A much better heuristic for you to detect pathological lies is the 10,000-foot view. This means, rather than watching one individual’s body language or even listening to their explanations, of which there will be many, you summarize their claims at a very high level and then let your intuition tell you if that just makes sense.
In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, this is exactly how the reporter who cracked her case was first inspired to dig into her story. That story that something struck me as odd, which was this notion that a 19-year-old college dropout with just two semesters of Chemical Engineering under her belt had dropped out of college and pioneered groundbreaking new science. You know, that’s something that’s possible in the realm of computers and computer software, obviously, with Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates have done that. But in medical science, you need the formal training, and you need to do years and decades of research to add value. This is an important point.
It seems that psychopaths, sociopaths, whatever you call them (and I’m not saying that Elizabeth Holmes falls into this particular category, but whatever this compulsive lying category is), these people have an easier time tricking our brains than they do our gut reactions. And it’s partially because they have an explanation for everything.
Here’s one example: My grandfather would go get a Theranos test done, and he would have a needle in his
arm. You know, it’s like, ‘Well, I thought this was a single drop of blood.’ And there’d be some excuse about why they needed to take a venous draw for him. But, you know, for everybody else, it’s a finger prick. And you continue to buy into that.
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