Five Ways to Spot a Liar (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/careers/package.jsp?name=careers/pm/spotaliar)

CareerBuilder.com

How can you tell when your lawyer is lying to you? According to the old joke, it's when his lips are moving. But lawyers haven't cornered the market when it comes to deceit. Some studies suggest more than 50 percent of doctors would lie to insurance companies to obtain treatment for a patient and a consultant to some of America's largest public corporations says his polls reveal 20 to 30 percent of middle managers have presented fraudulent internal reports.

Dr. Charles Ford, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham, says the average person lies to others once or twice a day. How can you tell when you're being deceived?

Most of the clues we've been taught to look for are pretty much useless unless you know how the person acts when they're not lying, says Dr. Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California-San Francisco and the author of 'Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage.'

And he cautions against attributing too much meaning to shifty eyes or squirming – especially when the stakes are high – for two reasons. First: because even though this kind of nonverbal communication reliably signals emotion, that emotion could just as well be fear of being disbelieved as fear of being caught lying. And second, because Ekman finds that one group in particular excels at making their speech and body language very sincere: pathological liars.

Ekman also shatters the myth that you can't trust a fast-talker. In fact he contends that the opposite is greater cause for suspicion. "The most common vocal deception clues are pauses and speech errors," he says. "These occur either because the liar may not have worked out his or her lie ahead of time, or because even if they did expect to lie, they did not anticipate your particular question."

Ekman offers a few more tips for sharpening your B.S. detector:

1. Know their baseline behavior. Many years of research have proven that it's incredibly difficult to know if someone is lying unless you have prior exposure to his or her baseline behavior and know how they normally act.

Be wary of making important deals with people until you've gotten to know them. Watch the person in a variety of situations to ascertain their normal speech patterns, gestures and facial expressions. Then see if those patterns change under questioning.

Also, avoid entering into agreements over the phone. Studies show people are most likely to lie via telephone.

2. Establish rapport. Get them relaxed and comfortable. Subtly mimic their posture and movements; speak in their style. This will relax them and wear down their guard.

3. Ask for minute details. Liars hate to give detail and often are evasive. Though con artists normally rehearse their lies and may look completely at ease answering your questions; ask for a lot of specifics. It will be difficult for them to remember what they told you, and they'll eventually trip themselves up. You may want to interrupt them with an unrelated question while they're in the midst of their story, then bring them back to their explanation and see how well it hangs together.

4. Watch for "false" facial expressions. According to Ekman, even the most practiced liars are unable to produce the minute movements in the upper part of the face that naturally come when certain emotions are felt. For example, if someone truly feels fear or sadness their forehead will crease. And when people are genuinely happy, their eye muscles will be involved in their smile. Ekman also says a sign that someone is feigning an emotion is that the facial expressions or onset or offset of the emotion is too abrupt.

5. Give them an out. Finally, make it easy for them to tell you the truth. Never show surprise or a negative reaction. Pretend you either didn't hear them correctly or didn't understand what they said. Always leave a way out so they can recant their words and tell you the truth!

Ways to Spot a Liar (cont.)

6. Look for a hooked nose. A hooked nose is a sure sign of a congenital liar. This demon is incapable of telling the truth, but it can mix some truth in with it's lies; to confuse you.

7. Look for a small, stupid hat on their head. It will probably be just big enough to cover early male pattern baldness. The stupid hat, together with a hook nose, is a dead giveaway that you are dealing with a congenital liar who is so smug, he feels free to advertise his lying abilities.

8. Look for big lips, brillo hair and ape-like features. These traits are a sure sign you are dealing with a sub-human; intent on scamming you for enough money to buy it's next crack rock.

Their eyes rollng to your left side as they reply. I can't recall exactly why this is, and I've found that as with anything it's best to be able to check some other way if a person is lying, but this has happened enough in my experience to be worth passing on.

(Semi-)wriggling ears; they're a sign of facial tension being deliberately pushed back, so to speak.

Their eyes rollng to your left side as they reply. I can't recall exactly why this is, and I've found that as with anything it's best to be able to check some other way if a person is lying, but this has happened enough in my experience to be worth passing on.

(Semi-)wriggling ears; they're a sign of facial tension being deliberately pushed back, so to speak.


The reasoning behind the eyes looking to the left is this:
The left side of the brain is the creative side. So while they are thinking what they are telling you, the eyes tend to go that direction.

Ok, I did not research that, nor did I try to find the facts. That is just something I was told a long time ago (so I could be wrong ;) )

if you have the opportunity to question someone without them weaseling away and not answering the questions, ie, examination or interrogation, if you will, lying can sometimes be established through:

-organizing their statements and cross referencing them to identify inconsistencies,

-repeating questions intermittently to test for the same response (dovetails with previous method)

- restating differently what they said as introduction to the next question, to test for their assent or denial of a different characterization of what they said initially (dovetails with previous 2 methods)

I say sometimes, because for someone who is not that bright they may just get confused. Also, some people are more suggestible than others, so a person asking questions has to be careful not to suggest answers. This happens with kids all the time. They can't remember, or can't put their memories into words properly and are getting worn out or flustered, so they just say what they think the interrogator wants to hear.

If a person is past a certain level of proficiency in lying, however, you do have to step back a little from the whole process and instead say:

Does this person have a reason to lie? How could that reason affect me in some way?

... and then act accordingly. You can't always spot a lie being told. But you can think in such a way that being lied to doesn't take you by surprise.

um..............how about if their last name is either Gliebe or Walker?

Hah! No comment.

If a person is past a certain level of proficiency in lying, however, you do have to step back a little from the whole process and instead say:

Does this person have a reason to lie? How could that reason affect me in some way?

... and then act accordingly. You can't always spot a lie being told. But you can think in such a way that being lied to doesn't take you by surprise.

It's interesting to be discussing lies and liars on the internet, the perfect medium for liars. Harold Covington, for example, is known right up there with Scott Peterson in Liars Clubs around the world. The internet was a godsend to Covington and his career as a liar really only took off after he discovered the 'Net. All of a sudden he could reach tens of thousands with his prevarications, instantly and practically cost free, whereas before he could only reach one at a time by phone, or a few with his insufferable newsletters which cost him First Class postage and printing costs and paper costs, etc. Pathological liars like HAC HAVE to tell lies; they can't help it. They'd rather jump up on a table and tell a whopper than do what what would be best for everyone, including themselves: simply tell the truth.

Back when another master of the lie, Bill Clinton, was lying to America with regularity my brother told me to watch his eyebrows. "Every time Clinton lies, his eyebrows go up," he said. He was right. I never could watch Clinton again after that without noting his dancing eyebrows.

The reasoning behind the eyes looking to the left is this:
The left side of the brain is the creative side. So while they are thinking what they are telling you, the eyes tend to go that direction.

Ok, I did not research that, nor did I try to find the facts. That is just something I was told a long time ago (so I could be wrong ;) )


I learned the same thing in law school. I think it was in Criminal Procedure, and the Professor was talking about police interrogations and some of the things cops use to judge a subject's truthfulness.