Experts Reveal 15 Behaviors That Could Point to Chronic Lying

Most people think they can spot a liar. They picture darting eyes, nervous movements, an answer that comes too quickly, or someone suddenly refusing to make eye contact. Yet research has repeatedly challenged some of the most familiar assumptions about deception, leaving a much less obvious picture of what repeated lying can actually look like.

The clues are usually found somewhere else. They emerge through repeated stories, unnecessary details, shifting versions of events, and behavior that only becomes obvious after you have known someone for a long time. When lying becomes persistent and pervasive, the pattern can affect relationships, trust, and everyday life in ways that are far harder to recognize than a single suspicious moment.

Five Lies A Day, Every Day

The first thing that separates occasional lying from a chronic pattern is frequency. In 2020, psychologists Drew Curtis and Christian Hart proposed a definition describing pathological lying as “a persistent, pervasive, and often compulsive pattern of excessive lying behavior leading to clinically significant impairment of functioning.” Some clinical descriptions also refer to five or more lies a day continuing for more than six months, although pathological lying itself is not currently recognized as a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR.

The scale of the behavior can become one of the clearest warning signs. Someone caught in a persistent pattern may lie to almost anyone, including people they have no obvious reason to deceive. The lies can also involve things so ordinary that telling the truth would have been easier, such as what they ate, where they went, or what they did during an otherwise unremarkable part of the day.

That creates the first three signs to watch for when looking at the broader pattern:

• Frequent lying: False statements appear repeatedly rather than during isolated moments.
• Indiscriminate lying: The person lies across different relationships and situations.
• Unnecessary lying: They invent details even when the truth would have worked just as well.

The important distinction is that none of these behaviors proves someone is a pathological liar. People exaggerate, hide mistakes, avoid uncomfortable conversations, and occasionally make things up for many different reasons. The concern comes when the behavior becomes persistent enough to interfere with relationships or daily functioning.

Too Many Details, Then a Different Version

The next group of signs concerns the shape of the stories. A chronic liar may repeatedly describe experiences that sound unusually dramatic, improbable, or extraordinary, especially when they place the person at the center of events. Dr. Kyle Zrenchik described it as a sign when someone “consistently tells stories about extreme, abnormal, or unlikely events that they were involved in.”

The fourth sign, then, is a repeated attraction to extraordinary stories. The fifth is an excess of detail. Instead of giving a simple account of what happened, the person may supply times, names, explanations, locations, and small pieces of information that nobody asked for. Those details can make a story sound convincing in the moment, but they can also create more opportunities for contradictions later.

The sixth sign is drama. Stories may repeatedly become unusually cinematic, with the person positioned inside remarkable situations or conflicts. That tendency is one reason the older term “pseudologia fantastica” has been associated with pathological lying. The seventh sign appears when the story starts changing between retellings.

The changes may seem minor at first. A restaurant becomes another restaurant, a person who supposedly witnessed an event disappears from the next version, or an important detail suddenly takes a different form. Any single discrepancy can have an innocent explanation, but repeated changes across unrelated stories create a pattern worth paying attention to.

Push, And The Room Changes

Another cluster of signs becomes easier to notice when a person is asked a simple follow-up question. The reaction can sometimes be more revealing than the original statement, particularly when the response seems much stronger than the question itself required. Dr. Nancy Irwin has warned that confronting someone with evidence can trigger outrage, insults, or verbal attacks rather than a straightforward discussion.

Four behaviors can become particularly noticeable:

• Visible anxiety: The person appears tense while explaining the story, even before being challenged.
• Rapid defensiveness: A normal question produces an unusually intense response.
• Sudden vagueness: Details become unclear precisely where the account needs to be specific.
• Confident contradictions: Their version differs from your recollection, yet they deliver it with enough certainty to make you question your own memory.

That last behavior can be especially damaging in close relationships. When the same events are repeatedly remembered differently, the problem eventually becomes bigger than whether one particular detail was accurate. Trust begins to erode, and the person hearing the conflicting account can become unsure of their own recollection.

Still, these reactions cannot be treated as a lie detector. Anxiety can come from social discomfort, defensiveness can come from feeling accused, and memory itself is imperfect. The useful signal is consistency over time, particularly when several different behaviors appear together.

The Rush Of Getting Away With It

The final group of signs is less obvious because people often assume that lying automatically creates fear. A person who has developed a persistent habit of deception may not always behave like someone terrified of being caught. In some cases, repeated lying can become sufficiently familiar that the emotional response changes.

The twelfth sign is an apparent lack of concern about being discovered. The thirteenth involves what clinicians describe as a sense of pleasure or a psychological high after successfully getting away with a lie. Neither reaction should be interpreted on its own, but both can become relevant when they appear alongside frequent deception.

The fourteenth sign is a growing mismatch between what the person says and what actually happens in their life. This can take months to recognize because it requires comparing statements with real events rather than judging a single conversation. Someone may repeatedly describe achievements, relationships, experiences, or circumstances that do not line up with what others observe.

The fifteenth sign may be the most unsettling: your own account of events starts coming back to you with someone else’s version attached to it. The person may repeat their story so confidently and so often that you begin questioning what you remember. That is one reason chronic deception can damage relationships even when individual lies appear small.

Eye Contact Proves Nothing

That brings the familiar eye-contact test into question. A major review by Bella DePaulo and five colleagues examined 1,338 estimates involving 158 possible cues to deception. Their findings did not support the widespread belief that liars generally avoid looking people in the eye. The researchers found no meaningful support for that assumption across the measures of looking behavior they examined.

The broader results were similarly sobering. Many of the commonly believed signs of deception produced only small effects, while only two cues reached what researchers considered a large effect. That means a person staring directly at you is not automatically being honest, just as someone looking away is not automatically lying.

A popular TED Talk by Pamela Meyer has helped make deception detection a familiar subject for millions of viewers, but the research picture is considerably more complicated than the body-language rules often repeated online. Human behavior changes from person to person, and there is no single facial movement that can reliably expose every lie.

There is also a crucial limitation surrounding all 15 signs. None proves that someone is a chronic liar, and every behavior can have an innocent explanation in the right circumstances. Persistent lying is also not a formal DSM-5-TR diagnosis, so identifying a clinical pattern is a matter for qualified professionals rather than something another person can simply declare.

The Amygdala Stops Objecting

Research into repeated lying offers another possible piece of the puzzle. In a 2016 experiment, Neil Garrett, Tali Sharot and colleagues scanned participants’ brains while they were repeatedly given opportunities to lie for personal gain. The researchers observed that activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional responses, decreased as participants continued lying.

The lies also became larger over time. Participants who showed bigger reductions in the amygdala response tended to increase the scale of their subsequent lies. The finding suggested that repeated exposure to dishonest behavior might reduce the emotional discomfort associated with it under the conditions tested.

Sharot described the initial response this way: “When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie.” She added that the response faded with continued lying and that larger reductions were associated with larger lies.

That study needs to be kept in perspective. The participants were ordinary people lying in a laboratory setting for relatively small financial gains, not people diagnosed with pathological lying. It therefore cannot establish that chronic liars have the same brain response, but it does provide a possible mechanism for why repeated dishonesty can become easier over time.

First, They Become Wonderful

Some of the most difficult deception can be recognized only after considerable time has passed. Research discussed by psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne describes a theory in which deceptive people can invest substantial effort into learning what others expect, then adjust their behavior accordingly. That makes the deception harder to identify because credibility can be established before the serious lies appear.

Melissa de Roos and Daniel Jones developed what they called Mimicry Deception Theory around this type of long-term behavior. The pattern involves gradually becoming accepted within a community, building elaborate stories that can withstand questions, obtaining resources in small amounts, and keeping the deception difficult to detect.

That process can make a chronic liar appear highly trustworthy at first. The person may spend time learning the expectations of a group and adapting to them, rather than immediately behaving in a way that raises suspicion. The deception works precisely because it does not necessarily look like deception during the early stages.

Whitbourne’s discussion also distinguishes between different personality traits associated with deceptive behavior. She notes that narcissistic and Machiavellian individuals may engage in longer-term deception, while people high in psychopathy may use both short- and long-term lies, sometimes more impulsively. Those personality traits should not be casually applied to anyone who tells frequent lies.

The Wrong Timescale

The biggest mistake people make when trying to identify a chronic liar may be looking for a single moment of deception. A lie happens in seconds. A persistent pattern can take months or years to become visible, because the evidence exists across conversations rather than inside one facial expression.

There may also be complicated reasons behind the behavior. Irwin has said that people who develop pathological lying patterns can grow up in environments where they learn early that they are not good enough and that being a flawed person is unacceptable. She also connected the pattern with emotional neglect, heavy criticism, and abuse in some cases.

That explanation does not excuse harmful behavior, and it does not mean every chronic liar has experienced the same childhood. It does, however, show why simply labeling someone dishonest may fail to explain what is happening beneath the behavior.

The more useful response is to pay attention to repeated patterns and protect personal boundaries. As Irwin puts it, “Let them know where you stand and set a boundary for your own self-respect.” When the same contradictions keep appearing, the goal should be clarity about what you can trust rather than winning an argument over every individual lie.

Sources:

1. Lebow, H. I. (2022, September 15). 15 Signs of pathological lying and How to handle. Psych Central. https://psychcentral.com/health/signs-pathological-liar
2. How lying takes our brains down a ‘slippery slope’ (2016, October 16). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161024134012.htm