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We throw around words like narcissist, sociopath and psychopath pretty freely these days.
The ex who ghosted you. The boss who took credit for your work. The friend who somehow always comes out on top.
But what’s the actual difference between someone who tells the odd lie and someone with genuinely psychopathic traits? And how quickly can you tell them apart?
Faster than you’d think, according to forensic psychologist Dr Leanne ten Brinke, director of the Truth and Trust Lab at the University of British Columbia.
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Speaking on The Diary Of A CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett, Dr ten Brinke said our brains pick up on psychopathic tendencies almost immediately.
“Most people think a psychopath looks dangerous; they picture the villain in a movie, but that’s not how it works in real life,” she explained.
“You can get a kernel of truth about someone’s personality, the extent to which they’re psychopathic, in about five seconds.”
Five seconds. So what exactly are we picking up on?
Forget what you know about eye contact.
When we suspect someone is lying to us, most of us watch for the obvious stuff: fidgeting, sweating, looking away.
But Dr ten Brinke said the idea that liars avoid eye contact doesn’t hold up.
“If you go around the world, and you ask people what’s the number one cue that someone is lying to you, they will say sketchy eye contact,” she said.
“And there’s no research to suggest that that is true.”
She explained that people who are skilled at manipulating others can hold steady eye contact, using it to come across as confident, charming and sincere.
Why most liars give themselves away.
To understand what sets psychopathic personalities apart, it helps to know how lying works for everyone else.
For most people, lying is hard work.
“The truth teller just has to remember what happened and tell you,” Dr ten Brinke explained.
“The person who is lying has a much harder task. We call this increased cognitive load, which means that they need to come up with details on the spot. They need to not contradict themselves, they need to make sure they remember it for the next time.”
That mental strain tends to show up in what people say, or rather, what they don’t.
“The most consistent effect we have that differentiates people who are telling the truth from people who are lying is the amount of detail that they give,” she said.
“So people who are lying tend to give fewer details. Liars will leave a lot of grey area in the things that they are saying.”
According to Dr ten Brinke, people high in psychopathic traits start from a different place.
She explained that psychopathy is one of the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of personality traits, alongside narcissism, Machiavellianism and sadism.
It’s marked by a lack of empathy, guilt and remorse.
Without the emotional stress that usually comes with lying, deceit doesn’t take the same toll on them, and that makes their manipulation much harder to spot.
The real five-second tell.
So if it’s not shifty eyes, what is it? According to Dr ten Brinke, it’s often a mismatch between what someone’s face is doing and what they’re saying.
A smile that doesn’t match the words.
In her lab studies, Dr ten Brinke looked at the ‘Duchenne smile’, the genuine kind that crinkles the muscles around the eyes.
“People who were high in these psychopathic personality traits, were showing very happy-looking smiles, as they were saying really hostile things,” she said.
Remorse that doesn’t reach the eyebrows.
Dr ten Brinke studied televised appeals from people pleading for the return of a missing loved one, some of whom turned out to be responsible.
She explained that people faking sadness tend to give themselves away in the upper face.
Pulling the corners of your mouth down is easy. But genuine grief also draws the inner eyebrows “up and together”, and that’s much harder to fake.
A flat, unblinking stare.
Dr ten Brinke also pointed to “shallow affect”, a core psychopathic trait where someone’s emotional responses seem flat or cold.
Pair that with intense, unblinking eye contact, the kind that feels like someone is trying to “peer into your soul”, and it’s no wonder people walk away feeling that something is off.
That instant gut reaction isn’t paranoia.
It’s your brain noticing the mismatch before you’ve had time to explain it away.
How to protect yourself.
Knowing the signs is one thing. Knowing what to do about them is another.
Here’s what Dr ten Brinke recommends.
1. Ask open questions.
If you think someone is lying, don’t make it easy for them with a yes-or-no question.
“You asked a closed-ended question. You’re like, ‘Are you cheating on me?’ ‘No.’ You didn’t even give them an opportunity to have to come up with something more difficult,” Dr ten Brinke explained.
“You would say, ‘Tell me about work on Friday night.’ And so then you’re asking an open-ended question.”
2. Don’t hand them power.
Charm is easily mistaken for leadership, which is why people with psychopathic traits can climb quickly at work.
Dr ten Brinke said rewarding them is fine. Giving them authority over others is where it goes wrong.
“You could give them an office with a view, you could give them a raise. But giving them power over people is probably not the right way to reward them.”
3. Put important conversations in writing.
Dr ten Brinke said charming manipulators lean heavily on face-to-face contact, where tone, presence and body language do a lot of the work.
Her advice is to move difficult or high-stakes conversations to text or email.
That takes the charm out of the equation, and it gives you a record of what was said if they try to rewrite history later.
4. Stop trying to fix them.
This might be the hardest one.
“Personality traits are by definition enduring,” Dr ten Brinke said.
Guilt and appeals to someone’s better nature are unlikely to shift deeply ingrained traits.
Instead, set firm boundaries and pay attention to what someone does repeatedly, not what they promise.
None of this means you should start diagnosing your friends over dinner or colleagues at the coffee machine. Psychopathy is a spectrum of traits, not a label for anyone who’s hurt you, and one odd smile doesn’t make someone dangerous.
But if someone’s warmth never quite matches their words, and that uneasy feeling keeps coming back, it’s worth listening to.
Your gut clocked it in five seconds. The hard part is trusting it.
If this post brings up any issues for you, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service.
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