"Even those experienced at dealing with deceivers, detect others' lies no better than would be expected by chance":

The new investigation challenges a view, championed by psychologists Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco and Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco, that a small number of individuals with considerable experience in unraveling certain kinds of lies do so with great accuracy...

Experienced judges displayed no lie-detection advantage over inexperienced ones. Neither did judges show greater accuracy in evaluating highly motivated liars, such as crime suspects, compared with less-motivated liars, such as college students pretending to have stolen money.

The researchers also found that the tendency to label someone as a liar also depended on whether a judge regarded other people as generally truthful or not.