Become a Human Lie Detector: How to Sniff Out a Liar

     

Have you ever been burned by somebody because they told you an outright lie? It can happen in your personal or business life – you’re on cloud nine when your girlfriend says she loves you, only to find out later she’s been cheating on you for months; a client says their business is solvent, but they end up bankrupt, and you lose a ton of money on an account.

Wouldn’t it be great to avoid these situations by being able to tell right then and there if someone is lying to you? Well, based on research by behavioral scientists and the work and experience of FBI agents and police officers, a system has been developed to help people become human lie detectors.

Below we provide a short introduction to the art of sniffing out a whopper. Ready to get started? Read on.

Caveat: Detecting lies is extremely difficult. It’s more of an art than a science. People can fool polygraph tests, so they can definitely fool you. There is no single behavior that indicates deception 100% of the time. Rather, detecting lies requires observing multiple behaviors and analyzing them using the surrounding context. Also, just because a person shows some of the signs we list below, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying, just that they might be lying.

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Catalog a Subject’s Pacifiers

The key to detecting deception is to recognize when people are uncomfortable. Generally, people who are being honest feel comfortable, while people who are lying feel stressed.

When we’re nervous or uncomfortable, we all unconsciously manifest our distress with the use of pacifiers. Like the name suggests, we use these gestures and body movements to help soothe and comfort ourselves in uncomfortable situations. Below is a short list of pacifiers many people display:

  • Face touching
  • Rubbing the back of the neck
  • Lip pursing
  • Hair stroking
  • Playing with jewelry
  • Covering the neck dimple (usually seen with women)
  • Eye blocking – closing eyes tightly or even covering eyes with hands
  • Rubbing palms on legs
  • Hand wringing

Every person has a different set of pacifying behaviors. Your goal at the beginning of a conversation is to know what pacifiers your potential liar uses. Once you know a person’s pacifiers, you can use that info to gauge their comfort and discomfort around certain topics.

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Establish a Behavioral Baseline

Maybe somebody rubs the back of their neck all the time, not just when they’re lying. So in order to gauge someone’s level of comfort or discomfort, you need to establish a baseline for their behaviors. That way you’ll know when they deviate from it. Figuring out a person’s pacifiers is easy if you’re around them all time, but what if you’ve just met someone? How can you figure out the pacifiers of a potential employee in the short time you’re interviewing them? Well, most people display a bit of nervousness when they first meet new people, so you might see pacifying signs at the beginning of your encounter. Make note of them, so you can use them to read the person later in the conversation.

Again, just because a person shows signs of discomfort around a topic, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily lying. It just means you need to investigate that subject a bit more to find out the reason for the discomfort.

Get the Person Relaxed

After you’ve figured out the person’s pacifying gestures, get your subject relaxed and comfortable with you. Make small talk. A person will express their comfort with their body language. They’ll lean in closer to you, they’ll open up their suit coat, they won’t have folded arms, and their feet might be bouncing underneath the table. After you have the person relaxed, you can start asking the important questions. As you discuss certain topics, look for the pacifiers you identified earlier to reemerge. If they do, it could mean the person is lying to you.

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June 9, 2010