Sometimes your brain picks up that a person is dangerous in ways your rational mind cannot explain and you'd be thankful that you follow that feeling. But also sometimes your brain dislikes minorities in ways you're not comfortable accepting and now you're actively being part of the problem.
The show had former detectives and police folks failing miserably. It just boils down to evidence.
We all have our own rules that we've built up over our lifetime and some of us have definitely spent more time watching people and/or are just better at the subtle clues.
But having said that, there are often people that just break all the conventional rules or just doesn't trigger any of the things that you are looking for. Like most things you can probably draw a bell curve where we can easily spot the people in the middle, but then it becomes geometrically more difficult as you move to the sides.
In the startup world they might claim to have 1.5x the rev they have, or that an impressive logo is trialling their product when really they’re in early talks, etc…
Then it’s much easier to tell the “truth” with one twist and these methods fail.
But what this article focuses on, is that it's hard to be consistent when you're lying. That's my experience from social deduction type games too: don't focus on gut or "tells", focus on the "world they're building" in these games' in-speak, and how well it holds up compared to other worlds.
Culturally from a young age we're told to not trust our guts and a lot of people shut them off.
"Don't judge a book by the cover", "you don't even know him". We're told to ignore our gut feeling especially if that feeling is consistent with negative stereotypes.