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