Many of us would not like to be labeled as a liar. But if a liar is merely someone who lies, we are all liars. Lying is one of the top unethical activities we may indulge in daily, and it undermines all efforts toward sound decision making. The truth is that one of the reasons we lie is because lying is difficult for others to detect. In more than 200 studies, individuals correctly identified people who were lying only 47 percent of the time, which is less than random picking.

One technique is to study a person’s body language, but researchers found that the probability of detecting lying based solely on body language was less than a random guess. Liars may indeed give verbal cues, but which cues apply to which people is a matter of debate. Whether liars tell better stories, or conversely give fewer details, is not certain. Managers—and organizations—simply cannot make good decisions when facts are misrepresented and people give false motives for their behaviors. Lying is a big ethical problem as well. Organizational behavior studies ways to prevent lying by creating environments not conducive to lying.