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By Root 586 0

offense than if they simply tried to deny that they had done anything wrong. It worked for Dexter—twice. Once, when Rita was becoming suspicious that something was amiss and asked whether Dexter was an addict, he said that he was. That answer satisfied her, especially after Dexter committed to going to the twelve-step meetings. Later, Doakes began tailing Dexter, certain that he would discover him doing something horrible. When instead his chase led him to the basement meeting of a Narcotics Anonymous group, Doakes thought all the pieces had fallen into place. Dexter wasn’t avoiding him and acting suspicious because he was out committing crimes; he was just hiding his personal problem and the work he was doing to deal with it.

Rita, Deb, and All His Colleagues and Friends: Dexter’s Unwitting Enablers

Having people around all the time can be quite an impediment, even to the determined liar. They see too much and know too much. Dexter has good reason to want his own space. Who wants some nice person around who, when the air conditioner breaks, might pull it out of the wall and try to fix it? Or who might wonder why you are getting home so late? Dexter lied to Rita about keeping his apartment because there, the Dark Defender could plot his evil deeds unmonitored and undeterred.

In other ways, though, the important people in Dexter’s life enable his lies. They don’t mean to, but they do. First, the mere presence of friends, a (now former) partner, kids, and a sibling he sees all the time shield Dexter from suspicion. They make him seem normal.

The second reason is perhaps not what you would think. Ask people if they can tell when someone close to them is lying, and often they will claim they have some special insight that strangers do not. They’ll say something like, “Oh, yeah, I can always tell when he’s lying.” And why shouldn’t they? They have much more experience observing, reading, and interacting with their close relationship partners than acquaintances or strangers do. And yet, when put to the test, romantic partners in particular are not very good at knowing when their loved ones are lying and when they are telling the truth. The problem is they want to believe that their partners would never lie—especially not to them. As a result they see their partners as telling the truth more often than they should, and more often than a stranger would.

Here’s a clever example of a study that demonstrates romantic partners’ obliviousness to one another’s deceit. It was conducted by Eric Anderson, for his dissertation, when he was a graduate student in my lab.

Anderson’s study modeled the dreaded question asked of one partner by the other, while pointing out a nearby stranger: “Do you think that person is attractive?” In the experiment, the person who was put on the spot—let’s use the name Bernie since it could apply to a man or a woman—answered truthfully half the time and lied the other half. The romantic partners of all the different Bernies were just a shade better than chance at knowing when the answers were lies. (They were right 52 percent of the time, when they would have gotten 50 percent right simply by guessing.)

Each of the 100 couples was joined by a stranger who also tried to determine whether Bernie was lying. The strangers were not very good at detecting deception either, but at 58 percent, they were better than the partners.

Anderson, though, did not stop at asking the participants directly whether they thought that Bernie was lying or telling the truth. He also asked them some indirect questions, such as how confident they were about each answer, whether they had gotten enough information to make an accurate judgment, and whether they felt at all suspicious. When the romantically involved participants said that they were not very confident, that they needed more information, and that they felt a bit suspicious, their partner was more likely to be lying than to be telling the truth. So even though the sweethearts were hardly better than chance when they were asked directly whether their partners were