Detecting Liars
This article gives practical advice on detecting liars. Areas to watch include the degree of eye contact made, body language, and the credibility of explanations.
It's common knowledge that, there's a lot of lies out there and secondly that we're pretty bad at picking up on them. But if you don't have access to polygraphs, thermal imaging or brain fingerprinting and most interviewers do not, then how can you tell a liar?
There are certain traits linked to lying that you can look out for, and they are generally in three categories: what is said, what the face is doing when it is said, and body movement as it is being said. None of the characteristics actually mean anything on their own, but the more of these a person is exhibiting, the more sure you can be that this person is lying.
Lying with Words
When it comes to verbal characteristics, you should look out for longer pauses, stutters and slower speech - and if your ear is really good, a higher pitch. But these are only present if the liar is having a hard time telling the lie - if they are finding it easy, the lie will come out fluently. So paying attention not only to how they are saying it, but also to what they are saying.
There are fewer details, fewer quotes, and less information about times and locations of objects and places in a lie. A lie also often has more structure than a truthful story, and flows from beginning to end in a chronological order. "It is very difficult to invent a lie which is not in a logical time order. Just try it yourself. Try to make up a story and start at the end. It's very difficult.
Credibility
Make sure you really listen to the words. If they're explaining why their reason for leaving, for example, see if the excuse sounds plausible. Some people, in the panic of being forced to lie, can come up with the most absurd story that is just impossible to believe. Really bad liars look sceptical as they tell their tall tale - even THEY don't look like they believe it.
Other people will fire off several excuses in a row, each one more outrageous than the last. Sometimes this list of excuses can even contradict each other, as the liar doesn't have time to think about whether his story works or not.
These are obvious examples of credibility problems, but the bottom line is to combine an awareness the messages this person is sending with his body AND with his words. If they don't add up, you're entitled to question their truthfulness.
Facial Features
The face is another place where you can look for lies because emotional facial expressions are not easy to control - at least, not as easy as controlling your words.
We do learn to control our faces to some extent, but we don't have the tools with which to analyse and retrain facial expressions like we can with our words. We only have our intuition about what we think is right.
Facial expressions that are triggered by emotion are pretty much involuntary. We can intercept these facial expressions to some extent, but not to the extent with which we can bite our tongue.
So how can you tell if a facial expression is true blue, or the result of a lie? Well, the most important thing is that there should be a match between the emotion of the words and the emotion of the face. If something is out of whack, there might be a lie lurking somewhere behind the mask.
When someone is lying, they will do one of three things. They might try to show emotion when they have none. They might try to show no emotion - the poker face - when they are feeling some. Or they might try to mask one emotion with another. All of these tactics are difficult because the liar will have to remember what parts of the face to move in order to give the impression of real emotion.
To detect these facial abnormalities looking at the eyes and the upper half of the face, where the true emotion might leak out. We are more adept at controlling the lower halves of our faces probably because this is where our mouth is and where our speech comes from.
Look for the timing of the facial expressions - if they are not in sync with what the person is saying, they might be lying.
Eye contact
In these situations, and often in spite of all the evidence before you, will sometimes experience a strong feeling that something's not right. Even though logically the story might seem absolutely watertight, something inside you is sending you warning signals.
The biggest mistake you can ever make in such a situation is to ignore this gut feeling. You might not be able to put your finger on your suspicions - let alone explain them to anyone else - but your best course of action is to just reserve judgement until you have more information. Don't accuse anyone, but don't put yourself at their mercy either. Wait until you're sure they're on the level.
Of course, not everyone deserves to be the object of automatic and chronic suspicion. But if you're not sure if someone is lying to you, pay attention to the combination of eye contact, body language, the credibility of the excuse, and your gut instincts. You will find that your ability to spot a lie at 50 paces becomes finely tuned and very reliable.