The ability to recognize deception is an essential skill for business dealings and personal relationships. If you can’t spot a liar, you’ll be easily fooled into taking bad deals — costing you money and credibility.Yahoo! Finance has an interesting article that explains 7 social cues you can use to recognize liars. The article is targeted towards entrepreneurs, but the information could be applied anywhere.One tip recommends looking for incongruent communication:
When our words and our body language don’t agree, our communication is incongruent. Imagine that you ask a salesman if he can assure your delivery will be on time. If he explains how certain he is about it being on time while also shaking his head–as if non-verbally saying “no”–he is incongruent. When this sort of incongruence occurs, you would do well to believe the person’s body over his words.
How else do you know when someone is lying to you?Are They Lying to You? [Yahoo! Finance]
Complete and utter bs.
Care to elaborate on that at all?
That is definitely one way to go about it.
Another way is to recognize repeated patterns in behavior when someone is lying. In poker it’s called “a tell.” Whether it’s with a verbal change or physical indication, you use the tell to determine their believability.
Watch the eyes. Pupils, focus (th ‘thousand mile stare’ for instance), small movements (saccades) and such are not under voluntary control.
Good stuff. I’ve been really enjoying a book on this subject entitled “The Definitive Book of Body Language” by Allan and Barbara Pease. One of the key points is exactly as you’ve mentioned here — the inconsistency between body language and verbal language. Authors Pease also comment on how women are more tuned into detecting these deceptions. Personally, I know a number of men who are just as good at this — it just takes greater understanding of what to watch or listen for.
> Complete and utter bs.
>> Care to elaborate on that at all?
Yes. Lie detection is a well-studied thing. Start by examining the polygraph literature if you want actual research, rather than the wive’s tales that are repeated in the article.
There is a reason why polygraphs are not admissible in a court of law, because they also have a high false negative/positive rate. The only promising detection method I’ve see involves MRI/PET to see which part of the brain is active when answering. And I’d be willing to bet that those will have issues as well.
JP,
You’ve certainly got a point about lie detection being far from an exact science. I still think that there is a lot you can pick up from those social cues though. It might not make you positive about a lie, but can help you know when you should investigate more.
Having served as a police officer for a number of years, I’ve been lied to more than most….and yes, whether it be a crackhead or sweet innocent Grandma….external patterns of behavior that reveal lying remain the same. John, you’re right about the ratio of incongruency between verbal and non-verbal communication.
Words are very easy to “fake,” so one thing I learned is never to listen to what a person says because it’s almost always BS, depending on the situation and person. Besides, verbal communication only represents roughly 35% or so of total communication, which is why we can get into some trouble blasting off that email which the other person interprets differently than what we initially meant.
Now you might here some neat NLP tricks out there like what direction the eyes move and such….there might be some science behind it, but forget about using it in the field because it’s just not practical enough. Instead, focus on two pattern indicators: 1) a change in voice inflection, most importantly hesitation or delay in answering and 2) eye movement.
A person has full control of their words, but they are not consciously in control of their ability to keep the tone of those words consistent. If a person uses too many “ummms, aaahs, what did you say?, or just silence,” it’s because they have to access the creative (BS) portion of their brain to come up with a plausible answer that might pull one over on you. Also, look at their eyes. Forget about what direction their eyes move and just notice if they are looking in your eyes, or if they look away. Eyes are truly the windows to the soul and an inexperienced liar will feel that you can see right through them if you are looking them in the eyes, which is why they answer without looking at you. On the other hand, experienced liars realize this and they might give you too much eye contact to compensate for this fact. The street thugs I arrested on a constant basis were very good at masking their eye language.
I could go on and on, but an important thing to remember when trying to be a human lie detector is never rely on one tip or trick that you hear from these books as your sole test for lie detection. Instead, focus your attention on patterns of behavior that indicate lying because this will be far more accurate for you. Example: not just noticing that they are not looking at you, but that they stall for more time in answering you, they are looking away, and they touch their mouth or rub their eye (another strong indicator of lying).
I’ve got a whole category on my website dedicated to body language and vocalics for those who want to research pattern behaviors in non-verbal communication.
Tristan
Synergy Institute