Liar Liar Pants on Fire

Apparently, I am terrible at differentiating between truths and lies. In my Lying and Deception course that I am taking, we watched a video of the same person in two different scenes, once telling the truth and once telling a lie. I got 3 out of 3 wrong. It was hard for me to tell the difference in the first place. We learned about certain bias people had about lying and the effects. Most people have a truth bias, where they think people are telling the truth most of the time. This causes the veracity effect which means people are better at distinguishing truth telling better than detecting lies. But it looks like I'm bad at both.

As I reflected in my life. There are a lot of times I've taken people's word for it even though their actions didn't add up. I trust people so much that it has led to many unfortunate situations for me. Even if I suspect that people are lying, accusing them of being a liar makes me feel guilty. In my class, we learned that the truth bias is what keeps our relationships healthy. If you always think people are lying, you live in a world of paranoia and are less likely to have good relationships with other people. I guess its a risk and a gamble. You have to give people the benefit of the doubt and if they take advantage of it, you lose a lot but you learn from it. It explains why trust takes so long to build but so easy to tear apart by an act of deception.