In a 1996 University of Virginia study lead by Bella DePaulo they recorded a daily log of people age 18 to 71 in the amount of lies they told in a single day. For the 147 participants the average amount of lies they told were just over ten times a day. Of course in the study many of the lies were times where people were trying to be nice. Someone perhaps with a new haircut that looked "good". These types of lies outnumbered the outright denial of truth approximately 15 to 1. This still does not hide the fact that of the 147 participants only seven people could say they were completely honest.
So with this amount of lying going on how do you catch someone in a lie? In these next few blogs we will cover 8 different tips that you can key in on to catch someone in a lie. Now there is no perfect way of discovering if the person across from you is lying to your face or not. Even the polygraph (Lie Detector) only works about 80% of the time. The skilled liars may not "bat an eyelash" in a lie but for most of us there are certain things that give us away.
Tip#8 Body Language
We have saved the toughest tip for last. It would seem that body language would be one of the simpler ways of telling if someone is lying to you but we find it can be the most difficult. There are certain body cues that you can look for which can lead you to believe someone is not telling the truth. Clues like not making eye contact, what direction the eye looks when responding, perspiration and heavier breathing, folding their arms or crossing their legs all can be signs of a heighten sense of anxiety. The confusion lies in the situation, being questioned for any reason can bring forth anxiety and set up our defense mechanisms even when you are telling the truth. The key to reading body language is having a baseline to go off of, especially if you are meeting the person you are questioning for the first time.
In many circumstances we don't get the opportunity to see the person we are questioning face to face. This poses a problem because according to various studies people are more likely to lie when being questioned on the phone. While questioning over the phone we have to pay attention to voice inflections, vocal pitch, using imprecise pronouns by telling the lie in second and third party and using phrases like "to tell you the truth" and "to be perfectly honest". Over the phone clues can be just as difficult to tell as body language again because in most cases you don't have an established baseline to determine if that is anxiety caused from lying or it is just that persons behavioral nature.
The best way to establish a base line in both body language and auditory clues is to begin the questioning in a calm and non threatening manor. Asking common questions about name and what they do as an occupation or something as mundane as the weather. Once a rapport has been established and you have made the subject as comfortable as you can you will be able to see the baseline physical and auditory factors. As questioning intensifies you can then key in on the body language change and the auditory language change and view that as anxiety which often comes from lying.