Spy the Lie
Former CIA Officers Teach You to Detect Deception
by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd and Susan Carnicero
St. Martin’s Press
If the studies are to be believed, everyone is a liar.
The average person begins lying at age 5 and only picks up steam in adulthood, when we fib approximately 10 times a day. Strangers lie three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting a new person; women and men lie equal amounts, yet about different things (men about themselves, women about others); and those married lie to their spouses one out of every 10 interactions.
No relationship is immune from deception.
“We’re deeply ambivalent about the truth,” explained Pamela Meyer in her popular TED talk, based off her book “Liespotting,” which provided the aforementioned figures. “We live in a post-truth society.”
Yet for how adept most of us are at lying — and we get plenty of practice, as we have more opportunities in our over-sharing world of constant tweeting and Facebook updates — we’re terrible at spotting a fake.
Typically, we’re lied to 10 to 200 times every day, and a whopping third of these go entirely undetected, according to social psychology professor and deception expert Aldert Vrij. Even police officers and custom agents are no better at sussing out a whopper than the layman.
But there are people who are gifted at lie spotting. Criminals, for one, are better than average at ferreting out false statements. And Secret Service agents, who have been trained to catch liars, are best at detecting them.
In other words, lie detection isn’t ingrained; it’s learned. And a new book, called “Spy the Lie,” written by three former CIA officers, maintains that by following their advice, which is based off years of interrogating terrorists and double agents, anyone can improve their odds at getting to the truth.
First, though, forget what you think you know about liars. Many of us think that fidgeting is a clear sign. Wrong. A seasoned liar will often overcompensate and keep unnaturally still. And eyes are far from the windows of the soul we think they are. A recent study that examined eye movement in 52 people making public statements about missing relatives — with half later found to be lying — showed no correlation between eye movement and deception.
Indeed, a good liar will often hold eye contact longer than a truth-teller.
It’s important then to get a baseline of how a person behaves when they’re telling the truth; only then can you start looking for indicators.
Sometimes it’s so simple that if you’re paying proper attention, it seems obvious. Liars will often exhibit inappropriate behavior, such as nodding their heads yes when they say no.
When Diane Sawyer interviewed Scott Peterson about his missing wife, his body language and language were clearly at odds.
“Did you murder your wife?” Sawyer asked point-blank.
“No. No. I did not,” he said, while smiling. Happiness is not the typical emotion you’d associate with a lost loved one.
We’re so conditioned not to lie that sometimes our inner turmoil will show in our hands. When we say something false, our hands will cover our mouths or eyes in a non-verbal admission of guilt.
“There is a natural tendency to want to cover over a lie, so if a person’s hand goes in front of her mouth while she’s responding to a question, that’s significant,” the book says.
Liars will often bite and lick their lips, or pull or on their ears. There’s a neurological basis for this tell. When lying, anxiety rises causing the fight-or-fight response to kick into gear. Blood circulation is re-routed from the face, ears and extremities to the muscles and organs.
“When the blood rushes away from those regions, it irritates the capillaries, which can create a sensation of cold or itchiness,” the book says. Thus the lip biting.
Non-verbal can speak volumes, but many liars will tip human lie detectors off with what they say — or what they don’t.
Outright denials are difficult for liars to produce. Instead, they’ll offer non-specific negations, like “I would never do something like that”; or they bury the response in a long-winded explanation; or repeat your question to buy more time to make an answer.
Statements like “That’s a good question” or “I’m glad you asked that” as well as qualifiers like “basically,” “mostly” or “maybe” signal deception.
Overly aggressive or polite demeanor can also be illuminating.
President Bill Clinton’s disavowal of having sex with Monica Lewinsky — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — used both the over-formal and distancing method of deceptive denial.
But be warned. Being a human lie detector has its drawbacks.
“If there’s a curse to being able to read someone’s behavior, it’s that it can lead us to a place where we’d rather not go,” the book says.
Sometimes, we’d just rather believe. Or maybe we just don’t want to be caught.