Apparent naïveté can weaken skepticism even when evidence of fraud is overwhelming.

Sympathy can lead us to reinterpret evidence to resolve conflicts between emotion and reason.

Even expertise in human behavior offers no immunity to emotionally persuasive narratives.

I've spent decades studying human behavior and the brain and always felt I had a knack for spotting liars. But while watching You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, I found myself momentarily wondering whether, despite her criminal conviction, she might be telling the truth.

It wasn't her tears that persuaded me. Those seemed theatrical, in my opinion. Nor was it her need to interrupt an interview to rush and check on her baby, just before her partner, Billy Evans, raised the possibility of financial compensation from the film. Grandiosity, self-importance, fixation on success, and other traits that Holmes reveals are typical of narcissism, but those behavioral observations are not a diagnosis, and these personality traits alone cannot explain her actions.

What almost hooked me was her apparent naïveté. Holmes seemed genuinely bewildered by Abbott and Costello's famous "Who's on First?" routine and portrayed herself as uninterested in financial matters. Could this extraordinarily ambitious woman, who attended Stanford and built a multibillion-dollar company, really be so socially awkward and financially unsophisticated?

Some have speculated that Holmes might be on the autism spectrum, and I wondered that as well, though such observations are........

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