0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 223. And with me are…

BR: Ben Radford here…

Celestia Ward:  and Celestia Ward. We’re going to be talking about deception studies with Curt Anderson. We had sort of teased this one a few episodes ago. For anybody who remembers, episode 220 last month, we covered truth-default theory. And this is sort of a continuation part to what did we get wrong? What did we get right? And what does it mean? And, and Kurt’s kind of blazing a trail in Deception Studies. So we’re going to talk to him shortly about that. But in the meantime, anybody got any housekeeping? Ben, you got stuff going on?

0:01:20
BR: I got a little bit of stuff going on. I am delighted to say that I have very kindly been invited to speak at Skepticon 2024, Skepticon being the Australian Skeptics Convention of Skeptics in November. So I’m looking forward to that. I’ve actually never been to Australia, so I’m really looking forward to seeing all our Australian friends, including, of course, Richard Saunders.

0:01:47
CW: Are you one of those people, those sheeple that believes that Australia is a real place?

0:01:52
BR: Well, about that: So my thought is that I’m gonna board the airplane and I’m gonna assume it’s gonna take me to Sydney. Now it might not, so I’m willing to test this.

0:02:04
CW: Well, keep your camera ready for when you go over the ice wall, okay?

0:02:08
PR: Yeah, I think you have to fly over the ice wall and then upside down under the flat earth because it’s the land down under less than Earth.

CW: On the bottom of the platter, yeah.

0:02:18
BR: Yeah, so that’s coming up, and again, I’m super excited about that. I’m also giving a talk at one or more upcoming folklore conferences. There’s the AFS, which is the American Folklore Society, and they are apparently having their next conference here in Albuquerque. So I’m pretty excited about that.

CW: That’s pretty fortuitous.

BR: Pretty fortuitous. I can’t really turn it down. And also there’s a conference of ISCLR, which is the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, and we’ve had a couple of my colleagues there on for a few things in the past, and that’s going to be in Logan, Utah, at the end of May.

0:02:55
CW: Utah’s right next to you, too. It’s like a border state.

0:02:58
BR: I think the last Folklore Conference, the last two were in Brussels and north of London. So it’d be nice to have something a little closer.

0:03:07
CW: Well, you clearly have pulled some strings or something, if they’re all they’re forming around you now.

0:03:12
BR: Well, speaking of even closer to home, I’ll be giving a virtual talk. I was supposed to give a talk on solar superstitions and moon myths back in Buffalo about a month or so back. Unfortunately, there was a snowstorm and typical Buffalo weather, so that did not come to fruition. However, on Friday, March 5th at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, I’ll be doing that talk. So from the comfort of my home studio, people are welcome to tune in.

CW: Cool. Cool. And, uh, and I’m sure listeners are aware that Pi Day just happened, uh, not too long ago. Did you guys celebrate at all?

0:03:49
BR: I did not. I was aware of it, but, uh, Pi, um, I did see, uh, Ross Blocher, uh, of course, Oh No Ross and Carrie who has memorized Pi to some ridiculous digit. I saw him.

0:04:03
CW: Yeah, like 3,000 digits or something.

0:04:05
BR: Yeah, so.

0:04:07
PR: Wow.

0:04:08
BR: I watched him recite that, but other than that, that was my celebration.

0:04:12
CW: Yeah, he did a neat little spot for Disney, his day job employer. There’s a neat little spot where he’s kind of walking around the studio areas and reciting the first 100 digits. So go Ross.

0:04:24
PR: That’s awesome. I think I’ve got three point one four one five nine two?

CW: My my kid hit upon a music video that goes through the first hundred digits So, I’ve been forced to listen to that about five hundred times like three point one four one five nine This is pie Diameter over I’m going to go over to something, circumference over diameter. Yeah, don’t let yeah. Clearly this is baked into my head, but not enough. I actually have some housekeeping that already happened, but I wanted to sort of give a thank you shout out to one of our listeners, Gail Knapp. She’s a psychology professor who listens to our show and she teaches a skepticism is wrangling with today She does a part one in the fall and part two in the spring if anybody’s interested if you’re in the Las Vegas area And you want to become a lifelong learner? The title of her class is Gray Matters Critical thinking for seniors so yeah good on you Gail for doing that good work!

BR: And the double pun is quite clever.

0:06:05
CW: I knew you’d like that, Ben.

0:06:07
PR: It was solid.

0:06:09
CW: And not really housekeeping, but a sort of a celebration. The Ghost Army was just awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Did you guys hear about this? It literally happened hours ago.

0:06:20
PR: Okay, no, that did not come across my radar.

0:06:23
CW: Well, yeah, we had an episode about the Ghost Army with Colonel Francis Park back a couple of years ago. It was episode 134, if anybody wants to check it out. But it’s nice to see. I heard about it on the radio, on the drive home today, and then it was also on the local news. So it’s definitely getting some play and people are clearly interested in what the Ghost Army was all about. And so it’s nice to see that little spike of interest in public awareness of what they did.

0:06:51
BR: That is cool. And another topic I wanted to throw out there, it’s for those who have been following news out of Africa. Well, I mean, there’s of course, there’s bad news all over the world. So I wouldn’t blame you if you’re sort of shutting down. But in Nigeria, there’s been a recent, very strong uptick in violence and kidnapping specifically and in northern Nigeria and listeners may remember the Bring back our girls movement of I don’t know probably what five six years ago whenever it was But anyway, the the kidnappings primarily by Boko Haram are continuing and they’re still The whole place is descending into chaos through all this and seeing this on the news I think of our friend Leo Igwe and all the great work he’s doing under very, very trying circumstances. I want to give a shout out to Leo. You know, it’s one thing to sort of to do skeptical work and outreach in a stable environment when you’re not at risk of being abducted and assaulted, just sort of conducting what you’re trying to do. So, shout out to Leo. Thank you for all your work and I also wanted to point out that he’s currently on a speaking tour in Texas and Florida and I’m going to try and get some more information about that soon.

0:08:11
CW: Okay, well moving on, we’re going to go to a segment we call Sway So, which is So, What Are You Skeptical Of?

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0:08:20
PR: So this week I am skeptical about a certain Brazilian leaders vaccination status.

CW: As you should be.

PR: I’m talking about Jair Bolsonaro, the very disgraced president of Brazil at this point.

0:08:50
CW: Doesn’t he proudly refer to himself as the Brazilian Trump?

0:08:54
PR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I guess, I mean, yes, he’s right.

0:09:02
CW: So what about his vaccination status exactly?

0:09:05
PR: So the police have said that the far right leader allegedly ordered one of his closest to actually enter false vaccination information into the Ministry of Health system for himself and his daughter, according to CNN.

CW: I’m shocked.

PR: Go figure. I mean, he seemed like he was so on the up and up.

0:09:24
BR: Yeah, he’s a piece of work. He was one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers across the board, and particularly with COVID. And he was noted for, again, just making fun of COVID deaths. All the while, there’s photos of mass graves outside of Rio and elsewhere because people are just dropping like flies. But meanwhile, he’s making jokes about it and saying, oh, the vaccine turned into a crocodile, and he thinks it’s funny.

0:09:55
CW: Yeah, and he did a lot of open flouting of the vaccine. And I mean, he showed up at the UN, and he wasn’t vaccinated and his whole like a whole bunch of people at the UN ended up getting the virus and he I’m kind of surprised he went to the trouble of faking his records because it seems to me you just be like I don’t need to put anything down I’m president you know.

BR: Well I think it was a case of where he he was forced to because because again he if he’s traveling to the States or somewhere else, I don’t care who you are, the rules certainly at the time were very, very clear.

0:10:31
CW: Oh, okay.

0:10:33
BR: So yeah, so I think had he just remained home in Brasilia or Porto Alegre, wherever he is, it wouldn’t have been an issue, but because he was conducting international business, he couldn’t bluster his way through. I mean, he was gonna have to show some sort of card and that’s why he’s like, well, let me just fake it.

0:10:51
CW: Well, I guess it’s time to pay the piper.

0:10:54
PR: Yep. You know, that’s, that’s one of many legal challenges he’s facing. He did a lot of Trump like things, uh, you know, little, little election fraud and some, uh, storming of the Congress kind of stuff.

0:11:07
CW: Yeah, they had like a, a January 6th, two over there just a couple of days later, right?

0:11:15
PR: Yeah, because he wanted January 6th at home, I guess.

0:11:19
CW: Yeah.

0:11:20
PR: Yeah, and there’s a bunch of stuff. And he actually has already been barred from running for public office. See, take a cue. Government can do that. Some governments can, and I thought ours could. But anyway.

0:11:35
CW: We’ll just have to see how that goes.

0:11:38
PR: Yeah. So, yeah, so, but yeah, this guy’s got like a coup de tenders belt now or a planned one at least and a bunch of other stuff. So he’s in a little bit of trouble. And, you know, of course, reflecting some similarities in terms of the mounting pressure and issues, you know, we see here with another former president.

CW: But, yeah, an indictment is not a conviction. So we just have to bide our time and see what happens.

0:12:06
BR: And I would just add that for those who don’t follow Brazilian politics, the person that succeeded him was Lula, who was the president of Brazil from a long time back, a leftist. So it’s gratifying to some people, me included, to have Bolsonaro be succeeded and basically run out of office by a very popular leftist from decades ago.

0:12:35
CW: So I guess the picture I’m getting here is if you’re tired of American politics and the left versus the right and the far right excesses, don’t move to Brazil. You’re not going to get away from it by moving to Brazil.

0:12:52
PR: Okay.

0:12:54
CW: Well, in my little news feed, I my my radar perked up when I saw that there are some measles cases popping up in Chicago. Have you guys heard of these?

0:13:05
BR: I have been following the measles outbreaks in Florida and Chicago and elsewhere. It’s yeah, another easily preventable disease that is making a comeback because people can’t be can’t be bothered to actually take safe and effective vaccines.

0:13:20
CW: Yeah, well, again, we could do several shows on, you know, vaccination and the anti-vax movement, et cetera, et cetera. This caught my eye because of the way it’s happening. There are 15 cases as of yesterday in Chicago among migrants in a certain migrant shelter. And most of these cases were confirmed to have developed after the migrants entered the country. So legitimate news stories, I read about it, stressed this point, which is good, kind of fights that tendency we have seen over and over again to be like, oh, the filthy, dirty foreigners are bringing disease to our shores. Now, public health officials and a team from the CDC are mobilizing and vaccinating everybody who can be vaccinated. Everybody eligible is getting vaccinated. I was happy with what I saw in the traditional, like, reliable, legitimate news sources. And then I did trawl Twitter just to see what I’d find or Twitter slash X. And yeah, it wasn’t hard at all to find very many people complaining about, Oh, Joe Biden has brought this to our shores with these diseased people and the whole rhetoric. And again, the same folklore we’ve encountered over and over and over again, demonizing people who are coming from another country as carrying diseases. And a lot of it was blaming Joe Biden personally, instead of ironically, instead of Governor Abbott for his new tactic of busing new migrants all over the country, which if you if you are going to view migrants as disease vectors, then busing them all over the country is probably the worst thing you can do if you think about it. So, yeah, pick your story, people. If you want to think migrants are a deadly vector of disease, And there were also people complaining that the Biden administration wants to kick you out of your hotel room to make space for migrants that have to quarantine. And yes, a lot of these migrants are staying in a hotel, but it’s not like they kicked people out of the hotel to…

0:15:43
BR: You come you take my job you kick me out of my hotel room.

CW: Yeah, they’re not like ruining people’s vacations here a family in there that was exposed to the measles virus. So Again, we’ll just have to watch as the story develops and I’m hoping it doesn’t get much, much worse before it starts getting better.

PR: Yeah, well, shouldn’t that prompt them to get vaccines or am I, is it too much wishful thinking on my part?

0:16:10
CW: Yeah, probably too much wishful thinking.

0:16:11
BR: Well, speaking of which, I will, I’ll put in a little plug for a CFI blog that I wrote about a week ago titled Immigrants, the Perpetual Bogeyman.

CW: Yeah.

BR: So if people are interested in reading more about that, also there’s a big section in my book, America the Fearful, but if anybody’s interested in more on the folkloric role that immigrants play as boogeymen for political purposes, check it out. And I also wanted to highlight the fact that there’s a new study out on Havana syndrome, which of course we’ve covered on the show a couple of times, including with Robert Bartholomew who co-authored a book on it. The most recent study was released a few days ago and it was an NIH study in the National Institutes of Health. They had basically looked at brain scans and blood markers of diplomats who had complained about symptoms of Havana syndrome. This is the as yet ostensibly unexplained syndrome in which diplomats in a couple of places, primarily Havana, Cuba, were complaining that they were suffering from headaches, dizziness, a sort of a variety of symptoms, which, as it happens, are mimicked by sociogenic illness. In this particular case, there were a couple of studies, and they basically found that there was nothing distinctive in, again, blood markers or the brain injury scans to suggest that there was any actual brain damage. And that was one of the keys.

0:17:39
CW: Now, this is this is big, because I remember 60 Minutes did a piece on Havana syndrome and they sort of pounded in and just like, oh, my my brain scan showed injuries. My brain scan showed deterioration. My brain scan showed all these terrible things. And when when Bob Bartholomew was on with us, because listeners can harken back to episode 159 back in October of 2021. We covered this and Bob Bartholomew was like, no, those brain scans, I’ve looked at them, they don’t show injuries. So it’s very interesting to have this follow-up study pretty much confirm what he said. I hope some people are buying him a beer this week. I hope he’s getting to say, I told you so to a couple of folks.

0:18:23
BR: Yeah, I grew up on 60 Minutes. I have a lot of respect for it. They’ve done some excellent journalism. They’ve also done some shoddy journalism and I think their work on Havana Syndrome really missed the mark. But yes, this is not, of course, the final study. There’s more to come, but this is just another piece of evidence from, you know, the NIH is pretty well respected. This isn’t someone, you know, someone in their basement. And it’s supporting basically the mass sociogenic illness explanation. Yeah, in fact, he was quoted in the Scientific American piece. The NIH representatives hedged their bets a little by stating that it’s still possible that some microwave weapon, which again is as yet unknown to science, along with the sonic weapons, caused damage that simply healed before it could be confirmed by tests. To that, Bob said, quote, I suspect that what we’re seeing in leaving the door ajar to the possibility to more exotic explanations has less to do with the inability to understand psychologically induced symptoms and more with not wanting to embarrass colleagues. So I think he’s I think he’s straight on with that.

0:19:31
CW: Yeah, yeah. I’m glad they they plugged him and his book in the Scientific American article. That’s that’s nice. And I think we’ve exhausted all of our sway-sos. That’s about what’s come across our our field here. Kate Middleton for a while was going to be something we talked about, but then she reappeared.

BR: Or did she?

CW: Or did she? Maybe it’s a body double.

0:19:52
BR: Wow. We should do a show on that. Ding!

0:19:55
CW: Alright, in the meantime, let’s get to talking with Kurt Anderson.

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0:20:15
CW: Well I’m very pleased to have this next guest with us. Curt Anderson, a magician turned academic and social research scientist. Are you here?

0:20:30
Curt Anderson: Yes, I am. Thank you.

0:20:32
CW: He’s appeared in the room. It’s magic.

0:20:35
BR: That’s got to be the least impressive magic trick I’ve heard, but great to have you on.

0:20:40
CA: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited. Yeah. I heard your prior podcast on true default theory and I’m like, oh, this would be great.

0:20:50
CW: Well, we literally name dropped you on it and we knew we’d have kind of a follow up because you have taken the truth default theory topic and taken it into some new directions here. And first, before we get into all that, I would like you to give us a critique on our summary of what truth default theory is. And did we get anything wrong in that last episode?

CA: Yeah, so you did a really good job. There was probably a couple of small nuanced things that I actually when I listened to it, I made notes, but that’s actually in my office back at the University of Tennessee.

0:21:12
CW: Oh, a likely story. The only thing that was that I think was notable is the the professor that came up with truth default theory is Dr. Timothy Levine because there are other professors in the field who spell their name the same way, pronounce Levine, but he’s Dr. Timothy Levine.

0:21:46
CW: Every person I’ve met with that spelling has been a Levine. So whoops.

0:21:51
CA: And he doesn’t take offense to that either. I just thought you would like to know, you know, if you ever run across him, you’ll be able to say his name correctly.

0:21:58
CW: Sorry, Dr. Levine.

0:22:00
BR: So before we get started, so again, we like to hope that probably listeners heard that same show, but in case they didn’t, I don’t want to be constantly referring to like, hey, if you’d heard this other show, then you’d know. So can you give us a little intro into what we’re talking about?

0:22:17
CW: Yeah, and if listeners want to look back, if this happens to be the first episode you’ve ever caught of Squaring the Strange, you can flip back like two, three episodes down to episode 220. You are going to believe this truth default theory. But yeah, please give us a, you’re the perfect person, Kurt, to give us a TLDR of what truth default theory is.

0:22:40
CA: Sure. So Dr. Timothy Levine was a research scientist studying human communication with specializing in deception. And he ran across a couple things that just kind of didn’t make sense in a lot of the data over the years and some of the trends and so he started putting together some different ideas and those works culminated into 20 years worth of understanding and trying to fill the gaps of knowledge into what he calls truth default theory. And it’s a theory that helps explain why people lie or deceive, how we perceive that, and what that whole communicative process is like. The basic namesake, truth default, is this idea that we as humans are basically defaulted to the truth in the way we approach life. People don’t lie very much. And we believe everything we hear unless we are triggered not to. And we can be triggered at different levels depending on our life’s experience and our knowledge. If we hear something and we have no frame of reference, we’re basically going to believe that. The first time I met either of you, if I introduced myself and the woman next to me said, this is my wife Bonita, it’s unlikely either of you went, oh, that’s really weird. I bet that’s not really his wife. I bet he’s lying to me. You know, we just don’t do that. It’s not functional for us to communicate and for us to get anything done. It’s just functional to believe everything to be truthful and left we have a reason not to. And so this idea that we approach deception as something kind of out of the norm, we have to kind of be triggered to to suspect it. And then even even once we’re triggered, we don’t always believe that someone is lying to us. There’s a couple of different levels of that trigger mechanism. And so truth default kind of branches out from there. It’s a modular theory where there’s a bunch of statements that have to do with deception that are defined and studied. I think now there’s about 50 papers that have been published that kind of help define truth default and replicate and extend its findings.

0:25:00
BR: When I first heard about the theory, and it was actually only a few years ago, it sort of occurred to me that they had a lot of explanatory power, particularly for skeptics. And I honestly, it’s possible that I’d read it. I mean, I’ve been editing Skeptic’s Inquiry magazine for a quarter of a century, it’s entirely possible that somewhere along the line someone did a piece on it, but if so, I don’t remember it. And it was just interesting that it seemed like it had, again, had such power in terms of, you know, skeptics lamenting, well, why do people believe this? Is it because they’re stupid? No. There’s nuances here. So I’m really glad we’re digging into it. I think it is really an underappreciated aspect of skepticism.

0:25:40
CA: Absolutely. And it the book was published in 2020 and some of the first like papers that really got traction as far as truth default itself were I think 2016. So it’s really a relatively new theory. And in my opinion, it is the ground floor of a paradigm shift in our our understanding of deception scientifically. And it is very strong in its explanatory power. And the findings are very consistent, very replicatable. There hasn’t, to my knowledge, been anybody that’s done a serious study or look into one of the studies and found any real issues. Now, of course, no study’s perfect and there’s always something that can be improved on or change. But there’s no like fundamental flaw. Levine is very, very conscientious about his work. And so he doesn’t publish anything unless it’s it’s rock solid.

0:26:38
CW: That’s some exciting stuff to live up to here in terms of an academic theory before we get too far into it, because we’re going to be peeling this onion a little bit further than we did the last episode when we just did an overview. Can you tell us about your background and what kind of led you to this path? You started as a magician, you still are a magician.

CA: Yeah, yeah.

CW: And many skeptics are, but a few magicians I know have the experience of also being a church magician. That’s really interesting when you look at that in line with truth default theory and the study of deception. And tell us about your background in your own words and how you got to where you are now.

0:27:20
CA: I grew up in a very religious, fundamental Baptist home. And, uh, you know, I was like the kid that brought the most friends to Bible school and memorized all the verses and did a WANA and won all the awards and the ribbons and things. And, and I really was overprotected as a child because I was born extremely early and underweight and my parents were told that I wouldn’t survive. And so my mom didn’t let me play with other kids and things. And so I really didn’t make friends. I didn’t really have friends. And so it gave me a lot of time to spend doing magic because I had no friends. And I thought, well, you know, people like magic. If I learn magic, then that will make friends. Right? And so I got really good at magic and I started doing stage shows. I did my first magic trick at seven. I did my first paid show at 11 and I was on the road as an apprentice at 13.

BR: Wow.

CA: And I broke off and did my kind of started my own business at 16, put myself through my first run of college back in the eighties doing magic. And I was in communication studies and broadcast film and trying to kind of find what I thought would help me best to be a professional magician. And I booked a 21 show tour in Costa Rica and I thought, well, this is the only chance a kid from Alabama might ever get to go out of the country and perform. So I took that and I just had to book a bunch of shows to pay the bills. And I was planning on going back to school the next semester, but those bookings led to another big booking, which led to another big booking. And I ended up being a professional magician. And I was on the road. My kids grew up on the road. They slept in the back of a Suburban, pulling a trailer from state to state. I performed in all 48 continental states. I performed in eight countries. I’ve been on TV a few times, you know, done a lot of stuff. And for a long time, a lot of that was doing an evangelistic show in churches. And then along the way, I just noticed some things and it really got me thinking. It’s pretty amazing how this story is certainly not unique to me, but a lot of people are really skeptical and good at skeptical thinking in most areas, except one. And for me, that was my religious belief. And just kind of wading through things, it was a long process for me. It took me about eight to 10 years from when I first started thinking, hey, there’s some things about Christianity that just don’t make sense and can’t be answered in a really satisfying way to the point where I just was like, you know, this is not something that I believe is true. And ultimately believing the most true things and, you know, was more important to believe something that was true and uncomfortable than to stay with something that was comfortable that I just couldn’t say was true. I then, you know, quietly just quit taking church shows. I didn’t make a big thing of it. Um, you know, most of my friends and family are highly religious. Many of them don’t know that I’m no longer religious or no longer believe in a deity. It’s weird because I’m the type of person that, you know, gets up on stage and, you know, entertains and, you know, always, always talkative, but it’s just something I haven’t felt like I needed to just go around and tell everybody, like they’ll find out eventually. And it’s more for their sake than mine because the few people that I did tell, it was so devastating for. My best friend, like within a couple of days of us talking just came to me like we’ve been life, you know, like best friends for years. And he’s like, I, I cannot talk to you anymore. You can’t see my family.

CW: Oh man.

CA: You know, I had some of that. And so I was like, you know what? I don’t like, I am not, as a matter of fact, I feel like I’m a better person than I was before, but there’s just no need for me to, to, to do that on a personal level. If somebody asks, I tell them. I don’t hide from it, but I just don’t say it. So a lot of people still don’t know, I guess, but I don’t really interact with a lot of people on a regular basis. I’m awfully busy. But I started taking shows in other areas and stuff. And then as I was kind of building traction again in a new market, COVID hit and I became instantly unemployed. Well, I had been guest lecturing at the University of Alabama in the truth, ethics and deception class. And the professor there is like, hey, weren’t you in communication studies like years ago? I’m like, yeah. And he said, you should finish your degree under COVID. And I’m like, ah, you know, I’m a magician. And he goes, yeah, but you’re not having anything to do. And I’m not one to sit around. Like, I don’t, I just like, I just can’t sit around. You know, we go on vacation. I’m not the guy that goes to the beach because I just can’t lay there the entire time. I’m thinking I can be doing something I really enjoy.

0:32:31
CW: COVID was really rough on performers.

CA: Oh, my goodness. It was terrible. So, you know, just even a couple of weeks in, I’m like, OK, I think the guy’s right. Like I should go do something. If I can finish my degree, it gives me something to do. I like to learn. I can study deception because that’s a thing now. And it really wasn’t a thing back when I was in the, you know, college in the 80s. So he helped me get a full scholarship. I finished my undergrad degree. COVID was still going on. During that time, I happened to meet Dr. Timothy Levine, who was the department chair at a college less than an hour from my house. And I went and I sat in his office and I said, hey, I am a professional magician. Here’s my situation with COVID. Deception is something I know a lot about, but I don’t know the scientific ins and outs of it. And I would like to study that. And I would like to get my master’s degree on communication, kind of specializing in deception. And you seem to be the guy, right? You are the guy and I, you know, because I’m now unemployed and I, you know, I still have all the bills I had. I can’t do it unless I’m funded, which in, you know, advanced degrees funding is a big thing. And we discussed it and he offered me full funding plus a scholarship and a stipend and to get paid to teach during that time. And then put me in the research team and I got my master’s degree, and then I spent a lot of extra time doing research on his team, which led me to find the people at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. And one professor in particularly, Dr. Kutowski, really, he and I really had like a good vibe. He seemed like the type of person that if I worked with him on my PhD, that he would really push me where I need to be pushed, but at the same time he would kind of let me go when I need to be let go. Cause I don’t really have the same vibe as most, you know, doctoral students.

0:34:36
CW: Are there any other magicians in your department? Does anybody who studies deception?

0:34:41
CA: There is one at the University of Tennessee, oddly enough, but he was in like advertising, but he’s not, like he teaches a class in something completely different. I can’t even remember, it’s like accounting or something. It’s like not at all what you would expect. But he still does shows and stuff. So he has a couple degrees, I think, and then he teaches in a non-related study. But we sat down and had dinner and had a couple adult beverages together a couple times and just discussed like magic and discussed getting a doctorate and discussed like academia in general.

0:35:21
BR: Well, I can see why Levine would just light up when you when you walked in his office and told him What you do in your backstory? I mean like this is this is the guy so that’s that’s cool. You guys ended up doing that.

0:35:34
CA: Yeah, so we’ll kind of jump like we’ll skip the middle part of that story there and kind of my my intent is really to really understand like I’ve really, really, really fallen in love with like the scientific study of deception. And it amazes me that magicians don’t do anything like that. And then the way that magicians approach deception isn’t at all like the researchers. So like, I feel like I can learn these scientific principles and at some point teach magicians how to better structure their approach to building, you know, deception so that it could make magic shows better, which we certainly need. There’s a lot of bad magic out there. And then also from having just a lot of experience of building deception and the trial and error and what goes into that is not something that the scientific world really has a lot of experience with. And so I’ve got something I can kind of teach that world to and be this bridge between.

0:36:38
CW: Yeah, magicians seem to learn many things about deception just instinctively and with muscle memory and just trial and error over and over and over again, show after show.

0:36:51
CA: Yeah, we kind of like, we do something, and if people go, oh wow, how’d you do that? We do it again, and we try to do more of that. And if they don’t, we go, oh, well, doggone it, let me try something else.

0:37:01
CW: Yeah, you guys are just a bunch of natural experiments going on constantly.

0:37:05
CA: Yeah, but not very rigorous sometimes.

CW: Yeah.

CA: It’s really just like, oh, I think this would be cool. And then other times we just like do something and it works, and we don’t even know why sometimes we just like, oh, that worked. We’ll do more of that.

0:37:18
BR: Of course, there’s a long history of magic, including Randi and whatnot. And the irony, of course, is that he’s, you know, with the magician, you’re you’re not asking yourself, I’m a magician. I’m going to fool you. You’re you’re paying me to entertain you. And you’re going to see tricks. And of course, there are people like Kreskin and others who of course, you know, will fudge, fudge, or Uri Geller, arguably, who will sort of fudge the boundaries. But it’s a whole different thing where you’re telling people you’re going to fool them, and there’s different, and I want to give anything away, and I’m by no means a magician, I love the art, but where magicians will tell you the truth about some things and lie to you about other things in service of delusion. And that’s part of the trick is, you know, as an audience member, like, he’s telling me that this is an ordinary deck of cards. It might be, or it could be total bullshit. And it’s just the ambiguity that it really trades on.

0:38:18
CA: Yeah, there’s a, I won’t say the name of the professional deceptive entertainer. But I heard in a lecture one time, they said something that really, really stuck with me. He’s like, one of my favorite things to do is to perform a trick in three phases. And in the first phase, I’ll say, now clearly I’m not doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he’ll give a method by which it could be done. And he’s not using that method, but he’ll use that method like in the second or third rednition of it. And like the second one he’ll say and I’m not doing blah blah blah blah blah which is what he did the first time. And so he actually will give three methods that he’s using while saying he’s not using those.

CW: In the wrong order.

CA: Yeah. Oh that’s great. Beautiful because you remember him saying I’m not doing this and then showing you that that wouldn’t work under these conditions, where he did it prior. And it’s just like, it’s just, it’s a great, you know, illustration of what Ben just talked about.

0:39:26
CW: So before we leave the topic of being a magician, I have to sort of ask, now that you’re in the research field, out of curiosity, do any of your colleagues know of Project Alpha? I mean, magicians know about it. Skeptical magicians certainly know about it. But do postdocs or PhDs in the research world, have they ever heard about it, you think?

0:39:48
CA: Well, I’ve told a few. And it was it was like Dr. Levine, who’s one of the most well studied in the field, you know, in the area of deception, had heard of it, but was fairly unaware of the details. So, you know, one of the problems we have in recent times is there’s just this idea that we don’t have to give science credit. And so when we bring up epic failures, and that really was an epic scientific experimental failure, Project Alpha. And so it doesn’t really serve the community to talk about it. It’s not that people are going to say, oh, no, that didn’t happen. But it’s just like, yeah, that was that was a big goof, right? Like they didn’t really follow scientific protocol. It was bad science.

0:40:40
CW: And if listeners are wondering what Project Alpha was, so we can have a little explainer here, every skeptic should look into this. It’s a project that James Randi did famously in the 1970s, where he sent in professional, well not really professional magicians, they were young magicians, Banachek and a fellow named Mike Edwards, when they were little baby magicians, young teenagers, they’d never pull anything funny. They were completely trusted by these researchers at Stanford in a Psy lab, a lab set up to study academically the phenomenon, if there was one, of psychic powers and telekinesis and all sorts of other things. And they were just doing magic tricks. And James Randi, interesting for the study of deception, he said, if anybody asks you, are you doing a magic trick, you have to say yes. And nobody ever asked. So that’s in a nutshell, Project Alpha.

0:41:37
CA: James even sent the researchers a letter on more than one occasion telling them, these sound like magic tricks. You should really look into this or even ask.

CW: Or here’s how you test against them being magic tricks. Here’s protocols you should use. And they just didn’t, yeah. Yep.

0:41:56
CA: And Banachek and Mike would say, hey, you know, we did this and here’s how we did it. And so Randi would contact them and say, now, make sure you don’t allow for this to happen or this to happen. And they go, of course not. We would never. So.

0:42:12
BR: Go away, Mr. Magician. We don’t care about you. We’re, we’re scientists.

0:42:15
CW: Yeah. Well, I’m, I’m thrilled. I wonder if, uh, so Dr. Levine had heard of Project Alpha, but he didn’t say, yes, you should come aboard because we could use a magician. We don’t want something like Project Alpha happening. We want to bolster our defenses here.

0:42:31
CA: No, because again, what’s so crazy is the scientific world just doesn’t operate in that sense. This whole thing, Project Alpha was like the perfect storm where they were trying to study supernatural occurrences and they weren’t really trying to set up scientific experiments about supernatural occurrences. They were trying to watch supernatural occurrences and then scientifically explain those. And so that’s different. Now, in the field, and it is a different field, and I don’t want to talk too much about the way those scientists do their experiments, but in the social sciences, in communication studies and communication management and handling deception, the best way to go about things from the lineage of professors that I work with is to really be grounded in a theory, see something that is a gap or something that doesn’t make sense, and to say, hey, what does the theory suggest? What prediction would make sense? And then test for that prediction. So instead of saying, hey, let’s see if somebody can do some psychic thing and then figure out why we think they’re psychic, we would say, we don’t think you’re psychic. Here’s a test condition where you couldn’t do psychic things any other way unless you were actually psychic so we would control for that one variable and go from there. And that’s not how Project Alpha scientists work. And that’s how Dr. Levine does his research and Dr. Kutowsky does his research. You try to be strictly in control of everything and then you manipulate one variable and isolate it as to see what that says in relation to theory. So it’s a very different approach.

0:44:29
CW: Well, on that, your concentration is in deception studies. Can you define how that how does that differ from basic truth default theory? Is it kind of a new field that kind of branches off from it? And truth default theory is the jumping off point.

0:44:43
CA: So truth default theory is simply that is it is simply a set of experiments and postulations, hypotheses that have been tested and have been shown to provide us with an understanding of how deception works. So, true default theory is a theory within the field of deception. And deception is within the field of, broadly, communication studies. More in like the social influence. So, it’s kind of like communication studies and then there’s social influence. Within social influence, one of those areas is deception. And then one of the theories that I think best explain how we understand deception is true default theory. So they’re not really like on the same field or you know comparable. It’s really something within something else I guess. It’s kind of like the theory of gravity is within you know the broader field of physics. It’s just something that helps us understand how physics work as far as when we drop something, it falls straight towards the earth. So true default theory is a theory that help us to explain deception within the human communication process.

CW: Okay, it’s complicated. It gets more and more complicated the more you specifically define things.

CA: Yeah, and that’s – I try to not overly do that, but it is so very specific because if you leave some of that out, then it’s fundamentally wrong. That’s one of the things about science is like, again, if we try to say it in such a way that is super easy to understand, then somebody can go, well, clearly that’s not right because of this or that or whatever. And so you, you know, if you leave something out, it’s just not the same.

0:46:57
BR: Well, let me ask about the practical applications, right? Because we, we, you’ve talked about one, which I hadn’t even thought of, which is improving magic, which I, that’s a super cool angle I hadn’t even thought of. But of course, the angle that I came up with was improving critical thinking, education, things like that. But what other, I mean, other than sort of an abstract topic to research in social psychology and so on, what are the practical applications of this? You know, how do you see this sort of work affecting regular people?

0:47:28
CA: Sure. So a big thing is this really It really changes the mindset from a lot of the work in the field over the last 50 years. Because the first deception study, like scientifically recorded deception study in the field, was like the early 50s. So it’s now that’s, you know, old for, you know, people, but it’s young for a science, right? It’s young for a field. It’s a very young field. But most all of the work starting back with Ekman, and if you’ve watched, you know, Lie to Me and some of the different TV shows and some of the different, you know, YouTubers, the great thing they’ll do is they’ll get on. They’re like, oh, here’s somebody who was talking on the news. And here’s why they were lying. And because they did this and this and this and this. We’re finding out really none of that is reliable.

0:48:19
CW: I know, and I really, I got into Ekman for like half a minute. Yeah.

0:48:24
CA: Right? Yeah, I did too, right? And, but the thing is, it’s because he’s charismatic and he knows what he’s talking about. It’s just if you look at all of the things he did, there isn’t the support for it that you would think there should be. And this is one of the things that Levine looked at a lot of the data on a lot of the deception work and went, yeah, we really haven’t found support, like back to the magic 54%, 54% of the time when people are trying to make a veracity judgment, that is to say, someone makes a statement and you’re trying to tell them they’re telling the truth or telling a lie, and we make a judgment call that of that person’s link truth, that person’s telling a lie. Across the board over thousands and thousands of data points, we’re accurate 54% of the time, which is just a little more than a coin flip. And so true default theory has changed the way we look at that, and it’s increased the accuracy by quite a bit by getting away from  cue theories. Almost all the other work in the field is some sort of  cue theory. And that’s the idea that you’re looking for a cue or a clue that someone else is putting out that helps you to tell their lie. Okay, so like, oh, your eye twitched or… Yeah, right? You wouldn’t look at me, you covered your mouth. Right? Those types of things. Your feet were pointed towards the door so you weren’t comfortable and wanted to leave, so I know you’re lying. Okay. All of those, there’s a lot of those. you know, the liar smile and, you know, all of the, but the problem is, yes, someone might have any one of those individual cues, but, you know, the next person you talk to, they might act the exact same way when they’re nervous, because they think you’re accusing them of lying when you’re telling the truth.

0:50:19
CW: Yeah.

0:50:19
CA: And so even when it’s right, it’s not functionally helpful because there’s as many different forms of bodily tells and cues as there are people. And some people will be the exact same when they’re lying or they’re nervous.

0:50:36
CW: So do you see this kind of filtering into in terms of practical applications? Do you see this filtering into police work, into approaches in courtrooms, poker strategy?

0:50:50
CA: Yeah. Well, you know, poker is kind of a different, it’s a little bit of a different realm because in day-to-day life, we don’t lie like poker players lie, right? In poker, you have a hand and you’re representing that hand or you’re representing a hand that you don’t have. That doesn’t really happen in day-to-day life. You know, we lie differently in day to day life. Lies aren’t really as much individual sentences, right? Not an individual statement. It’s more of an episode. Celestia, you have a young child.

0:51:27
CW: I do.

CA: And if they say something that really you don’t believe, right? You don’t just go, oh, okay. Right? You question them about that. Well, wait a second.

CW: Oh yeah.

CA: You’re not hungry. Why are you not hungry? Cause you haven’t eaten in four hours and I can’t find the cookies that we bought earlier. Right? And they say, oh, I don’t know what happened to cookies. You don’t just stop and go, okay, well, they don’t know. Right? Dig a little deeper. And that’s, you know, we don’t, we don’t just like, somebody doesn’t say a lie and you go, oh, yep, you’re lying or you’re telling the truth and that’s it. That’s just not how it works in real life. Poker, it kind of does, because you either do have the full house that you’re representing, or you missed the flush draw and you’re bluffing. And so you’re, it is more of a dichotomous thing. And one of the best tactics for poker players is to take a dichotomous decision and try to represent it as a different one. So one of my favorite poker tactics is let’s say I’m in a hand where I do have a full house, right? And someone’s trying to figure if they should call or not because I’ve pushed all in. I might say something like, well I know what you’re trying to figure out. You’re trying to figure out, do I have two pair or did I miss that flush draw? Well, I’m not going to tell you because now I’ve given them two things to consider, neither of which are true. So yeah, there’s a lot to this.

CW: Yeah, I should also mention, we’ve tiptoed into another side interest you have. I know you’ve also dabbled in poker quite a bit.

CA: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:53:13
BR: Let me ask this. You know, we’re talking about different types of lies and deception. How do you parse out different types of them by intent or severity? I mean, you know, as you well know, studies show that most people lie every week, sometimes multiple times a day, but they’re not lies that are going to get you in trouble with the FBI. They are your butt doesn’t look fat or, you know, this your kid’s drawing is a masterpiece or that lunch was great. So how does the severity or the type of life factor into this?

0:53:46
CA: So one of the things that I’m actually working on I thought it was going to be my dissertation. That was my intent and it’s changed because I’ve had some other opportunities and some work that I think is going to potentially give us is more important in a sense, I guess, to me and maybe to the field, or answer a question that’s been around longer than my original intent. But my original intent was to address this very thing, Ben. I don’t think the field, being as young as it is, actually addresses it the way it should. So most definitions within the field of deception is some form of an intentional act to mislead without prior notification. So we break that down, right? You have to be, you have to knowingly, we’ll use the subset of lie, okay? Lie as a subset of deception, but we’ll stick to lie because, you know, in my field, communication studies, most of what we talk about is lying. Deception is broader than that, but we’ll stick with lying to make it easier. So it must be intentional, right? If someone pulls up in your yard and you’re out cutting the grass and they say, hey, how do I get to the mall from here? And you go, well, you go down here about two miles and you take a right, and it’s actually a mile, but you’ve never really looked at it and it feels like two miles to you. You didn’t lie to them, you were just mistaken. So it has to be intentional. And then to mislead someone, to give them information that you believe they will accept as true that is not. So the intentional act to mislead without prior notification. So it’s one thing if we’re talking about a piece of software that we use for college called Canvas, right? And Canvas gives everybody fits from time to time or or here’s a better one, right? Let’s say if anybody has ever had to be on a college campus and had to deal with parking, right? If I say, oh, I love parking. I love the parking policies on our campus. That’s clearly not true. I intentionally told you something that I knew wasn’t true, but there’s this prior notification that, you know, we joke about parking, right? So if I say, oh, I love the parking on campus, that’s not a lie because we know that, right?

0:56:10
CW: Sarcasm font.

0:56:11
CA: Right. Sarcasm fits into that category. But what I feel like the field has kind of missed is this idea that we need to consider not just intent but motivation behind a lie. And we need to consider broader context and results. So if we go to Ben’s example of like, do I look fat in these jeans? If your significant other says, do I look fat in these jeans? And you say, no, you look fine, simply because you don’t want to have an argument. That still has a different motive than if you want them to feel good about themselves and you feel like they look great but you know they don’t feel like they look great because they’ve put on pounds since you were first together. But you still feel like they’re a beautiful person with a beautiful body and they should be more confident in who they are and you go, no, you look great in those jeans. You could tell the same the exact same lie, but just those slight difference in motivations can change how you communicate as a couple.

CW: That’s that’s that’s some nuanced parsing of a message there. That’s that’s that’s like top level. And it brings me to my it brings to mind something you said on one of my Facebook posts a long time ago. You said, deception is just another form of communication. What did you mean by that? Most of us, just blanket statement, oh, lying, lying is bad. Lying is always bad. But you’ve just given us an example where motivation can, you’ve really dissected the little white lie thing.

0:58:02
CA: Yeah, so deception, lying are communicative tools. They’re not inherently good. They’re not inherently bad. They’re not right. They’re not wrong. They’re to be used, right? And we think, like, if I say, hey, I’m going to deceive you, like your first feeling is, oh, like, I don’t, I’m not cool with that. Right? Your first thought is deception is bad I have asked people in lectures and before my magic shows, hey, if I tell you I’m gonna deceive you. What do you think about that people? I know that’s bad I’m like you’re here to you know I’m a magician if I do a magic trick, and I don’t deceive you that’s gonna kind of suck.

BR: You’re gonna want a refund.

CA: Yeah, right like you’re really gonna want this to be good magic, right? But you know, then that’s that like the intentional act to mislead. So magic really isn’t deception because the prior notification, right? This idea that when you go to a magic show, you know they’re going to try to deceive you, right? And you don’t really believe that Penn and Teller cut somebody in half, right? Like there’s blood all over the stage, but we don’t really believe they cut that woman in half and put her back together. We know that’s a trick by and large. Now there are people from time to time to think that stuff’s real, but by and large, the contract between the audience and the magician is that they are going to do things that are not truthful and they’re going to try to create illusions and those things aren’t real. So there is that prior notification thing there. So magic isn’t deception, but I contend that the devices that we use as magicians are deception. Because deception, you are hiding or giving information that is false that you believe people will accept as true. So I don’t think that when I make somebody float you believe that I can change the laws of physics in my area on stage so that a woman can float around stage without any means of support. is the way that I accomplished that trick, I likely have something that is causing her to float around stage that I work very hard to make sure you don’t find out about. So that is the deception, is the actual devices, mechanisms, and those have to be physical things, right? Yeah, it can be the way that I manipulate your perception verbally or non-verbally, right? Misdirection, I can get you to look one way in a focused sense where I do something in another area that you don’t notice because I have manipulated your perception, those are deceptions. Magic is not deception, but those things that we use to create those illusions is where the deception takes place.

1:01:21
CW: Now, you’ve got me thinking on another interdisciplinary approach here. Ben, I’m going to bring you in for this. I’m thinking of all the stories we’ve done about trickster figures in folklore, and how a big message is usually delivered. The moral of the story happens because of a lie that is told. You know, it has an impact because of the way a trickster god has manipulated something, or a trickster figure in like Native American folklore, or somewhere has deceived someone. Do you know what I’m talking about here, Ben, in terms of like it would be less powerful. It would be far less powerful if the trickster figure just, well, I guess wouldn’t be a trickster figure. They just said, here’s the lesson I’m going to teach you. My advice is blah, blah, blah. No, that’s straightforward and bland and would not communicate the story.

1:02:18
BR: Yeah, no, that’s an interesting point. I mean, you know, one of the running themes as you point out, if you’re looking at folktales or Aesop’s fables or even stories about the devil and witches and deception, it’s the idea that in this dichotomy, of course, you have God as being the omniscient and omnipotent and always in theory trying to do things for the greater good, then you have this evil, literally Satan, the devil that is, you know, the trickster figure and he will try and tempt you and try to get you to do things and deceive you with, you know, the great deceiver.

1:03:00
CW: Oh my God, have we just proven that Curt is a Satanist now?

1:03:05
BR: That was not where I was going with that. But no, but no, it is…

1:03:09
CA: Aaron Ross, call me.

1:03:10
BR: I’ll get right on that. But no, it is, I mean, that’s, for a good story, for a good narrative, you need a conflict. You need to establish that here’s the setting, here’s what’s going on, some inciting event happens, something happens, a lightning bolt, or there’s deception or betrayal over else, and then it gets resolved or not. And oftentimes that the conflict is derived from deception, right? It’s derived from misunderstandings, you know, in Shakespeare, I mean, half of Shakespeare.

1:03:48
CW: And the whole draw for the audience is they, well, they see cues, which you were saying, you’re stripping out of deception studies because they don’t really work. But the audience gets such narrative joy of like, I sense a cue that Iago is betraying him. I sense a cue that this character is dishonest. And you get such satisfaction in watching that play out when you have picked out the liar. But the main the main character is still, you know, has has the wool pulled over their eyes.

1:04:16
CA: Sure. And the reason that works is because it’s contrived to work. Right? Your perception of those characters is being manipulated. In real life, it doesn’t work that way. Right? In real life, you don’t give off that, you know, sly smile to the audience, you know, when you pull the wool over the eyes of someone unsuspecting. Right?

1:04:45
CW: Mustaches are never twirled.

1:04:46
CA: Right. Yeah. So, you know, we use that and you know again as a magician, right? We use those things We use a lot of those techniques on stage and another one of my favorites. One of my favorites is This the sense of I teach public speaking, right? So most people are familiar with this idea that when you put together a speech or presentation You want to tell people what you’re gonna tell them then you want to tell them that and then you want to tell them what you told them, right? This idea of you preview what you’re gonna talk about, lay out all of your presentational points, provide support for those, and then in your conclusion, you recap what everyone was supposedly supposed to learn, and then kind of give them the takeaway, right? As a magician, one of my favorite things to do is to tell them what to expect, which will generally be more grand than the trick itself, then do the trick, and then in the wrap-up explain to them, remind them what I did in such a way that is way better than what I actually did. So that when they tell the story of the trick that the magician Curt Anderson did, it’s always told in a better, grander sense than what I actually did. People –

CW: Rou’re influencing their memory.

CA:  Yes. Yeah. We know statistically, like when people testify in court that their memory is not really that good and can be easily manipulated. And it can be easily manipulated when they’re talking to police officers and they say, well, did you see this? They’re not exactly sure what they saw, but they’re kind of consistent with what they saw. They might say, well, yeah, I saw that.

CW: Yeah. You’ve actually just described what lawyers do. They tell you what they’re going to lay out. They lay it out and then they tell you what they’ve just laid out.

1:06:35
CA: Right. Now, when we’re talking about deception, is it good or bad? Right. Is it right or wrong? Is it, you know, necessary? Is it evil? If it’s the other person’s lawyer, we’re like, hey, that’s not cool. That was bad. If it’s your lawyer and you go free, that was pretty good. That was useful.

1:06:54
CW: Well, yes.

1:06:55
BR: Right? It all worked out.

1:06:56
CA: Yeah.

1:06:57
BR: You know, it strikes me what we were just talking about, about the story’s getting better. We did an episode a long time back with Richard Wiseman on the Great Indian Rope Trick. And in that discussion –

1:07:10
CW: Oh, yeah.

1:07:11
BR: Yeah, and he sort of – I mean, it’s a complicated story. It’s really fascinating. People should check it out. But part of the element that I’m remembering from it was how all these stories, you know, there would be some sort of performance. And in the telling, in the retelling, it got to be, you know, three people turned into 30 people turned into a crowd of thousands, you know, and there’s just nothing there, but anyway, it struck me that we’re talking about the importance of like a baseline, right? So it seems to me that in a truly magical world, in a world where the magic was real, magic will lose its appeal, right? Because it’s the fact that people don’t, you’re coming into a magic show and, hey, ordinary deck of cards, is it? Is it not? Who knows, right? It looks like an ordinary woman or stage or whatever else. And so it’s really, it’s the contrast between our assumptions about how the world works and what we’re seeing and the grandiose magic that we’re seeing. And anyway, I’m sort of repeating myself, but it just occurs to me that again, in a genuinely magic filled world, people wouldn’t find that interesting or entertaining.

1:08:33
CA: Yeah. And a little shout out to Richard Wiseman here, just prolific author and magician, but he has one of the few books that actually scientifically goes through the theory of magic. And it’s appropriately called, you know, magic and theory. And he takes it from a scientific approach. And so I’ve actually cited his work in some of my work.

1:09:03
CW: Oh, yeah, okay, fantastic. Again, magicians entering academia, I love it.

CA: Yeah.

1:09:10
BR: So, Curt, I have to ask, you know, we’ve been talking about how different people approach deception, ordinary people, you know, lying to your significant other about, you know, how good their pasta was and things like that. But there, of course, there are some careers and professions that rely heavily on detecting lies. I’m thinking spies, investigators, interrogators, customs agents, people whose job it is security, right, TSA. Sure. Drug dealers, drug dealers. So, presumably, their, their training and their profession allows them to be better at detecting lies than random chance. Is that true? And if so, what sort of strategies do they use?

1:09:52
CA: So it’d be really cool if there was a yes or no answer there. But there’s not. So the type of training they’ve had affects that. The constraints by which they’re trying to detect the lies affects that, right? If you’re trained in interrogation and you have to talk with somebody out on the street or in a restaurant where there’s a lot of people there, then, you know, that affects that. There are different law enforcement agencies who have spent a lot of money in training and some of those have been more accurate and some have not. Probably the most interesting finding in this whole field is that the accuracy and deception oftentimes has to do more with the liar than the lie detector. So let’s run back, we’re gonna do a callback now. This was a joke, right? We talked about 54% earlier in the podcast.

1:11:02
CW: Yeah, we mentioned that on the last episode too. The 54% thing is really sticky. It just keeps coming back to that.

1:11:10
CA: It’s almost a coin flip, but it’s not. And it’s consistently not. Why 4%? Why 4% better than a coin flip? One of the biggest portions of that 4% and there’s like about 3% of people that are just really bad at lying. You know, it just is, right? So there’s certain people that are really good at lying. So this idea that if you’re highly trained you could spot lies, if you think about it, every decade or so, there’s some high level spy for the U S that was a double agent and no one knew about it for 20, 30 years. And they’re taking lie detector tests. They’re talking with people. They’ve got some of the world’s best interrogating them about what they know, what they’ve told, what they’ve learned, where they’ve been, and yet they go undetected, right? So it really has more to do, there’s just, there’s gonna be some mom or dad out there who’s got two or three kids, and right now they’re thinking, oh yeah, yeah, I got one kid that just, when they lie, I don’t know, but I got another one, when they lie, I know every time they’re lying.

1:12:19
CW: Well, so you gotta rely on that one to tattletale on the other one.

1:12:23
CA: Right, right, that’s parenting 101 right there. But the truth be told, there are some people under any circumstances are just really good at lying. There’s some that are just really bad at lying. And the training and the professionals typically do have a higher rate, but you can put them in a context that they’re not used to. And they’re gonna regress right back to 54% ish, it might be 57%, it might be 52%, but they’re gonna be back in that range quite a bit. And some of the research now is starting to target that and I’m working on an idea based off of some other work that I think might make some progress in this field if it’s grounded in theory and I understand it right. I’m looking to kind of try to test something that might help with some of that.

1:13:17
CW: Just as somebody who again watches a lot of pop culture narratives and I’m keyed in on what devices are used to show a character is lying, I wonder how much of that 3%, the really bad liars, we’re going to call him a guy named Joe. Joe is such a terrible liar and everybody who he lies to just can tell immediately that he’s lying. I wonder if people like that just really absorb the pop culture cues and they just subconsciously or consciously they’re like, oh, I’m lying now. Not that they’re masking or trying to put on a front and mimic these behaviors on purpose, but in worrying about doing these behaviors, they might be doing these behaviors.

1:14:04
CA: You know, it’s really just their natural reaction is so different than how they normally communicate. They don’t look comfortable. They do things out of the ordinary. They, you know, they might laugh uncontrollably, like you’re in a serious, you’re being, you know, you’re being accused of cheating on an exam where you could get expelled. And you just laugh and shake your head and go, like, of course I wouldn’t cheat. I wouldn’t cheat. I didn’t ask if you would cheat, I asked, did you cheat? Oh, of course I wouldn’t cheat. Of course I wouldn’t cheat. Again, that’s not what I asked, right? Like, you don’t act like people don’t act like that normally. So it’s, yeah, it’s a natural reaction with some people, whether it is their own consciousness, if they’re having some sort of guilty feelings, or if, you know, it’s just a reaction to like the consequences that are gonna happen and they feel like there’s no way they could get away with lying. So, you know, they just aren’t very good liars.

1:15:18
CW: OK.

1:15:18
BR: This is slightly off topic, but it would remind me when you’re talking. I was a big fan of tennis, particularly in the 1980s. And I remember reading Andre Agassi’s book. I think it was called Open. And he talked about how, you know, because when you’re playing tennis, one of the lot of times the server will try and disguise their where they’re going to hit the ball, right? Because obviously, if you can tell where they’re gonna hit the ball, then you have an advantage. And he said that in terms of adversaries, one of the famous rivalries that Agassi had was with the German tennis player, Boris Becker. And Agassi often beat Becker, and Becker didn’t realize it, but he had a tell that Agassi zoomed in on that apparently no one else did. And he said, yeah, he said that Boris didn’t realize it, but when he was serving, he would stick his tongue out in the direction to where he was gonna serve the ball. And so Andre was all over it, and Boris couldn’t figure out how he was getting such good returns.

1:16:18
CA: Right, so we’re back to like the poker idea, right? Right. This is a dichotomous thing. You’re never hitting the ball at somebody. You’re aiming at that left corner or right corner. You know, you’re trying to hit down the line. You’re trying to go in that back corner. Yeah, that’s one or the other.

1:16:30
BR: Yeah.

CA: Right. And and the thing is, he might have two or three other tells, but those weren’t reliable. But, you know, Agassi found one that was. Right. We do have tells, but you can’t go on the tennis court and now start watching everybody’s tongue. Right.

CW: It won’t work for everybody.

1:16:46
CA: Yeah. It isn’t going to work. Right. And that’s scientifically, when we’re talking about cue theory, you know, is there something that people do that we can tell reliably that they’re lying? No. Are there certain people that do certain things reliably when they lie? Absolutely. Right. But that’s that’s not going to help. You know, you’re not going to interview the same criminal for, you know, 43 different murders, but you might see Becker in 43 different matches, right? So yeah, functionally, there are certainly cues. It’s not to say cues aren’t a thing, but they just aren’t diagnostically functional, you know, to base your, you know, like, Hey, this person’s telling truth, telling a lie, typically.

BR: Definitely. Um, so Curt, I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Dan Arelli, but he’s of course done stuff into deception and misdirection. What can you say about his work? And for some people may not know, he was actually criticized recently, including in the New Yorker magazine for possibly fabricating data. I don’t know anything about it, but I just know there’s been questions raised about it.

1:17:57
CW: Double irony.

1:17:58
BR: Right, right.

1:17:59
CA: Yeah. And that’s, you know, it’s funny because that’s one of the big questions that you typically get when you talk about doing deception research. One of the questions that’s commonly asked in certain types of research is, you know, did you lie about this? Or did you tell us about a time that you lied? And people go, well, why would you ask that? Because if they’re lying, why wouldn’t they just lie about lying? But really, most people are honest about when they lie. And it’s kind of back to most of the lies we tell aren’t ones that are going to get us in big trouble. Right. Oh, well, I told my mom that, you know, I love having her over when I really didn’t want to have her over. But I love my mom. So I told her that. Right. So I told the lie. So, yeah, it with research on that subject, it’s not, you know, something that is like localized to deception research, these accusations. And I don’t know whether he fabricated or not. I have read some statements by people that worked on his research team. I’ve read some statements from different folks. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to make that call. One of the tragedies to me, and I know I’m new to the field, right? I haven’t been in this forever and so forth, but there’s this big pressure to publish work, publish work. And it’s just in the field, they call it publish or perish. Like you have to put out enough publications and we’re not talking about just like writing something and putting out there for people to read. These are things that have to be peer reviewed and published in an academic article within, you know, a journal within your field.

1:19:42
BR: Right.

1:19:43
CW: That pressure.

CA: You have to have a certain amount of those to get a job, to keep a job, to get tenured. Like when you get a job as a professor, most people don’t realize this, like you just don’t get raises, right? You have to publish enough to earn your way to get that next spot in the ladder. And so there’s that pressure and that doesn’t go away when you have published so much work that you’re esteemed in the field, then everybody feels like, you know, they’re waiting on you to publish something else. And so there’s even more pressure to put out more amazing stuff. And, you know, time to time, these creep in where people have published something and they have lied about the data or they reuse data from something else, or they made up the statistics on it. And one of the great things about science is we have other people out there that are checking out what you said to see if that’s true and if the data’s there. And there were things that he published that didn’t seem reliable and people checked into it and they have reason to believe that it’s not exactly as published. And I trust the process to really get to the truth. But the nice thing is, and this is something that’s overlooked, is that science is not based on one person’s work. It’s not based on one article. It’s not based on one theory. It’s not based on one idea. So even if I come up with the coolest study ever, let’s say I do my dissertation on something that fundamentally could change the world. By itself, it’s pretty meaningless. It’s one study in a field of data. And so, for every good study out there, you can go find a bad study. And you can find something that supports almost any idea that you want. If you get someone who has manipulated the way they did their experiment, collected their data, the sample size. You know, if you ask, you know, the old joke, like if you just ask one person and you report that as your data, you know, that’s an extremely small sample, but you can get anything supported by a small enough sample.

1:21:52
BR: Yeah.

1:21:53
CA: Right?

1:21:54
CW: I think you’ve just explained all the problems we had with COVID.

1:21:57
CA: So you can find any answer you want. That’s the bad thing about the internet is you can find anything you want. But if you really look at the knowledge, the body of knowledge as a whole, it’s gonna be really accurate because there’s always gonna be bad scientists. There’s always gonna be somebody that’s pressured to do something and they take a shortcut or they purposely manipulate something or purposely lie for their own career or whatever their motive is. I don’t live in anybody else’s shoes, so I’m making no judgment calls there either. But if we rely on one person, too often in this society, somebody’s like, oh yeah, I read an article on New York Times publicist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so now I don’t have to trust anybody in deception studies.

1:22:44
BR: Right.

1:22:44
CA: Well, no, that’s not actually how science works. And we feel like we can justify whatever we want to when we hear one story or one thing that supports what we already believe right we got that confirmation bias, and that’s you’re always going to have that option But if you’re a true skeptic, and you really want to get to the truth, and you hear something you yes now Okay, now that’s now. I’ve been saying that for years that makes sense that doesn’t necessarily make it true, right? Even one study, even one good study doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s correct. One of my favorite quotes Dr. Lyon said in one of the classes that we had in my master’s program was, did you know that not all facts are true?

CW: Oh, stop breaking my brain.

CA: Right? Because a fact is something that we have observed, we’ve made a theory about, and we’ve tested it repeatedly, and it’s consistent. But every generation, we find something in science that we gather more information, and it changes what we knew. So if we look back thousands of years, every morning people would get up and they would see the sun come up over the horizon, go over their head, and fall in the sunset. And so it was repeatable, it happened every day. Every day the sun would rise and so they would see the sun move over the earth. And so obviously the fact of the matter was that the sun revolved around the earth. That was a fact. Until better theory came out, until more science was done and we discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth. So at one time, the sun revolving around the earth was a tested, repeatable scientific fact. It is now no longer the case. So in every generation, we have things like this. So there are things that we currently believe and we’re wrong, but it’s the best knowledge that we have. And that’s why it’s important that we continue to add to that body of knowledge. And on a micro level, on a personal level, right? One of the most difficult things that a person can do if they want to be a true skeptic and really approach this the right way is just because somebody that you love and respect tells you something or teaches you something or introduces a set of dogma to you, just because you love them and respect them doesn’t make it more likely to be true. Right? And that includes research scientists, right? Just because one person puts out a study doesn’t necessarily make it true. So whether he, he lied in the data, whether he fudged something, whether he mistakenly did something wrong, or if he’s a hundred percent accurate in the body of knowledge, we’re going to go with what the overwhelming body of knowledge says and what the theory says. And in time, his results will either fit with what we know to be true or it won’t.

1:25:48
BR: Or of course, the other possibility is that, and again, I don’t know anything other than what I’ve mentioned, but the other possibility is that some data was fudged and yet the answer remains correct.

1:26:00
CA: Yeah, that’s entirely possible also, right?

1:26:02
CW: I think all of that was a really long way to say you can neither confirm nor deny.

1:26:07
CA: Not on one study, right?

1:26:10
CW: Yeah.

1:26:11
CA: You just can’t, right? And there’s no need to. Again, you could have the most interesting study come out and they could be 100% accurate, but without testing it, repeating it, extending it, checking for external validity, see if it’s meaningful beyond the scope of the study. You know, that’s just one thing that helps us to start to understand the concept, but it takes much, much, much, much more work to really fully understand any concept.

1:26:39
CW: All right, Kurt. Now, we’ve got many listeners who are involved in teaching critical thinking, and obviously with skepticism and critical thinking in mind, truth-default theory is something we should be getting familiar with. How can folks become a little bit more knowledgeable about truth-default theory and incorporate aspects of it into maybe their curriculum without say going to grad school for several years and participating in hundreds of studies? Do you have any quick guides or resources or places you can point us?

1:27:12
CA: Yeah, so nice thing, Dr. Levine feels like all of his work should be as public knowledge as possible. He feels like anything that we learn scientifically should be shared with the masses as much as possible. So, you know, some of his, you can just, you can Google search Timothy Levine. You can search truth default theory. You can find some YouTube videos. You can find some papers that were published that explain different aspects of it, the basics of it. The book, Duped by Dr. Levine, is the theory in its entirety. It’s not that expensive. You can catch it on Amazon.

CW: Yeah, I have it. I have a copy right here. It is Duped Truth, Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception from the University of Alabama Press came out in 2020. I think Ben mentioned that. And it’s 363 pages with a very nice index.

1:28:07
CA: Yes, yeah, it’s very thorough. And everything that you want to know and more, the nice thing, Dr. Levine’s really good about writing on a multi-level at the same time. So anybody who’s never been in the science at all can sit and read through it, and there’ll be some, you know, sciencey things and stuff, but it will all make sense. If you have been in the field forever, there will be a deeper meaning that you can also glean from the same information. So it’s really, really cool. So that’s a resource that’s available to everybody. I know that you can email Dr. Levine. You can look up Dr. Timothy Levine at UAB and you can email him if you have a question. And he will send you a Word document or a PDF of one of his studies if it’s specifically relevant to what you’re wanting. That’s my first introduction to him. I was an undergrad, I was studying this, and I had this idea that maybe there was a way to rectify cue theories and truth default theory, and maybe I could do that. And so I had some questions and I emailed him and he’s like well here here’s a paper that talks about cue theories approach and here’s one that I did on truth default and then the same thing and just look at these and you know have at it and so he was freely open with the information but his book he doesn’t he doesn’t hold back and also any study that he’s ever done if you want to see the full set of information on the data he will send it to you. And he does this regularly with other resources.

1:29:41
BR: Not everybody does that. That’s, that’s great.

1:29:43
CA: Yeah. So if you talk about, did you fudge something? Here’s everything I did. Here you go.

BR: Knock yourself out.

CA: Knock yourself out. He’s got nothing to hide. If you do it the right way, you got nothing to hide.

CW: That man keeps receipts. Awesome.

1:29:56
CA: Yes.

CW: Now, Kurt, you’ve also been a recurring part of the Skeptic track at DragonCon. I’ve seen you there a number of years, both performing magic and sitting on panels. I’ve been on a panel with you, I believe, a couple of times. Can we expect to see you this coming fall?

1:30:16
CA: Oh, absolutely. You can expect to see me more than the next couple of coming fall If all goes well.

1:30:23
CW: Fantastic.

1:30:25
CA: As a matter of fact, you mentioned James Randi, one of my favorite Dragon Con memories, as he came and sat in the front row of one of my magic shows at Dragon Con. And then afterwards, the person that was with him came up and said, James Randi would like to have breakfast with you. He has some thoughts on your show.

1:30:45
CW: Oh!

1:30:46
CA: And I was like, oh, that was amazing. So I met him and he’s like, hey, I really love this. I love this. This thing you did was like one of the best I’ve seen. Here’s an idea I had, I think that could make that even better, something I thought about before and it seems like it’d be perfect for what you’re doing. Here’s a trick that you did and there’s one fundamental thing that you could definitely do to make this better and he shared that with me. And so it was just great. And then I found out that I was doing a show not far from his house, six months down the road. And so he invited me to spend, I took an extra day and I spent an entire day in his library with him. And we became, I wouldn’t say like close friends, but we text and talk to each other every week for a while. And we’d Zoomed and he helped me with things. And he spent one entire day teaching me everything he knew about escaping out of prison and that was one of my favorite magical memories. So, and that was all because of Dragon Con so I am beholden to Dragon Con for some of my Favorite memories. You might be able to hear my son Ty laughing. Yeah I’m not sure why he’s what he thinks is funny.

CW: I mean James Randi was brilliant, generous, and he was also a funny guy.

CA: Yeah, absolutely.

CW: Now, you mentioned, Ty, I just wanted to, another thing that amazes me about you is you are doing all this academic work with a tremendous load of classes and work and research and studies, and you’re a full-time caregiver.

1:32:18
CA: Yeah, so my son, Ty, is a special needs adult who’s had over 12,000, what they used to call grand mal seizures, the tonic-clonic generalized seizures. And that is a bit of degenerative situation for him that has slowly taken most of his ability to learn and communicate away from him. And so he, he needs someone with him 24 hours a day. And, and so I, one of my stipulations when I went back to school was that Ty could go to all the classes that I took. And then when I got into my master’s and now my PhD, he goes to all the classes that I teach, that I take, all of my research meetings, and any other meeting that I have to attend. And then the University of Tennessee, this tells you how much they really loved me, right? They agreed to make parking next to our building available for me because I would have Ty with me.

1:33:16
CW: Yeah.

CA: And like the most prized commodity on a campus other than their football team is their parking spot. And so to have a spot next to the buildings, so if Ty has a seizure and I have to carry him to the car, I just simply have to carry him, you know, the shortest path possible as opposed to carry him across campus or try to catch a bus and try to, you know, carry him on a bus when he’s incapacitated. So, yeah, the University of Tennessee has been so gracious to allow for that and Ty’s with me 24-7. And so it’s there’s some drawbacks to that, but there’s also some great things, too. So really, the other students and the professors all enjoy having Ty. It makes the class lively sometimes. Sometimes if he’s in a bad mood with me, they think it’s kind of funny. If he’s in a really good mood, sometimes it can be kind of funny. But mostly, he looks at each class like he’s watching another theatrical production. So to him, like he’s getting to go to the movies a dozen times a week.

1:34:20
CW: Oh, that’s wholesome. And as a father, as an academic, as a magician, you’re just so inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find more of you?

1:34:32
Well, you know, my website for magic is magicurt.com. It looks like magic and Curt with one C. It was really clever in the 90s when, you know, it was first coming out. It was like, oh, a magi and Curt. Magi Curt. But it looks like Magic Curt, right? And it’s just one C and myself and two other people have, have understood that, you know, the last 30 years, but, um, yeah, so magicurt.com, uh, all the socials, magicurt. Um, hopefully you’ll be able to see, you know, my published work. I did have my first publication come out in January. I actually coauthored with Dr. Levine and it was about some experts who used some of the true default basic principles to interrogate potential liars and cheaters in an experiment and they reached a 98% accuracy in judging whether people cheated or not, lied or not, and then covered up or not for the lie of their partner. And so this was an extremely high rate of accuracy that was achieved and it was achieved grounded in true default theory. And so I thought there were some very significant things there. It was something that Dr. Levine had had in the cooker for a while and had some research teams do some work on. And I just felt like this was really important. It was a really important step towards a bigger understanding. And so I asked if I could lead the research team during the summers while I was there to code. Because we coded almost a 100 different up to 15 minute interviews for like 78 different things, which is awful, awful lot of coding when you’re doing anywhere from two to five coders per video. We, we coded all that and we wrote everything up. And so I, I took a team of master students and pushed them to get this done while I was at UAB and we were able to get that, get that published. And so, you know, you can look that up online somewhere. Cool. Hopefully you’ll see more of my work. Come see me at DragonCon.

1:36:52
CW: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

1:36:53
CA: I pop up with shows here and there around the US. I just booked a show in England for the summer. So I’ll be performing at an old theater on the edge of England, on the edge of London in England. So yeah.

1:37:08
CW: Cool.

1:37:09
BR: Cool.

1:37:10
CW: All right. Well, thanks very much, Curt. I know your time is precious and thank you for sharing it with us.

1:37:15
CA: Oh, thanks for having me.

(MUSIC)

1:37:17
CW: Well, that was nice of Curt to give us some of his time. I know he is a tremendously busy guy. I hope you enjoyed the conversation too, Ben, yeah?

1:37:41
BR: Yeah, it was cool hearing somebody who’s more involved. I mean, I’d read some of Levine’s stuff and of course did some research on it, but it was nice hearing her talk about his firsthand research and his sort of insights sort of beyond the headline stuff.

CW: The closer you can get to the original sources, the better, right?

1:38:00
BR: As always.

CW: All right. Well, what have we got coming up for next episode, guys?

1:38:05
PR: So as of just a couple weeks after this recording, gosh, even, yeah, just barely, not even a couple of weeks, it will be our sixth anniversary as a podcast.

CW: Wow. That’s six years is a lot of years. We could have each earned like a master’s degree. Oh wait, Ben, you did.

BR: I did during that time, yeah.

1:38:27
PR: I should have done more with my life in that time. No, but so we’re gonna be, you know, kind of doing a retrospective. This isn’t a clip show. We’re gonna actually be talking about a lot of the topics we’ve had and just talking about, you know, what we loved, what we didn’t love, things that have changed, maybe ways we were wrong. So, you know, just be ready for that. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun to just sort of have a fun talk about the entirety of our repertoire at this point.

1:39:01
CW: Yeah, we don’t do too many like chit-chatty blah, blah, blah. Let’s talk about our thoughts and feelings shows, but you know, it’s nice to do that every once in a while. So once every anniversary, allow us to indulge ourselves.

BR: I have to talk about my feelings, really?

CW: Yes you do.

BR: This is how far we’ve sunk. We expect people to listen to Ben talking about his feelings.

CW: Yes, you have to tell us what each and every episode made you realize.

PR: Yeah, I’m gonna have just a three-hour list of every episode in our star rating of each one.

CW: And then we’ll have the reading of the grievances. Right, I’ll get right on that.

1:39:40
Okay.

1:39:41
All right, until then, everybody, take care.

1:39:43
Bye-bye.

1:39:44
See ya.

1:39:45
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1:39:50
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1:40:28
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1:41:10
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1:41:13
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Transcribed with Cockatoo