Look Me In The Eye!
You have probably heard all of these: "Liars can't look you in the eye." "Their truth, your truth, and the truth." "Imposter syndrome." "I don't belong here." One of them is simply false, and it does real damage. One of them is useful, if you are willing to follow it all the way down. Two of them are lies we tell about ourselves — and they were handed to us. Let's take them one at a time. "Liars Can't Look You in the Eye" This one is the worst, because it is both universally believed and flatly wrong. Start with how widespread it is. A team of ninety researchers surveyed people across 75 countries and 43 languages, asking an open-ended question: how can you tell when someone is lying? The dominant answer, everywhere they looked, was that liars avert their gaze. Roughly 64 percent of respondents named it, and the belief held steady across languages and age groups. About 70 percent of non-English-speaking ...