Tag Archive for Lie Detectors

How To Accurately Read Lies

by  • March 6, 2013 • 0 Comments

By now we know that liars are practiced, we all do it, and we do it regularly. Sometimes we don’t even realize we do it and other times those around us don’t care to know. What we do know is that most liars feel only mild feelings of guilt and fear. Thus, we should only expect very subtle clues to deception and nothing more. It has been shown through the research that looking for full blown signals of lying is both misleading and even unhelpful. Liars as it were, are only slightly more apprehensive than truth tellers with both feeling nervous and anxious when faced with scrutiny.

My advice to read people is to watch for the little stuff, the microexpressions, the small gestures and the ones that happen instantly, and then hone in on it. Keep in mind too, that you won’t be able to detect lies much better than about seventy-five percent of the time anyway, which is on par with the CIA minus of course various lie detection machines which we discussed as being impractical and requiring cooperation that you are very unlikely to garner, even if provided with access.

The top lie detectors all seem to have one trait in common, and that is skepticism. They know or assume that someone is lying so they view them through that window being careful to watch and recall any cues that tip the scales toward deception. Looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses will lead to rose-coloured predictions about people and this is all just dandy, if you aren’t interesting in uncovering bad things around you. You also must be aware of a person, from their face to their toes and be willing to look them over and actively observe them. If you’re goal is to make friends, then by all means avoid filtering and analyzing the body language around you. In fact, I would advise body language readers to relax their skills when around family and friends, or at least keep it secret!

It is not safe to immediately peg someone a liar based on one or even a handful of cues just by the nature of the trade. Reading lying correctly is a long term comparison of the facts seeded with emotional, fearful and stressed body language from one moment to the next that can only happen over time. Success will come by looking at the full picture and comparing the parts to the whole and digging deeper when discrepancies happen between expressive behaviours and the words said. No doubt, lie detection is difficult, but the body language in this chapter coupled with how it is framed, that is the lie detection theory and it’s limitations, will help increase your odds significantly.

How We Really Detect Lies

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It is traditionally assumed that deception detection occurs simultaneously to the telling of a lie. Meaning, as people speak, lie detectors were able to pick up on nonverbal and verbal cues to ‘read’ people. Most of the research to date suggests that we can’t use any body language cue, or collection of cues in a comprehensive manner to read liars, but this might just be a limitation or flaw in the design of the studies. In 2002 research by Hee Sun Park working out of the University of California in Santa Barbara it was found that success in real-world lie detection happens gradually, over time and not on one chance encounter. Her research found that the most often reported method of disseminating lies included third party information, confessions and physical evidence, none of which the studies thus far have provided. Therefore, with respect to how people really read lies, the scientific investigations to date, haven’t provided people with information necessary to accurately detect lies.

Reading lies in real life is an active comparison from information we know for certain, and information told to us. No doubt, nonverbal language can provide clues to us as a full package, but it doesn’t permit us to ascertain conclusive evidence. We should therefore use untrustworthy or nervous body language as motivation to spark further investigation.

Lying In Children

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Unfortunately, you probably thought that I would be describing how easy it is to spot lies told by children, but the common theme in this chapter is held consistent. Being able to ‘look through our children’ is a common sentiment. We do think that children are bad liars overall, but studies show that children are nearly as, if not just as efficient at lying as adults. A 2007 study by Leif Strömwall, Pär Granhag and Sara Landström of Göteborg University in Sweden found that overall detection of lies in children was only around fifty-two percent, or not much better than chance. Adult raters were only slightly more effective at detecting children’s lies when the children were not allowed time to prepare their fibs. In this case they were only fifty-six percent accurate. The children relied on their own real life experiences and those of others they knew to fabricate believable stories, whereas their nonverbal strategy was to ‘stay calm’. Other research tells us that children as young as four are able to construct and build lies, but that older children are more skilled than younger children and are therefore caught even less. Another study showed that by age twelve, children have reached adult success levels. Further to this, there is no ‘expert advantage’ mean that when college students were compared to teachers and social workers, no difference was found, they all performed poorly as lie detectors.

Now let’s all breath deeply here! Children have a natural knack for telling lies, but so too does the rest of the world it seems. To catch our children’s lies it’s best to watch for their verbal inconsistencies rather than their nonverbal language. In fact, that is exactly what we do. Paying particular attention to the consistencies in the verbal dialogue is reported by several studies as successful where adults are trying to catch children in lies. To illustrate this point I draw on a 2002 study by Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee of Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, Canada. In the study they had children hold a stuffed Barney toy behind their backs. As the experimenter left the room, they asked for them not to peek. Almost no one could resist the temptation. Raters who had no chance to interview or listen to children speak, but had to rely on body language alone, showed similar difficulty as other studies when trying to pick which of the children where lying. However, when outright asked if they peeked seventy-five percent lied and only twenty-five percent admitted to peeking, but when asked to guess what toy they held, almost half of the six and seven-year-olds said “Barney” admitting they had looked, whereas ninety percent of the three, four and five-year olds admitted the same. The study demonstrates that young liars are easily read by verbal leakage. Only some of the students where able to come up with alternative answers, or report that they didn’t know.

Another factor we look for in liars, is “richness of detail”’, meaning the level of information in a story. It is this richness that we assume means that someone has actually experienced the event, rather than constructed it. Children have limited life experience and it is difficult for them to create details outside of their personal lives. Then again, young children often give short responses to questions anyway and offer up little detail, even when prompted. Children have also been found to appear more nervous and seem to think harder when lying, the problem of course is that they hold these traits while telling the truth as well. Telling the truth is hard for both adults and children. Reality is as difficult to recall as is creating lies.

Adults, parents in particular who spend a great deal of time with their children, can usually pick out lies easier, because they’ve been with them to measure their experiences more so than the cues they give up through their body language. However this falls much shorter than lie detection, it’s merely an examination of the facts or at its most generous, a probability assessment. Parents most often rely on baseline comparisons in their children and while this is helpful, detecting lies in strangers or in other people’s children would be more useful. Teachers whom are faced with stories about summer vacations or their extravagance might hold doubts, but until they can confirm these doubts with facts, photographs or even parent’s confirmation, they simply remain doubts. Information presented outside the realm of the children’s possible experiences can be used to reasonably detect lies, but with widespread media and internet, story creation by children is made much easier. However, as the research shows repeatedly, we should not expect to be able to detect lies through body language alone, even in children.

Police As Lie Detectors

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In a 2004 study out of the University of Portsmouth by Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij and Ray Bull it was found that police officers were sixty-five percent accurate in detecting lies when they watched the proceedings of an interrogation. This success rate is significantly higher than that which could arise by chance alone and also shows that familiarity with the subjects can have a role in increasing accuracy. Most research thus far has used college students, but this shows that police who frequently deal with suspects might have an advantage reading them over reading others. By a similarly notion, this advantage would theoretically be non-existent for police officers in a business meeting or with regard to a salesperson on a car lot, unless they had particular experience with such matters. This study does tell us that familiarity with the subject and the context can help us in detecting lies.

Police manuals give the impression that officers who interview suspects often, are good lie detectors, despite of course the vast research that says otherwise. When the researchers qualified their observations however, they found some surprising findings. Officers who named visual cues such as those mentioned in Inbau’s research, mentioned previously, which forms part of the manual on lie detection for police, such as gaze aversion, unnatural changes in posture, self touching, mouth and eye covering were less likely to be accurate in reading others. In fact, these cues proved counterproductive. Specifically, female participants who claimed to use Inbau’s cues most often where poorer at detecting truths, than the males who did not. In particular, gaze aversion was unhelpful and in fact distracting when analyzing for truth. So despite the moderate success of officers at detecting lies, there still remains severe shortcomings because it was not necessarily due to observations of body language or other anything else that could be described, catalogued, and hence put to use. If an inherent skill amounts to a sixty-five percent success, but one can’t describe that skill in a way that makes it useful to other people, then it simply appears like a hunch. Hunches are not reliable, nor do they meet the scientific principle of reproducibility or have predictive (useful) qualities.