Lying as an inseparable act in our life.

A month ago I watched a film or more precisely an American television series – Lie to Me, which consists of 48 episodes and each episode has its logical beginning and end. In the show the local and federal law enforcement parties assign Dr. Cal Lightman and his colleagues in The Lightman Group to detect criminals by their body language, postures, facial expressions and other psychological indicators. It is very interesting, because the actor is simultaneously explaining and interpreting the indicators.  After watching the movie I started to pay attention to those expressions while talking to people and noticed that indeed there are signals that give you lots of information even if the person is silent.

I found this video in TEDTalks and it interested me a lot, because the author is speaking about how to spot the liar and as I have a big experience due to Dr. Lightman (Tim Roth) it was interesting for me to make comparisons.

Pamela Meyer is a social media expert, founder and CEO of social networking company who has made a research on deception over several years, took advanced courses on deception detection and summarized her knowledge, findings and experiences in a book called Liespotting, which has a high rating in Amazon.com. In this podcast she speaks about lying, tips of spotting a liar and man’s endeavor to seek the truth. I liked the way she was explaining: at first a picture or a video was shown, then she asked a question to think about and in the end she explained the answer. She speaks clearly and it is a pleasure to listen to her. More information and updated research findings on liespotting can be found on her blog, www.liespotting.com

Meyer (2010), presents her findings about the liars and deception, according to which lying is a cooperative act and it is only our choice to believe the liar and get involved or dismiss it. We are against lying, but all of us lie and not always we have bad intention. However most often we are lied to unwillingly which may have high costs for us. Meyer’s study showed that on a given day we are lied to 10 to 200 times including lies with good intention, but most interestingly we lie more to strangers – 3 times within the first 10 minutes of meeting,  than we lie to our friends, colleagues.

Lie spotting is a science of practical and proven analytical techniques guaranteed to detect lying and all other forms of verbal deceit. Those techniques were developed by American national espionage, intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies over the last 75 years. 

While listening to Meyer and searching for other articles on deception detection I separated the following not exhaustive list of indicators that signal a deception:

•  looking too much or too little into your eyes in order either to convince you or to avoid eye-contact
• hesitating to response, repeating the question, mispronouncing the words
• over-emphasizing trivial details and tending to avoid important details
• using nervous and/or unusual body language
• lowering vocal tone
• fidgeting and touching the face while talking

Eventually it does not matter who is the liar and of what nationality he/she is; we all use the same expressions and techniques when lying. Above mentioned are just behaviors and the presence of any of them does not necessarily mean that the person is lying. However if you notice clusters of them, you should go deeper, ask hard questions, walk into curiosity and follow the gestures, expressions. Nowadays even technology is developed enough to investigate what the truth looks like. Nevertheless, if we combine the science of liespotting with the ability to look and listen, we will never be engaged in the act of lying and will create our little honest world, which is a step forward to the truth.

   A man with a facial expression like the first smiley is inclined to lie,
    while a person with a natural smile is most likely telling the truth.

Source:  Meyer, P. (Social media expert). (2011, July). How to spot a liar. TEDTalks (Video podcast). Retrieved from http://castroller.com/Podcasts/TedtalksVideo/2635076

Let's use new methods of education with more interaction and communication.

  While trying to find some interesting podcasts on education, Salman Khan’s TED Talk interested me a lot; he was bringing the educational process to a platform completely different from the conventional one; emphasizing the role of computers, videos, online tutorials and interactive educational web sites in an efficient process of education. I am the advocate of the latter and for two years was reaping the benefits of this approach.

  Before coming to ATC I was studying in Yerevan State Agrarian University, which is one of the oldest Universities in Armenia. It still adheres to the traditional understanding of the education process, student-lecturer relationship and lecturing techniques, when the lecturer and the student interact only during the exam, and when the lecturer is the main speaker in the classroom and the “historical” notebook of the lecturer is the only “source of reference”. On the contrary, ATC is one of the few Universities in Armenia where open-mindedness, the aspiration to adopt the successful education methods and the interactive classes are the cornerstones of the studying process.


                                                                                                                             

     From monologue-                                                                To interactive
                lecturer                                                                            group-work
                                                                              

  Though Khan was developing the topic in order to advertise or more precisely introduce its non-for-profit organization – KhanAcademy to the audience, however he was speaking about a phenomenon which is vital for everybody and in the end is of strategic importance for the whole economy.  KhanAcademy is a portal for the provision of world-class online education to anyone anywhere. I went there and was really influenced with the large amount of mathematical and scientific information available. Many school districts are using it to share their knowledge and experience and always be in touch with each other. In ATC we as well have used interactive portals within the frameworks of different courses. In this curriculum we are using the Pearsonopenclass within the framework of our Analytical Writing course; it is a simple version compared with KhanAcademy. Therefore, all the benefits that Khan was listing were familiar to me. People are satisfied with the service they provide, which was obvious from the comments that Khan read and I could check under the wide range of videos/lessons that would not be delivered without a demand. The great advantage of having access to online tutorials, videos is that even if you have missed the lesson you can feel yourself as attending it by watching the video, pausing it, going back and ahead as many times as you wish until you get the message. You can make tests, fail, watch the material, test again and so forth; you don’t have to show mastery, it’s just a learning process. As one philosopher stated, failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

  I really enjoyed watching this podcast. The moral was that we should be flexible to keep pace with the developments and opportunities of new technologies in order not to waste our time on writing lectures, but using that time for a little more communication, interaction and new experiences. It will be more interesting to sit at your home comfort and do a group work with people from different countries and different nationalities, won’t it?  

Source:  Salman Khan. (Educator). (2011, March). Let's use video to reinvent education (Video podcast). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html