going to be one of our major educational objectives over the course of the next 10 20 years is allowing people and teaching people how to find authority

through this kind of information. And to teach people to filter information. How to filter it. But I think actually we're becoming quite good at debunking. I'm always fascinated by the devices that people use. So the most common one when you read conspiracy theorists or people who experience paranormal events is they say, I used to be a sceptic. I used to be a sceptic

and then I looked into it or then I saw a ghost or went to a psychic or whatever. And you think, that's just a device. You weren be a sceptic. I used to be a sceptic and then I looked into it or then I saw a ghost or went to a psychic or whatever. And you think, that's just a device. You weren't ever sceptical. So I live for the day when someone says, I'm a credulous fool. But... So I think

just the devices, we're constructing a communication here. We're not actually telling people what we really think. We're trying to persuade them to our point of view. And once you understand that's what communication is, I don't think it's quite as confusing then. What a lovely, upbeat ending. So we will have now...

We always ask our audience a question to get their take on the world. And today's question is, which fact do you wish was actually a lie? So here we are. The first one is Gravity by Julia, who was just up there. Well, it's a serious one.

We know more about space than we do about the ocean. Yeah, that is. Nigel Farage is not a comic creation. Still my favourite line. Think of bizarre images. There was a lovely... I can't remember where they were. I think they were a UKIP member and they said,

the problem with Britain nowadays is the homosexual machine is out of control. What a lovely image that is. It's over there! It's coming now! It's escaped from Bletchley Park! Everyone down! Which fact do you wish was actually a lie, that the moon landings were faked? Humans cannot travel at the speed of light,

and a lot of people wanted to travel faster than the speed of light. They obviously used the same Virgin train service that I used from Coventry the other day. So that'll have to be cut, though it did take bloody ages. At least they've got East Coast. Brilliant. I love suspense in travel, and now all sides are covered. Every single bit of train travel. Another Beckett play waiting to happen.

So... Just thought I'd get that out of my system. I've been touring a very long time now. So, thank you to our panel, Professor Sophie Scott, Professor Richard Wiseman and David Aranovich. 11 series in, and we still have people with different solutions to what the infinite monkey cage means and today it's Emily Davidson.

Dear beloved monkey cagers, I've come to the conclusion that the whole concept of caging a monkey depends on your definition of a monkey. If, say, we take monkey to mean all of the atoms that once made up a monkey but now is a free gaseous format, this would be extremely difficult to cage. If we assume a cage that is infinite in any respect other than volume,

which we can since it's not explicitly stated, then there must be a boundary to the cage somewhere in space. And this is a problem for the concept of caging our theoretical monkey gas since objects as large as buckyballs have been shown to appear on the other side of barriers due to quantum effects. One could create the cage out of material that is sufficiently thick that this effect is supremely improbable, but there would still be

a reasonable chance that some of the monkey atoms would end up inside the cage material, making it more of a monkey sponge than a monkey cage. Thank you very much. That was the Infinite Monkey Sponge. Goodbye. Thank you. APPLAUSE In the Infinite Monkey Cage In the Infinite Monkey Cage

In the Infinite Monkey Cage In the Infinite Monkey Cage You're now nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it's to be more than 15 minutes?

Shut up, it's your fault. You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to. Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's that one where his dad discovered the atomic nucleus. Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister, thank you very much, Brian.

And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects. These are some of the science programs that you can listen to. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you