People don't even need to be on the Spectrum … that myth was debunked for the entire human race absolutely ages ago.
It was a nice money-spinner for a few people for a while … a whole cottage ‘self help’ industry sprang up as people peddled the myth that there were sure and known ways to determine whether someone were telling the truth or lying.
But as soon as you looked into it, you started seeing that it was all couched with so many caveats and disclaimers that what it amounted to was pop psychology at its worst: misunderstood concepts (albeit perhaps innocently) misrepresented … the equivalent of suggesting one tell a schizophrenic by virtue of their sometimes seeming like a different person (thanks to their having ‘multiple personalities’) — nonsense at best … disastrously to dangerously misguided at worst.
At most, some people with decades of experience of dealing with a limited range of people under limited circumstances might learn the domain specific tells of a lie or prevarication under those very specific and limited conditions. That does not mean their experience is applicable to any other domain, let alone that it can be used in isolation of other corroborating evidence even within such a domain.
Seriously … it is to Psychology what Homeopathy is to Medicine. At best, the people who espouse it are well-meaning, but they’re no less misguided for that.
Please don’t propagate the myth even if Random House don’t offer you a million bucks. It could, can, does and has lead to any number of misunderstandings and because people take it onboard and believe it. The number of HR departments that employ the MBTI in the erroneous belief that it has any validity of any kind whatsoever should give you pause for thought. They aren’t psychologists but, because they deal with personnel fancy themselves as knowledgeable when they are anything but so. What happens if someone is accused of something in the workplace and some senior member of HR or management has allowed themselves to be convinced they can well someone is lying based upon this myth?
Just don’t do it.
It’s nonsense.
Seriously … you’re a great writer and, usually, I’m with you every step of the way, but not on this occasion. As a psychologist, I have to urge you to either edit it or take it down — you aren’t helping anyone by leaving it as it is.
