Othello Error

The Othello error occurs when a suspicious observer discounts genuine cues of truthfulness. As the psychologist Paul Ekman describes it, the error happens when a lie catcher fails to consider that a truthful person under stress may still appear to be lying, because their non-verbal signals of worry about being disbelieved can look identical to the signals of real deception; a polygraph can be deceived the same way, by misreading a truthful person's nervous signals as guilt. The error takes its name from William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, whose central relationship between Othello and Desdemona is a well known dramatic example of the error in practice.