The Body Language of Liars

"Detecting deception is really about looking for discomfort at three critical junctures in an inquiry.

• The first is when the person first hears the question and how they respond to hearing that question (is there comfort or discomfort). 
• The second part has to do with how they process that information, how long they take to answer it, and how troubled they are to think about the answer. 
• The third phase has to do with how they answer the question; are there speech errors, hesitation, vocal inflections indicative of distress, discomfort displays or lack of emphasis. 

In all three of these critical phases, depending how well the question is formulated and asked, we have an opportunity to assess for comfort and discomfort."

"Having laid this information out, I would caution that the best we can say, unless we actually know the truth, is this: if the person did poorly in all three areas (hearing, processing, and answering the question), there are likely issues there that need to be explored because their behavior, lacking so much discomfort, is suggestive, but not conclusive of deception.

I would be reluctant to call someone a liar merely because they respond poorly in all three areas, but I would certainly pursue the topic further to see what caused this behaviour."

These are the words of Joe Navarro, a former FBI Counterintelligence Agent and the author of a fascinating book; "What Every Body is Saying."

For additional articles, look on his web site; www.jnforensics.com or follow him on Twitter: @navarrotells @navarrotells

Corporate psychology: How to tell when your boss is lying | The Economist

Corporate psychology: How to tell when your boss is lying | The Economist

“ASSHOLE!” That was what Jeff Skilling, the boss of Enron, called an investor who challenged his rosy account of his firm’s financial health. Other bosses usually give less obvious clues that they are lying. Happily, a new study reveals what those clues are.

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception. As with Mr Skilling’s “asshole”, more frequent use of swear words indicates deception. These results were significant, and arguably would have been even stronger had the authors been able to distinguish between executives who knowingly misled and those who did so unwittingly. They had to assume that every restatement was the result of deliberate deception; but the psychological traits they tested for would only appear in a person who knew he was lying.

This study should help investors glean valuable new insights from conference calls. Alas, this benefit may diminish over time. The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive emotion. Expect “fantastic” results to become a thing of the past.

Why deception is our preferred way of life

Why deception is our preferred way of life

Greek philosopher Epictetus commented on human behaviour in this way: "It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions and perceptions of those things." It is not what happens to us that determines our behaviour but how we receive and interpret what happens to us.

Thus, when facing a potential threat, one person might interpret it as a challenge to be mastered, another as a force majuer and certain defeat, while a third might see it as retribution, the punishment he or she readily deserves.

Crucially, the decisions about what to do and how to react to this potential threat, follows on from the individual's ability for absorbtion, comprehension and interpretation, as it is attributed and applied to the original action.

This uncertainty lies at the heart of what we need to know if we are to understand ourselves and behave differently and more appropriately.

Yet throughout history we have denied ourselves this direct path to the truth because what it tells us about ourselves is that, while we are not responsible for most of what happens to us, we are always responsible for how we interpret it.

We appear to dislike taking responsibility for ourselves as much as we dislike risk and uncertainty.