How Can You Tell If Someone Is Lying?
Of all the stupid things people can do, lying is right up there with chain saw juggling, potato chip collecting, and nude riverdancing in public places.
Just watch the news any evening, and most of the people featured doing the perp walk to the county courthouse found themselves there because they lied about something. Still, people lie all the time.
A Cornell University professor recently finished a study that counted how frequently 30 of his students lied--about 26 percent of the time, the group learned.
Interestingly enough, the participants lied most often on the phone--37 percent of the time. They lied face to face 27 percent of the time, 21 percent of the time on instant messenger, and 14 percent of the time in e-mail messages.
The moral here: It's easiest to lie when someone isn't looking at us, and isn't going to have a potentially permanent piece of evidence proving our deception.
(The other moral: If you're the parent of a college student, talk with your kids over e-mail, or you might end up sending more "emergency book money" than necessary.)
I'm not in the camp of people who think all lies are bad. Sometimes, when someone asks us, "Do these pants make my butt look big?" it's better to say, "No, not to me," than it is to say the truth, which may well be, "Yes. Absolutely enormous. What were you thinking?"
Since we can't make anyone tell us the truth--and don't always really want to hear it anyway--the next best thing is to be able to determine when someone is lying (and when we should change into something more slimming).
Part II: Lying--The old-fashioned way to tell
Sometimes, a person's body language can be a giveaway that he or she is telling a stretcher. You've probably heard of some common "tells" that someone is lying:
they talk quickly or change the pitch of their voice.
they fidget.
they fail to make eye contact.
While all of these things can be clues that someone isn't telling the truth, they're not foolproof, body language experts say.
Paul Ekman's book Telling Lies: Clues to Detect Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage takes on the eye-contact belief. It's what people commonly list as proof that someone is lying, he writes, but the problem is that this is so commonly believed that a good liar will make sure he does make eye contact. Pathological liars do this all the time.
Ekman says shifty eyes are better interpreted as a sign that someone is feeling emotional--perhaps from a lie, but perhaps just from nerves
The better you know a person, the easier it is to figure out what those shifty eyes mean. I know my three-year-old daughter is lying, for example, when she gets a certain smile on her face. (It also helps that she says, "I'm not writing on the walls" and other confessions of bad behavior before I even ask what she's doing.)
If you don't know the person--let's say, you're a customer at his car lot--then you will have a harder time knowing if the pitch of his voice has changed, or if he always talks that high and fast.
One thing to keep in mind in a scenario like that is, it's easier to lie to people we don't know or care about. This is precisely how I ended up spending $200 more on my car than I'd been told it would cost; a second car salesman waved a convincing-looking sheet of paper in front of my face, causing me to doubt the first one I'd received. Argh!
Given all this, and given the fact that people apparently lie more easily on the phone, where you can't track their shifty eyes or fidgeting, your best bet is to pay attention to the details. Ekman's book says details make lies more believable. But they can also trip up the liar. If the details change or contradict each other, you should suspect you're being had. Also, if the speaker pauses a lot, Ekman says, it can be an indication he or she is lying. (The same thing holds true for lies in handwriting, graphologists say.)
Part III: Are machines any better?
We've all heard of polygraph machines, which are so named because they measure and record many of the body's responses at one time. The type of machine you see on TV, though, with the pen drawing squiggly lines, has been replaced by a computer model (except on TV and in the movies, where the squiggly-line machine apparently hired a better agent).
Unlike measuring things such as eye contact, which can be controlled, the polygraph measures things we generally can't control: heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and sweatiness (called electro-dermal activity). It's up to an examiner to interpret the test, but changes in these measures are believed by some to indicate deception.
Because the data are open to interpretation, not everyone loves the polygraph. Even fans of the polygraph admit that this so-called lie detector doesn't detect lies--just physiological responses that can come about when a person is behaving deceptively (which supposedly are separate from physiological responses that come when hooked up to a polygraph machine).
Interesting alternatives to the polygraph machine have arrived in recent years.
The "Silent Talker" is a machine that analyzes "microgestures" of the face, many of which we don't notice with our eyes. Developed at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, the "Silent Talker" is said to be accurate at detecting lies 80 percent of the time (compared to 70 percent of the time with other equipment).
Another difference: It can be operated remotely with a laptop and a camera, so no expert is needed--nor is it necessary to even be in the same room with the subject. This might come in handy for airport security and such things, although I have to wonder if someone fresh out of a Botox party might be able to sail on through with artificially paralyzed facial muscles.
Another technology called "Brain Fingerprinting" uses a particular type of brain wave to determine whether information is stored in a person's brain or not. So, if someone denies knowledge of a crime, but has a brain wave response (called a P300) that shows that details about the crime are in his head, his brain fingers point and call him a liar.
Of all the stupid things people can do, lying is right up there with chain saw juggling, potato chip collecting, and nude riverdancing in public places.
Just watch the news any evening, and most of the people featured doing the perp walk to the county courthouse found themselves there because they lied about something. Still, people lie all the time.
A Cornell University professor recently finished a study that counted how frequently 30 of his students lied--about 26 percent of the time, the group learned.
Interestingly enough, the participants lied most often on the phone--37 percent of the time. They lied face to face 27 percent of the time, 21 percent of the time on instant messenger, and 14 percent of the time in e-mail messages.
The moral here: It's easiest to lie when someone isn't looking at us, and isn't going to have a potentially permanent piece of evidence proving our deception.
(The other moral: If you're the parent of a college student, talk with your kids over e-mail, or you might end up sending more "emergency book money" than necessary.)
I'm not in the camp of people who think all lies are bad. Sometimes, when someone asks us, "Do these pants make my butt look big?" it's better to say, "No, not to me," than it is to say the truth, which may well be, "Yes. Absolutely enormous. What were you thinking?"
Since we can't make anyone tell us the truth--and don't always really want to hear it anyway--the next best thing is to be able to determine when someone is lying (and when we should change into something more slimming).
Part II: Lying--The old-fashioned way to tell
Sometimes, a person's body language can be a giveaway that he or she is telling a stretcher. You've probably heard of some common "tells" that someone is lying:
they talk quickly or change the pitch of their voice.
they fidget.
they fail to make eye contact.
While all of these things can be clues that someone isn't telling the truth, they're not foolproof, body language experts say.
Paul Ekman's book Telling Lies: Clues to Detect Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage takes on the eye-contact belief. It's what people commonly list as proof that someone is lying, he writes, but the problem is that this is so commonly believed that a good liar will make sure he does make eye contact. Pathological liars do this all the time.
Ekman says shifty eyes are better interpreted as a sign that someone is feeling emotional--perhaps from a lie, but perhaps just from nerves
The better you know a person, the easier it is to figure out what those shifty eyes mean. I know my three-year-old daughter is lying, for example, when she gets a certain smile on her face. (It also helps that she says, "I'm not writing on the walls" and other confessions of bad behavior before I even ask what she's doing.)
If you don't know the person--let's say, you're a customer at his car lot--then you will have a harder time knowing if the pitch of his voice has changed, or if he always talks that high and fast.
One thing to keep in mind in a scenario like that is, it's easier to lie to people we don't know or care about. This is precisely how I ended up spending $200 more on my car than I'd been told it would cost; a second car salesman waved a convincing-looking sheet of paper in front of my face, causing me to doubt the first one I'd received. Argh!
Given all this, and given the fact that people apparently lie more easily on the phone, where you can't track their shifty eyes or fidgeting, your best bet is to pay attention to the details. Ekman's book says details make lies more believable. But they can also trip up the liar. If the details change or contradict each other, you should suspect you're being had. Also, if the speaker pauses a lot, Ekman says, it can be an indication he or she is lying. (The same thing holds true for lies in handwriting, graphologists say.)
Part III: Are machines any better?
We've all heard of polygraph machines, which are so named because they measure and record many of the body's responses at one time. The type of machine you see on TV, though, with the pen drawing squiggly lines, has been replaced by a computer model (except on TV and in the movies, where the squiggly-line machine apparently hired a better agent).
Unlike measuring things such as eye contact, which can be controlled, the polygraph measures things we generally can't control: heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and sweatiness (called electro-dermal activity). It's up to an examiner to interpret the test, but changes in these measures are believed by some to indicate deception.
Because the data are open to interpretation, not everyone loves the polygraph. Even fans of the polygraph admit that this so-called lie detector doesn't detect lies--just physiological responses that can come about when a person is behaving deceptively (which supposedly are separate from physiological responses that come when hooked up to a polygraph machine).
Interesting alternatives to the polygraph machine have arrived in recent years.
The "Silent Talker" is a machine that analyzes "microgestures" of the face, many of which we don't notice with our eyes. Developed at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, the "Silent Talker" is said to be accurate at detecting lies 80 percent of the time (compared to 70 percent of the time with other equipment).
Another difference: It can be operated remotely with a laptop and a camera, so no expert is needed--nor is it necessary to even be in the same room with the subject. This might come in handy for airport security and such things, although I have to wonder if someone fresh out of a Botox party might be able to sail on through with artificially paralyzed facial muscles.
Another technology called "Brain Fingerprinting" uses a particular type of brain wave to determine whether information is stored in a person's brain or not. So, if someone denies knowledge of a crime, but has a brain wave response (called a P300) that shows that details about the crime are in his head, his brain fingers point and call him a liar.
posted by Edwina at
11:05 AM
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