Studies keep finding people are barely better than chance at spotting lies. Your gut isn’t a lie detector.

Confidence about who is lying feels like perception and is mostly a story assembled from nerves, eye contact and whether you already liked the person. All of those vary hugely between honest people, which is why strong hunches about deception are so unreliable. Being sure makes no difference to how accurate you are, because the feeling and the skill are unrelated.

Go looking for checkable things this week instead of reading faces. What was said before, what actually happened, what somebody else saw. Ask a plain question and listen for specifics. And be slow to accuse anybody off a feeling, because getting that wrong costs a friendship.