Wednesday, only hours after the story broke, President Clinton was interviewed by Jim Lehrer on national public television for nearly an hour, excerpts of which were shown on all the networks’ evening newscasts and many of the next day’s morning talk shows.
Did this extraordinary interview allow television viewers to determine whether the president was lying when he denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky? Were there tell-tale signs in his tone of voice, expression and gesture which showed he was lying about this and about his denial that he or his friend Vernon Jordan has instructed Lewinsky to deny the affair when she testified in the Paula Jones trial?
Not much chance. Scientific research studies have established that most people cannot accurately distinguish lying versus truthfulness from demeanor. It is not just ordinary people whose judgments aren’t much better than a coin flip. We found that members of nearly every federal law enforcement agency, trial judges, attorneys, doctors, custom officials and municipal police don’t do much better.
Only about 5 percent of the thousands of people we have studied are accurate lie-catchers, and they were not evaluating someone as socially skilled as President Clinton. Not every elected president is what I have called a “natural performer:” smooth improvisers, great conversationalists, charming and nearly seamless if they should choose to lie. Neither Jimmy Carter nor George Bush was such a performer, but Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy had that ability.
The best lie-catcher in the country, identified by my research, who just retired from a federal law enforcement agency, watched President Clinton’s TV interview and called me when it was over. He and I had both spotted only one subtle sign that the president was lying: The very slightest head shake “no” when he said he would cooperate with an investigation of these new charges.
But it doesn’t really matter. If the president is telling the truth about Lewinsky, he might well be ambivalent about having to waste his time cooperating in what is sure to be a time-consuming, awkward and embarrassing investigation. And if Clinton is lying, he certainly would be ambivalent about cooperating in having the relationship discovered.
The fact that there was no other “leakage,” no micro-expressions, no gestural equivalents of slips of the tongue, doesn’t mean the president was being truthful, for the absence of these and other signs of lying never establishes truthfulness. It is only their presence which suggests lying.
It took no special skill to see that the president looked tired, strained, hurt and perhaps even a bit exasperated. Who wouldn’t look that way faced with such allegations, regardless of whether they are true or false? So how will Americans decide whether the president was lying on TV? Just ask them about their party affiliation.
