Case File 205 · Investigation Psychology

Does Looking Left or Right Mean Someone Is Lying?

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

No. The idea that a person looking up and to one side is lying, while looking to the other side means they are telling the truth, comes from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), not from established science. When researchers tested the claim directly, they found no link between the direction someone's eyes moved and whether they were lying. Eye movements happen for many ordinary reasons: thinking, remembering, searching for a word or simply feeling self-conscious. Treating a glance in a particular direction as a sign of deception is not supported by the evidence, and deception researchers are clear that no single behaviour reliably separates liars from truth tellers.

Key takeaways

The "look left for truth, look right for lies" rule comes from neuro-linguistic programming, not from peer-reviewed deception science.
A 2012 study by Wiseman and colleagues tested the claim across three studies and found no supporting evidence.
People average about 54% accuracy when judging lies from behaviour, little better than a coin toss.
Eye movements reflect thinking, memory and nerves, so a direction of gaze cannot tell you someone's intent.
Treat where someone looks as, at most, a prompt to ask another question, never as proof.

Where does the "look left or right" idea come from?

The specific rule most people have heard comes from neuro-linguistic programming, a set of communication and self-help techniques developed in the 1970s. One NLP idea, sometimes called eye-accessing cues, holds that the direction a right-handed person's eyes move reveals how they are processing information. In the popular version, looking up and to their right supposedly indicates "constructed" or invented imagery, and therefore a lie, while looking up and to their left indicates "remembered" imagery, and therefore the truth.

The idea spread through training courses, television and online articles. It is easy to understand, feels scientific and gives the observer a simple rule to apply. None of that makes it accurate. The claim had never been the product of controlled deception research, and when it was finally put to a proper test, it did not hold up.

What does the research actually say?

The most direct test is a 2012 paper by Richard Wiseman, Caroline Watt, Leanne ten Brinke, Stephen Porter and colleagues, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE under the title "The Eyes Don't Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming". The researchers ran three studies.

In the first study, they filmed people telling truths and lies and coded their eye movements. The pattern NLP predicts did not appear: there was no meaningful difference in eye direction between liars and truth tellers.
In the second study, they gave one group of observers the NLP eye-movement rule to use and left a comparison group without it. The group taught the rule did no better at detecting lies than the group who had never heard of it.
In the third study, they analysed real high-stakes footage of people making public appeals, some of whom were later shown to have been lying. Again, eye-movement direction did not distinguish the liars from the truth tellers.

The authors concluded that all three studies "provided no evidence to support the notion that the patterns of eye-movements promoted by many NLP practitioners aid lie detection." In short, the rule failed in the laboratory, failed as a trainable skill and failed on real cases.

Why does the idea feel so convincing?

Part of the answer is that beliefs about lying and the eyes are extremely widespread. A large cross-cultural project by the Global Deception Research Team, surveying people in 75 countries, found a dominant worldwide stereotype: that liars avert their gaze. Because so many people share the intuition that the eyes betray a liar, a rule that seems to systematise it sounds plausible.

But a belief being common does not make it correct. When someone is told to watch for an eye movement and then "catches" a liar, they tend to remember the hits and forget the misses. Ordinary behaviour provides plenty of eye movements to interpret either way, so the rule can feel confirmed even when it is doing no work. This is why the controlled comparison in the Wiseman studies matters: it removed the guesswork and found nothing there. For a wider look at why intuition misleads us here, see why there is no single reliable sign of deception.

What do deception researchers conclude more broadly?

The eye-direction myth sits inside a much larger finding: behavioural cues to lying are weak, and people are poor at reading them. The landmark 2003 meta-analysis by Bella DePaulo and colleagues combined 1,338 estimates of 158 possible cues and found that most had no reliable link to deception, with the stronger patterns being subtle and easily explained by other causes. A 2006 meta-analysis by Charles Bond and DePaulo, drawing on tens of thousands of judgements, found that people average about 54% accuracy when deciding whether someone is lying, barely above chance.

A 2019 Annual Review of Psychology article by Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig and Pär Anders Granhag summarised the position bluntly: the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered so far are faint and unreliable, and people are mediocre lie catchers when they focus on behaviour. The authors also noted how stubbornly these misbeliefs resist correction. The direction of someone's gaze is one more cue that does not survive scrutiny. See also can you actually tell when someone is lying?.

Can eye movements ever mean anything?

They can mean a great deal about what a person is doing mentally, just not about honesty. Looking away can help people concentrate by reducing distraction, which is why many of us break eye contact while thinking hard about a difficult question. Gaze also shifts with discomfort, shyness, cultural norms about eye contact, tiredness and the simple effort of recalling detail. All of these can occur whether a person is lying or telling the truth.

That is the core problem with any gaze rule: the behaviour is real, but it does not point to a single cause. A truthful person searching their memory and a lying person inventing an answer may both glance upward. Because the behaviour is shared, it cannot tell you which is which. The same logic undermines the related belief that avoiding eye contact is a sign of lying, and it applies to body language as a whole.

If eye movement cannot do the job, what can? The honest answer is that no behaviour does it reliably on its own. What investigators can do is gather independent evidence, check claims that can be verified and compare accounts over time, rather than reading a glance as a confession.

Is there a game that explores this the right way?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation, from the Croatian studio Gungrounds, is built on exactly this uncertainty. It is a narrative interrogation game inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews, where you examine unreliable stories, contradictions and behavioural changes rather than applying a magic tell. Development materials describe an in-game casebook of behaviours to notice and an evidence board for linking statements, but the design treats behaviour as a reason to look closer, not as proof of guilt.

That framing fits the research on eye movements. A glance is a prompt to ask a better question or to check a fact, never a verdict. 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 are interested in the behaviours people wrongly treat as tells, microexpressions and lie detection covers another popular example.