How to tell when someone is lying?

After reading all of Paul Ekman&#x27;s books, watching all episodes of Lie to Me, and reading various other pop-science books, articles, posts, and so on, all on body language and lie detection, the only honest conclusion I could reach was that if you really want to know if someone&#x27;s lying you better know the truth beforehand.<p>Though there is some science to the method, it ultimately relies on very complex combinations of all sorts of hints, clues, behaviors, all very ambiguous and hard to put to together. Applying this method to regular social interactions is even harder because you rarely get any feedback. You might determine that one person is lying but you might never get the chance to truly confirm your assessment. It&#x27;s really hard to figure out what works and what doesn&#x27;t.<p>You might have a chance at improving if you&#x27;re a detective (maybe lawyer?) and get to often interview people, ask questions and immediately (or at least at some point) get feedback on whether your truthfulness assessment was right or not but if you&#x27;re just some regular person who has ordinary social interactions it&#x27;s much harder to become a human lie detector.

As a former MI interrogator, this was part of my skillset.<p>For the average layman looking to spot lies within a complex story there is an exceptionally simply method known as <i>reverse chronological testing</i><p>It works best for people you know are purposefully lying and you need a hook or a fallacy for proof.<p>1. Ask the person to recount their version of events.<p>&gt;&gt; <i>Oh so you went out with the girls at 7pm, then what happened...?</i><p>2. A liar will naturally add more detail to try and manufacture credibility. Do not interrupt. Let them ramble. Silence from you will solicit more imaginings from them.<p>3. At the end of the tale, immediately ask them to recount the events in reverse.<p>&gt;&gt; Why this works : It is almost impossible for untrained personnel to factually recall imaginative events that have not actually occurred.<p>The brain has no factual reservoir from which to draw upon - the source material is fiction and does not lend itself to recall.<p>In essence; the liar is trapped in a world they are trying to simultaneously create and remember.<p>It&#x27;s a hugely combative tactic though - if you use it, expect the situation to escalate hugely.

Any time this topic comes up, I think immediately of the Louise Woodward case (aka the British Nanny Case): <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Woodward_case" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Louise_Woodward_case</a><p>During the trial, much was made of Louise Woodward&#x27;s odd demeanor on the stand; particularly, her propensity to awkwardly twist her mouth to stifle laughter during testimony. Many interpreted that as a sign of guilt, but my grandmother would laugh in a similar fashion whenever she was nervous or uncomfortable. Woodward struck me as genuine.<p>On the other hand, at the end of the trial, the baby&#x27;s mother read a statement to the court. Her delivery was cold, emotionless and oddly stable given the circumstances. It was unnerving, and I&#x27;ve never forgotten it.

The article&#x27;s OK, but it doesn&#x27;t actually deliver on the headline by illustrating the &quot;tells&quot; of a lie. This book is much more practical.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Lie-Former-Officers-Deception/dp/1250029627" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Spy-Lie-Former-Officers-Deception&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1...</a><p>One of the most interesting ideas is that no single tells indicates a lie, but clusters of them together are strong signals. A few would be: 1) pausing before you answer (lies take longer to compose than truths); 2) touching your face with your hand (blood rushes from your face when the fight-or-flight response kicks in, prompting an itching sensation); 3) fidgeting at the place where your body rests on something more solid (floor, chair, armrest); 4) vacillating between an appeasing and angry tone; 5) leaning away and closing your body language.

Here is the video that Brinke saw and identified her as lying, can you?<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/55997359" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;55997359</a>

Here is an interesting TED Video, &quot;How to spot a liar.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/pamela_meyer_how_to_spot_a_liar" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;pamela_meyer_how_to_spot_a_liar</a>

How to delude yourself in to thinking you know more than you do?

<i>Hardly anyone refrains from lying altogether, and some people report lying up to twelve times within that time span. I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yes, great place. Trust me: we often lie without giving it so much as a second thought.</i><p>Is this an American trait? I think it&#x27;s the opposite in Eastern Europe. People would stop you to tell you they&#x27;ve had a bad experience at the restaurant, usually don&#x27;t compliment and interrupt you immediately to tell you what they think about your line of work.

It seems to me that under some circumstances, developing a skill for detecting liars could be dangerous. If you are good at catching liars, then your confidence in people who you do not belief to be lying could go up, which could in turn increase the damage done by false-negatives.<p>Knowing that in all likelihood <i>some</i> of the people I interact with are sociopaths&#x2F;psychopaths (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% of the population are, and most blend in with the general population), I distrust my own ability to determine when somebody is or is not lying to me. Being self-critical in this way limits the damage done by the few that will inevitably slip through.

Why would she kill the daughter when she had an ex-husband to take care of it? what the hell?

Maybe it&#x27;s just that the article was written by a woman. (As I could easily see my significant other behaving in this manner when she was &quot;out with her girlfriends&quot;.) But, does anybody on HN actually relate to this paragraph below?<p>&gt;I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yes, great place.<p>I am proud to say that I relate to none of those examples.<p>I would usually say &quot;it was nice to meet you&quot; when somebody I just met was parting ways just as a pleasantry that has to be said, not that I meant it. And not that the other person would assume that I actually genuinely meant that either. Ending a meeting with &quot;It was nice to meet you&quot; seems just as natural and called for as starting out with &quot;Hello, my name is sirdogealot&quot;. Who goes home thrilled or even remembering the fact that somebody they met that day said &quot;Nice to meet you&quot;?<p>I always am truthful about where I am from. If the person has never heard of my small home town, I would explain it&#x27;s location to them.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t lie and say somebody&#x27;s work sounds fascinating if it wasn&#x27;t. If you haul boxes or flip burgers, I don&#x27;t really care to hear about your job or your problems at work. In fact I find I don&#x27;t congregate with people who hold boring jobs. It just gets too tedious hearing that you are unhappy and yet not bright enough to realize it and quit.<p>I would never compliment somebody on their clothing if they actually looked like shit unless they I was trying to cheer them up, hit on them or get a job or something.<p>If somebody suggests a terrible restaurant, I&#x27;ll let them know why it&#x27;s a bad choice. Like the restaurant that served me ants in my stir fry, or the place that gave me food poisoning on Christmas eve one year? No, I&#x27;m not eating at those places again. I don&#x27;t care if I&#x27;m trying to win over my girlfriend&#x27;s parents. If a place is shit I&#x27;ll call it shit.<p>Does the author think that her checkout clerk is lying to her when they systematically grunt out &quot;have a nice day&quot; as they pass her her grocery bags?<p>Do you think the kid at the McDonald&#x27;s counter is mocking you when he smiles at you?<p>Do you think I&#x27;m lying to you when you ask &quot;How are you doing?&quot; and I only ever respond with &quot;Oh, pretty good! How are you doing?&quot; I might say that if I just woke up in the morning or if I had just been in a car crash but I&#x27;m not lying. I know that most people don&#x27;t care to hear about your problems. So I don&#x27;t bother them with them.<p>Society is weird. There are a lot of odd things we do in society but I wouldn&#x27;t misconstrue them all as lying.

<i>She confessed to murdering Karissa—she wanted to save her faltering relationship with her boyfriend, she told the court, and he’d told her that she would have to choose between him and the child—and described in quiet detail her daughter’s final moments.</i><p>Is there any good research on the behaviour of women in these situations? Obviously this is the extreme case - murdering your own child to save your relationship with your partner - but I would be interested in broader research in this area on how mothers deal with disinterest or hostility to their offspring by a partner.

There is a scene in Polish crime movie &quot;Psy&quot; (great movie BTW, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105185/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0105185&#x2F;</a>), where a bad guy answers this question by saying: &quot;Noone ever lied with a car battery connected to his balls&quot;

Detecting lies would be a more-credible field if they purged their voodoo shamans first. It is fascinating that detecting lies is a field so full of frauds and liars.

&quot;How to tell when someone is lying? They open their mouths.&quot; -- Unknown

ten Brinke

Well, there is a simple method:<p>1. Get the statement from the person that might be lying.<p>2. Find out what the truth was.<p>If the truth is different than the statement, the person was lying. Recently uncovered famous liars, with this method, include James Clapper and Vladimir Putin.