The Investor’s Lie Detector with Susan Carnicero

Susan Carnicero (0:06)

The more you allow a person to lie to you to be more deceptive, the harder it's going to be for them to tell you the truth.

Justin Thomson (0:17)

Welcome to The Angle from T. Rowe Price, a podcast for curious investors. Just a reminder that outside of the US and Australia, this podcast is for investment professionals only.

Thank you for joining me today. I'm Justin Thomson, head of the T. Rowe Price Investment Institute. At T. Rowe Price, we believe asking better questions gets you better insights. To help us ask better questions, we've engaged with one of the best in the business, Susan Carnicero. After 20 years as a CIA operative, she now has her own business, QVerity, that helps governments and corporates ask better questions, interpret suspect behaviors, and identify whopping great lies. Susan, welcome. Thank you.

Let's talk about you to start off with. How does one become a CIA operative? How did you get into this business?

Susan Carnicero (1:03)

Well, I was actually recruited into the organization many, many years ago.

But a lot of people come in, they apply. Depending on what their backgrounds are, they come in as analysts, they come in as security people, they come in as economists. So there's a position for every industry inside the organization. But I was recruited out of a company where I was in PR, Public Relations for a Fortune 500 company, and someone knew me in the organization and suggested that I would be a good person for work inside the organization. And I did one level of work for a while, and then Audra James decided to out me, and I ended up going to the Office of Security, where I did polygraph for a number of years and things like that. It helped to develop the methodology for detection of deception.

Justin Thomson (2:04)

So you're in PR.

In terms of academic training, was it physiological? Was it behavioral? I'm just very keen to know how your mind got you into the position that you are now an expert in.

Susan Carnicero (2:23)

Well, so I would say that it was part education, but it was also part experience. I do have a background in forensic psychology. I have a master's in forensic psychology.

And then when I ended up going into polygraph and started to study people all day long, for hours at a time, you would naturally start to pick up some of the behaviors, and you could see where the deception was, but that's mostly where it came from. And then just years and years and years of following this methodology that was developed inside the agency allowed us to start to really identify deception. And with finding the deception, what do you do once you find it? Do you just say, oh, they lied to me and walk away? Or in your particular world, if you see deception, what's your next step? And that would be your follow-up questions. You identify the question and identify the stimulus, identify the behavior when you see deception.

You need to ask those follow-up questions.

Justin Thomson (3:26)

Very good.

We talk a lot in this podcast series about biases and counteracting biases. And one of the reasons talking to you is so interesting is that I know one of my own biases as an analyst and portfolio manager was I was too believing. I was too believing. My question to you then is what were your biases and how have you overcome them in becoming the expert that you are?

Susan Carnicero (3:58)

Well, I hear you when you say that you were too believing, that you were too trusting. And I would say that for much of my life, I was the same way. I wanted people to like me. I didn't want there to be any conflict. And it took turning off that quite honestly. It took me seeing enough bad behavior or even being wrong about people for me to start really paying attention. And I still don't like conflict. I still try to keep things mild.

I try to be a nice person, but we talked about earlier when I see or hear deception, I don't go around looking for it. But if I'm in a conversation with somebody and it pops up, I immediately kick into that mode where I start paying attention to what's being said. But it really took a psychological switch to just be aware that people are going to lie to you. If it's in their best interests, they're going to lie to you.

And that's a hard row. I have learned probably in my last 30 years, well, more than that now, of doing this kind of stuff, that there's a lot of bad people out there. And there's a lot of bad people who want to beat you. And, you know, they want to be able to prove that...