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   What is a lie?

We usually lie in our everyday experiences, like when we are asked how we are doing, we usually reply with ”good, how are you?” No matter if we really are feeling good or not. It is a lie, but it has no value. It is socially accepted and therefore we don’t perceive it to be a lie. To withhold parts of the truth or to not show how you feel are also lies in a sense. You are simply not completely honest.

But we are not concerned with these sorts of lies, but rather when we are lied to in a context where we can sense an agenda. Where we sense that someone is saying something in order to gain on our expense. That means that the lie must be conscious, that what is said does not describe what has happened.

Contradicting Signals

The signs of a lie that are detachable appear when the reward or punishment is non-trivial, that is, when it actually means something to the individual. That is when the liar becomes emotionally committed to the outcome, and it is that engagement in emotions that the person trying to detect the lie is looking for.

A lie always consists of two signals. A true and a false one. You need both in order to be able to distinguish them from each other. Since everything that we do is a communication, in one way or the other, lying is simply a way to try to control that which we communicate.

The art of detecting lies can be summarized to paying attention to the ways we are bad at controlling our communication. For instance a truthful person will be congruent in both conscious and subconscious actions, where body language, tone of voice, and actual words spoken match. A deceitful person might say one thing, and have his or her body language tell you something else.

We are simply looking for contradictory signals. Changes in behavioral patterns. It is also not bound to a specific action. If a person is lying when doing something, another person might do the exact same thing and still be telling the truth. Remember, the signals that we have a real problem with controlling are the ones that mean the most to us.

[If you are the liar, there is a really easy way to solve this. Just do everything in your power to convince yourself that what happened really didn’t take place. When you are absolutely sure that what happened is in fact a lie, and that which was a lie did happen... then you can lie as much as you want, believing you are telling the truth. Easy. This is a very hot area of research, concerning witness testimonials and their validity.]

The best way to see when someone is lying, is to know them ahead of time and noticing when their pattern changes. What kind of person they are and what they are likely to do. Here is where a thorough understanding of personality psychology can come in handy. Knowing what type a person is, what their tendencies are and how strongly biased they are toward a certain trait, can be of great advantage in determining whether or not what they did was in fact a lie.

But remember, do not jump to conclusions. You are looking for more than one slip up. Noticing one thing and drawing the conclusion that they’re lying is a high risk gamble. Notice, create a mental note about it and leave it. Let more information come to the surface before you confront.

In my experience the absolute best thing to do, when being suspicious of being lied to by a loved one or a friend, is writing. Before you do something stupid, write. Be honest and write down all your observations. Point by point. Separate your thoughts from your emotions. To let your emotions cloud your judgement in a situation like this is very unwise. Let it sink in, let it cool down.

Like I already mentioned, you must look at the person, their situation, where they are in life, the context of the situation, any alcohol involved, and keep having an eye open for more reasons as to why those false signals might have arised.

Signs of deceit

There is a whole spectrum of things we need to be aware of like body language, tonality, repetitive actions, changes in speech and a hole lot more. At first, this may be a bit daunting as you understand that you will never be able to remember it all in one sitting. Especially in the heat of the moment. But as you have read this a couple of times, perhaps had the use for it once or twice, you will begin to see it all come together.

As always, we’re looking for the unnatural, the diverting-from-the-norm behavior, things that just seem out of place. People have different ways of approaching this.

Body Language

In general, the farther away from the face we get, the easier it will be to detect whether or not a lie is taking place.

The most used part of our body for communication is of course our face. We have a great variety of facial expressions and combinations of them that reveal either congruence or deception.

Smile: The biggest and probably most common one is the smile. A congruent smile will be symmetric, both cheeks move upward, the eyes are becoming thinner and wrinkles in the corners of the eyes appear. The eyebrows are also moving down a little. People trying to give you a false smile might do it quickly, without the upper part of the face involved. Three things to look for are delay, symmetry, and intensity. For how long are you receiving the expression. A sincerely happy person will seldom smile only half a second, it is usually prolonged. But note, a false one might overstay its welcome so to speak and linger way past what is acceptable. Always look for a symmetric smile (it don’t always mean it’s sincere, but an asymmetric is definitely false). If only one half of the mouth is turned up in a smile it is not a sincere smile, but often a sign of contempt. If the nose is wrinkled they probably smelled something bad rather than having appreciated anything you did. With what level of intensity is the expression done? Someone who is sincere has no need to hold back.

But the most common one is when people smile (symmetrically) with their mouth, but not with their eyes, leaving the upper part of the face without expression, making a sort or grimace that is easy to detect.

Other things we might do when we lie is,

• smile in compensation to the otherwise saddened face.
• to change the intensity of a facial expression, making it either stronger or weaker.
• show an emotion when we really don’t feel anything, or the reverse where we hide an emotion that we actually feel. The last one is called masking and is when we hide an emotion by expressing a totally different feeling.

Eyes: If you have a chance ot look for dilated pupils, that is a sign of them liking what they see. The reverse is also true. But one of the most common ways people act when lying is by looking too much at you, staring you down, or not at all, trying to avoid any eye contact. In ordinary textbooks on the subject of lying you will find conflicting information here. Some say that people who lie divert their gaze all the time. But I believe it to depend on theinterpersonal relationship. If they are the aggressive type, then they might try to ”escape” the situation by being dominant, making you self conscious and putting pressure on you. But if you take charge from there, then they will more likely than not, divert their eyes. But nevertheless, it is always a matter of compensation. Whichever way it manifests is just a reflection of their way of handling that particular situation. If they are staring you down, the intensity will be out of place and you should be able to make yourself aware of this.

Other things to look for are prolonged blinking, excess of blinking, and flickering eyes.

There are also more advanced models for spotting when someone is lying, or at least constructing a memory, called EAC (Eye Accessing Cues). This method can be useful, but has proven inconsistent at times. Some scientists even go so far as to say the model is incorrect. But for our purposes it is quite sufficient. Be aware of its shortcomings and you’ll be fine. If you see that it doesn’t work, just do something else. It works like this, depending on what type of thought process is active in our brain, our eyes move to different locations. For instance, if you were to construct an image, you would use the visual part of the brain and your eyes would focus up and to the right. If you were recalling an event visually, your eyes would go up and to the left. Auditory construction is done when the eyes are in the middle height wise and to the right. Auditory recollection is middle left. Physical sensations are experienced down and to the right while an internal dialogue is taken place when the eyes are down and to the left. The problem arises when we add the fact that this scheme is sometimes mirrored around the vertical axis. So visual is still up, but construction is to the left. You can use control questions if you want to be really sure. But generally, it is a matter of right- vs, left-handed people, where I described the right-handed scenario.

That which is of course relevant is when you ask someone and their eyes divert to the construction side, since that could imply that they’re creating a story...

Hands: Hands have a life of their own and is one of my favourite things to look out for. One major factor you have to consider here is how the person is using his or her hands on a regular basis. Are they very animated, arms and hands flying around all the time, or are they more the mellow type? Everybody is using their arms and hands to some extent thou. In our every day life, we have many signals we use our hands for and they are automatic. Like raising your hand to greet a friend whom you spot on the other side of the street. Showing the inside of your palm toward a person on the streets trying to sell you bad deodorant, or signaling to your buddy that ”She’s crazy.” In every culture there are a few socially accepted ”rules” by which we use our hands. The interesting part is that when we are tired, uninterested, or very sad, our use of arms and hands goes to a minimum. Or when we have to think about every single word we are about to say. Like when lying. When we are extremely self conscious. This comes from having to construct new thoughts which is a very demanding task. Since we only focus on one thing at a time, our body language will be left unattended so to speak, giving away very clear signals.

[An interesting thing here is that we either extravert feelings, that is showing feelings, or we extravert thinking. Never both at the same time. This means that whenever we are thinking, we suppress our emotional part and vice verse. There’s tons of more information on this in the book ”The Art of Speedreading people.” And if you really want to take it to the next level, this has to do with different parts of your brain being used, the cortex for logic and reason vs. the limbic system that is more involved with emotions.]

There is one spinoff to this rule. In general the hand movement goes to a minimum, but hands have a tendency to move up to the head more often while lying. The most common one to watch out for is people who hold their hands in front of their mouths. Other very common occurrences are scratching of the nose, correction of glasses, scratching ears etc.

As always, look for repetitive actions.

The rest of the body: Here we’re talking about posture, legs, and feet. Whatever movement that takes place will seem stiff. The person takes up less space in general. Unless they are the attacking type who are trying to escape the situation by making you self conscious. But in general, if you conduct the situation to your favour, the movement will be limited.

When we demonstrate that we don’t care about a certain topic, or we have no idea what it is about, we usually shrug our shoulders and raise our hands above our elbow and turning the palms of our hands forward. When lying, it often takes the shape of minimal shrugging of shoulders, the arms are down alongside the body, and the palms of the hands are shown around the hips.

Legs cramped around each other when sitting.

A person who has nothing to hide, will have an open position, will show more interest in the conversation, but a liar has a feeling of wanting to escape the situation and assume a retractive position. Usually, if they can, they have their legs and arms between themselves and the questioner.

Secondary Actions: Often as a person is committing a lie, or about to, they will be nervous and an excess amount of energy will start to build up. This energy has to go somewhere and usually takes the form of shaking hands if they try to act cool. This shaking of hands can also be seen with the release of tension as can be seen with poker players when they make a big hand. That is, they made the hand but they are still in the pot so they don’t want to show it.

An advanced technique here is to induce that security after having built up that tension. If you can observe abnormal shaking and other behaviors due to the release, then you know that whatever thing that built up the tension had value to the other person.

More visible actions that you can notice are the tearing of paper, playing with a pen, snapping of fingers, excess smoking, and other twitches. These act as vents for the energy and are generally pointless, repetitive actions. These are not uncommon even in daily situations, so look for changes in patters. Do they usually do what they are doing now? If so, it might not mean anything. Once a person has found a way to ventilate their energy, they can be relaxed and normal as ever.

Part 3