How to Spot a Liar
Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans! We’re sure you lied to someone. It happens to everyone. But have you ever thought about how to spot a liar? Never? Pamela Mayer even published a book about it. And today we will listen to her speech on the Ted Talk stage in which she tells what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a lie-spotter, and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from lie-spotting to truth-seeking, and ultimately to trust building.
First, let’s understand who the lie spotters are.
Lie spotters aren't those nitpicky kids in the back of the room shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril.
I watch the TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, lie spotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do every day, they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during challenging times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition and that proposition is the following. Lying is a cooperative act.
Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to.
Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful.
Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret.
We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, "You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. So sorry."
Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, connecting our wishes and fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, and what we're really like.
According to studies you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times a day. Now granted, many of those are white lies.
But another study showed that strangers lied thrice within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. Now when we first hear this data, we recoil.
We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers.
Extroverts lie more than introverts.
Men lie 8 times more about themselves than they do other people.
Women lie more to protect other people.
If you're an average married couple, you will lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions.
If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.
Let's move on to the second truth about lies.
We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries.
It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history.
Think Dante, Shakespeare, and News of the World.
Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive.
Lie starts early. How early? Well, babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming, and then go right back to crying.
One-year-olds learn concealment. Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic in short, what one author calls a post-truth society.
It's been very confusing for a long time now.
What do you do? Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass.
Trained lie spotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn?
There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques.
Let's look at an example, of how to spot a liar.
Pamela starts with an example where a rapist tells the whole country that he wasn’t abusive to a woman who says he was.
Speaking of this, he doesn’t call the woman by name. We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool.
Our next pattern is body language.
With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've got just to throw your assumptions out the door. Let science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time.
Well, guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well, guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth.
Warmth and smiles convey honesty and sincerity. But a trained lie spotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile?
You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo Botox; nobody will think you're honest.
Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions?
When you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.
An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful in getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, and provide details.
They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys on the payroll that forged those checks."
And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whoever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.
Now let's say you're having that same conversation with someone deceptive.
That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, or be kind of herky-jerky.
Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places.
And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order.
And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backward, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells.
Do you know what defines a liar? Gestures. Because they practice words, not gestures.
To sum up, lie spotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark."
And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness.
Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have chosen to live their lives in public.
It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty.
Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency and character integrity that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter.
So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.
When you combine the science of recognizing deception
with the art of looking, and listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized."
And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. And that's the truth.
