Othello error occurs when a suspicious observer discounts cues of truthfulness. Essentially the Othello error occurs, Paul Ekman states, "when the lie catcher fails to consider that a truthful person who is under stress may appear to be lying," their non-verbal signals expressing their worry at the possibility of being disbelieved.K. D. Harrison, Forensic Interviewing (2013) p. 76 A lie-detector or polygraph may be deceived in the same way by misinterpreting nervous signals from a truthful person.K. Fiedler, Social Communication (2011) p. 327 The error is named after William Shakespeare's tragic play Othello; the dynamics between the two main characters, Othello and Desdemona, are a particularly well-known example of the error in practice.
