One Way to Spot a Liar

When I began my first appointment as a school administrator, I quickly found that a large part of my job was dealing with disciplinary issues that arose during the day.  As a result, I dealt with students who tried to lie to get out of deserved consequences for inappropriate behavior.  In addition, I found that I also dealt with a small number of parents who, in their effort to protect their children, would also bend the truth in an effort to get them out of trouble.  Some parents truly believed their children, despite the mountain of evidence against them.  Their children truly resided within the parent’s personal blind spot.  Other parents actually out and out lied to me.

I knew I had to get better at dealing with getting to the truth.  I had to get to it fast as, in some schools, office referrals build up quickly.  I began to devour any material I could about how to get to the truth and spot lies quickly.  My studies took me from interrogation manuals to manuals meant for hostage negotiators.  I learned the subtle nuances of hesitation or the covering of one’s mouth when speaking to more advanced techniques like Visual Accessing Cues.  One source that was interesting and easy to get was David Liebermans’ book, “Never Be Lied to Again”, which taught the unconscious mannerisms of those who are lying.  Here is a caveat, however:  One of the mannerisms does not mean lying.  Even several mannerisms do not mean that someone is lying.  However, seeing clusters of the mannerisms in substantial numbers increases the probability of lying.

So, here’s your first tip on how to spot a liar:  There is only a 60% chance that someone is telling the truth if they don’t use contractions when they speak to you.  In other words, instead of saying, “Hey, I didn’t do that!”, a liar is more apt to say, “Hey, I did not do that!”  The rationale is that the liar is trying to convince you by emphasizing the “not” in the phrase.

The interesting thing is that when I read that little tidbit of information, I looked up at the television just in time to see President Bill Clinton point his finger, look into the camera and say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.”  Politics aside, I had just spotted my first lie.

Never Be Lied To Again: How to Get the Truth in 5 Minutes or Less in Any Conversation or Situation

ILRP

Comments

[achim]

Every person shows other "signs" when lying. It even matters how
much is at stake for the liar. There are many important factors
regarding lying. You can only spot a difference in behaviour,
if you already know the "standard" behaviour for the supposed
liar. The detection apprehension is handled very extensivly
in the Paul Ekman book about lies I can only recommend.

The signs of lying could even be the signs of the anxiousness about
false accusations. The holistic approach you described in your
article is very important, because many people try to cover
up with words, but neglect other means of expression.
tone, pause, mimic, gestures, etc..
The covering up of emotions can leav micro-expressions or
traces/fragments of the original emotion behind.

It is a very delicate topic, because it's about the foundations
of human interaction: trust; if you're getting paranoid about
the people who surround you, you get stuck, if you're to naive
you're not getting anywhere too.

I found Paul Ekmans book "Telling Lies: Clues To Deceit In The Marketplace,
Marriage, and Politics" and "Emotions Revealed" especially helpful to
shed light on that matters.

The book about lies even has a separate chapter about polygraphs,
so called "lie detectors", which are much more popular in the U.S.
than here in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (can't say much
about other countries). Control question technique and guilt knowledge
technique are discussed. On a quick search on question techniques
I hardly found anything about the guilt knowledge technique and
it can only be applied in certain situations.

[Max Leibman]

Ha! Very timely--I'm taking a class in social psychology, and we just finished a quick skim of the current state of the lie-detection debate in psychological circles.

Based on that (and IIRC his appearance in BLINK, which I read this summer), I was also going to recommend Ekman, but I see I've been beaten to that punch...

[Diego]

Hi,

I bought a BBC documentary entitled 'The Human Face' on DVD, and this very topic is covered. They narrow the ways to spot a lie, down to micro-expressions. And funny enough, they show that very same Clinton footage, in which you can actually see the micro-expression on his forehead as he is denying the thing.

[Irina]

I just discovered this blog, and am greatly enjoying it. I'd like to follow the entries via RSS and unfortunately the RSS link provided on the right of the page seems to be broken.... any suggestions?

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Irina