Case File 207 · Investigation Psychology

Do Liars Give Too Much or Too Little Detail?

On average, liars tend to give *fewer* details than truth tellers, but the amount of detail alone is a weak and unreliable guide to honesty. People vary enormously in how much they say, and an honest

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

On average, liars tend to give fewer details than truth tellers, but the amount of detail alone is a weak and unreliable guide to honesty. People vary enormously in how much they say, and an honest person can be vague while a liar can be elaborate. The more useful distinction from recent research is not how much detail someone gives but what kind: truthful accounts tend to contain more checkable, verifiable detail, while liars often favour detail that cannot easily be confirmed. Even then, detail is a probability, not proof, and no account should be judged on its length alone.

Key takeaways

Research finds liars are, on average, less forthcoming and include fewer details than truth tellers, but with heavy overlap between the two.
"Too much detail" is not a reliable sign of lying either; over-explaining has many innocent causes.
The verifiability approach finds liars give fewer checkable details, preferring detail that cannot be verified.
Amount of detail is shaped by memory, personality, nerves and the question asked, so it cannot prove deception.
Detail is most useful when it can be independently corroborated, not simply counted.

Do liars give less detail?

The best evidence that liars say less comes from the 2003 meta-analysis of deception cues by Bella DePaulo and colleagues, which pooled 1,338 estimates of 158 behaviours. Among the more consistent findings was that liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers: they tend to say less, offer fewer details and tell less compelling stories. Lies also contained fewer ordinary imperfections and fewer unusual details than truthful accounts.

The usual explanation is strategic. A liar has less genuine experience to draw on, so there is less to describe, and may deliberately keep an answer short to avoid being caught out or contradicting themselves later. A truth teller, by contrast, is simply recounting something that happened and can add texture without risk.

But "on average" is doing a lot of work here. The same meta-analysis stressed that most cues, including this one, are weak, and that the distributions for liars and truth tellers overlap heavily. Plenty of honest people are naturally terse, anxious or bad at describing events, and plenty of liars are fluent and talkative. Counting details in one person's answer therefore tells you very little on its own. For the wider context, see why there is no single reliable sign of deception.

What about "too much detail"?

The opposite belief is just as common: that a liar gives themselves away by over-explaining, piling on unnecessary detail to sound convincing. This is intuitive, because we can imagine someone padding a story to make it believable.

The problem is that over-explaining has many innocent explanations. Some people are simply verbose. Anxiety about being disbelieved can make a truthful person volunteer far more than asked. A complicated or genuinely eventful experience naturally produces a long, detailed account. Because both honest and dishonest people can over-explain, volume alone cannot distinguish them, which is why over-explaining is not a reliable sign of lying any more than brevity is. The research does not support a simple "more detail equals lie" or "less detail equals lie" rule in either direction.

Is the kind of detail more revealing than the amount?

This is where recent work has made progress, by shifting attention from quantity to checkability. The verifiability approach, developed by Galit Nahari, Aldert Vrij and Ronald Fisher, starts from what they call the liar's dilemma. Liars want to include enough detail to seem credible, but detail that can be checked is dangerous to them, because an investigator might disprove it. Truth tellers face no such tension and can freely describe things that could be confirmed by other people, records or locations.

In their 2014 study, participants wrote statements that were either true or false about a recent period of their activities. Liars included fewer verifiable details than truth tellers, such as named people who could be contacted or places covered by records, while giving a similar amount of unverifiable detail. Classifying accounts by the number of verifiable details, or the ratio of verifiable to unverifiable detail, separated truths from lies well above chance in that sample. Importantly, the gap grew when interviewees were first encouraged to include checkable detail, which prompted truth tellers to add more but did little for liars.

This connects to the older idea behind reality monitoring, which proposes that memories of real events tend to be richer in sensory and contextual detail than invented ones. You can read more about the technique itself in the verifiability approach to lie detection. The practical message is the same: a detail you can go and check is worth far more than a detail you simply count.

Why is the amount of detail not proof?

Even the clearer findings describe group averages under research conditions, not a test for an individual. Several factors shape how much detail a person gives, none of which is honesty.

Memory. Real memories fade and reorganise over time, so a truthful account of an older event may be sparse. A rehearsed lie about a recent event may be rich.
Personality and communication style. Some people are naturally detailed, others minimal, regardless of truthfulness.
Nerves and setting. Stress can make a truthful person clam up or, equally, ramble.
The question. Open invitations to "tell me everything" produce more detail than narrow yes-or-no questions, whoever is answering.

The accuracy evidence underlines the caution. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo's 2006 meta-analysis found people judge lies and truths at about 54% accuracy, and a 2019 review by Aldert Vrij and colleagues concluded that behavioural cues to deception are faint. Verbal detail is more promising than most nonverbal cues, but it is still a probabilistic aid, best used by trained interviewers with checkable material, not a tell to spot in casual conversation. See also can you actually tell when someone is lying?.

Is there a game that explores detail and gaps?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation, by the Croatian studio Gungrounds, treats the texture of an account as something to probe rather than a verdict. It is a narrative interrogation game inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews, built around unreliable stories, contradictions and narrative gaps. Its press kit names Narrative Gaps among the behaviours players examine, and development materials show an evidence board where statements are linked to one another and to what can be checked.

That mirrors the research: the useful move is not to count words but to notice which details can be corroborated and where an account thins out, then ask again. Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027, and its cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions. If you want the broader picture on behaviour and honesty, start with why there is no single reliable sign of deception.