by Bella DePaulo | Oct 4, 2020 | LIARS AND THEIR LIES
Bella’s intro: I can’t think of anyone whose scholarship on the psychology of deception I admire more than Professor Maria Hartwig’s. Mark Fallon is a former Special Agent and has led some of the most important counterterrorism operations in modern history. He also wrote the book critiquing the U. S. government’s torture program. I am so grateful to them for writing this important guest post.
I could not share this with you as soon as they wrote it, though. It had to be reviewed by the United States government first. That’s ironic, because the authors are challenging the government’s sweeping pre-publication review process in this article. That challenge is part of their broader examination of the role of bullshit in the contemporary American political scene, and how it undermines freedom and democracy.
I posted the first part of this article on my blog at Psychology Today. If you have come here from there, you can start reading at Part II.
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by Bella DePaulo | Mar 27, 2018 | books about deception, cues to deception, frequency of lying, intuition and deception detection, LIARS AND THEIR LIES

The Psychology of Lying and Detecting Lies has just been published. The book is a collection of 29 of my brief writings on deception that have appeared in blog posts and books over the past decade. It is available in paperback or as an e-book.
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by Bella DePaulo | Jun 13, 2015 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, books about deception, Books about singles, LIARS AND THEIR LIES
For many (though not all) of my e-books, I have the option to put them on sale for seven days, several times a year. One of those weeks is starting today, June 13, 2015, I think at 8 a.m. (If you are reading this after June 20, 2015, this particular sale is over but the regular prices of all of these books are still affordable.)
These are Kindle countdown sales. The way they work is that the prices of the books are at their very lowest (99 cents) on the first day, then gradually increase over the course of the week to their usual list price. The sale is ongoing at both the US and the UK Amazon sites.
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by Bella DePaulo | May 10, 2013 | books about deception, LIARS AND THEIR LIES, morality of lying, strategies of lying
Most people value honesty. They want to tell the truth. They also value kindness. Sometimes, though, honesty and kindness collide. That happens when telling the truth would be hurtful, but being kind involves telling a lie. How do people negotiate this clash of noble intentions?
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by Bella DePaulo | Feb 2, 2013 | detecting bad intent, LIARS AND THEIR LIES, personality of liars

Once upon a time, my primary professional interest was in the psychology of deceiving and detecting deceit. I wrote about that in “My previous life as a deception researcher.” Now my passion is the study (and practice!) of single life. But I continue to get questions about deception. So I have compiled here many of my blog posts about lying and detecting lies. You can find many of these, plus some other writings, in the book, The Psychology of Lying and Detecting Lies. If you are interested in my other books about deception, you can find links here. (You may need to scroll down to find the books about deception.)
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by Bella DePaulo | May 26, 2011 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, Books about singles, detecting bad intent, IT'S PERSONAL, LIARS AND THEIR LIES
Recently, I went to a talk here at UC Santa Barbara by a communications scholar who studies deception. When he got to one of the puzzling aspects of the available research on deception, he said that thinking about it kept him up at night.
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