Any piece of writing with a title as bold as the one given to this article had better start with a massive disclaimer, or it’d be very hard for you to believe anything written in it.

So, firstly, I should note that despite what Body Language charlatans, and other people trying to sell books, DVDs and courses etc. might claim, there are no infallible guides to spotting liars. Think about it – if there was some foolproof guide, Police, Prison Guards, Customs Officers and other people whose jobs involve professional lie-catching would have very much higher detection rates. We can therefore conclude that most people are often pretty good at lying, and a very short article certainly won’t act as any sort of magic bullet.

In fact, in professional scientific studies examining college student’s abilities to detect lies, accuracy rates of about 54% are generally obtained (when an accuracy of 50% would be obtainable purely by chance). However, DePaulo and Pfeifer (1986) studied experienced and newly recruited law enforcement officers; Ekman and O’Sullivan (1991) studied members of the secret service, federal Polygraphers and Police officers; Garrido, Masip, Herrero, Tabernero and Vega (1998) studied Police students from a Spanish Police academy; Köhnken (1987) studied Police officers; Vrij (1993a) studied Police detectives; Vrij and Graham (1997) studied Police officers; while Vrij and Mann (1999) also studied Police officers. In each of these investigations, accuracy rates were in the range 45-60%.

Vrij (1993a) used regression analysis to determine which cues the Police detectives in his study were using to attempt to determine whether people were lying or telling the truth. His breakdown was as follows:

Socially anxious – 6%
More hand movements – 8%
Less co-operative – 8%
Less smiling – 10%
Untidily dressed – 12%
Public self-consciousness – 14%
Unexplained – 42%

These choices all seem pretty much arbitrary, and that somewhat explains why the Detectives achieved such low accuracy in the research.

Luckily, as seducers, we don’t have to detect thieves or murderers etc. And in some cases, you probably don’t even want to know if someone is lying. For example, if I spend some time and money choosing you a present, I’m setting myself up for a fall if I try to determine whether you are telling the truth, when you say that you like what I’ve given you. Equally, you would likely be fairly reluctant to allow me to attach you to a Polygraph, or film you while I searched for micro muscle movements.

On the other hand, a dysfunctional man might try to impress a woman by inventing stories about taking part in unusual sports, to compensate for his lack of an interesting life, or else claim that he drives a Ferrari, when in fact he has only borrowed one, or possibly doesn’t have one at all. Just as likely is a scenario where a deceptive woman may claim that she is interested in a man, simply to try to gain some material benefit; or she may state that she will meet a man at a certain time and place, when in actual fact she plans to be elsewhere at that time.

Clearly, in each of these cases, someone will be making an effort to start a relationship, only to be greatly disappointed later on, after they have expended time, money and effort. Obviously, these people would be better off being able to detect lies and protect themselves against deceptive people, so that their time and energies might be more profitably applied elsewhere.

So, why is this all so difficult?

1) Difference between liars and truth-tellers are usually very small, and human behaviour can be very complex and at times confusing.

2) Contrary to what Body Language charlatans might tell you, there is no such thing as ‘Typical deceptive behaviour’. That is to say, there is no one behaviour or set of behaviours that all liars exhibit, because there is no such thing as generic behaviour.

3) Conversation rules prevent people from analyzing the person talking in detail, and head-to-foot observation would be very unusual in conversation. Further it would be terrible to accuse a truthful person of being a liar.

4) Persons attempting lie detection may depend upon mindless decision making rules, following garbage spouted by Body language salespeople, or just spuriously deciding that any odd or complex behaviour constitutes deception.

5) People have a tendency to interpret nervous behaviour not simply as nerves, but as deception. (q.v. Bond and Fahey, 1987)

6) People often fail to take individual differences into account. For example, introverts and socially awkward people often make a dishonest impression, as do black people (to white observers at least). The behaviours that these groups of people show are often incorrectly interpreted as indicative of lying.

Where does all the crap come from?

• Old wives tales
• Body Language charlatans
• Neuro-linguistic programming

Old wives tales: are basically folk wisdom or folk law; and it’s pretty easy to find people who will tell you that “Liars can’t look you in the eye“, “Liars have shifty eyes“, “Liars fidget” or “Liars say ‘ah,’ ‘er,’ ‘uh,’ or ‘um’ a lot“. All no doubt reinforced by years of old Detective movies. Someone may have spotted this behaviour once or twice, and it happened to coincide with a moment during which a person was being deceptive, and the idea stuck.

Body Language charlatans: are basically greedy people trying to make a living by inventing their own field of study (much like Astrologers). These people would have you believe that everyone behaves the same way, all the time, in all situations, or that there is some standard set of behaviours that all people exhibit. In spite of the fact that people who want to be deceptive will have taken the trouble to familiarise themselves with this body of literature, and will therefore be monitoring their behaviour to make sure they don’t conform to this pattern.

According to these “unqualified experts” everyone feels guilty when they lie, and it doesn’t matter that “Professionally qualified Psychologists” have found that many people actually experience a sense of pleasure while lying. A behaviour known as “duping delight” (possibly because they see deception as part of a game that they believe that they are winning, at that point). However, that doesn’t matter, because the Body Language charlatans won’t have to deal with a situation where an innocent person is accused of being a liar, on the basis of arbitrary rules.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP): is more interesting, and in this case, the idea seems to be that you can tell whether someone is lying solely from whether the person breaks eye contact to the right or left. The belief that liars break to the left is popular, although there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this theory.

The idea seems to be derived from the NLP “eye accessing cues” model, which holds that a persons preference for thinking visually, auditorily or kinaesthetically (emotionally) can be determined by watching the direction of their eye movements during communication. To be fair to Bandler and Grinder, I cannot recall any literature in which they have suggested a correlation between lying and looking to the left, so the idea seems to have been invented by some of their more over-enthusiastic students.

What can help you spot liars?

It’s important to take a balanced view, when it comes to determining whether you’re being lied to or not. If you assume that everyone is honest all the time, you’re more likely to be duped by a liar. But on the other hand, assuming that everyone is lying is unlikely to win you many friends, and ultimately leads to paranoia.

Next, in more recent years, Psychologists have developed a checklist of criteria collectively known as Reality monitoring theory (See Johnson, Hashtroudi & Lindsay (1993) and Johnson & Raye (1998) for a more academic overview of this subject). According to Reality monitoring theory, people rely on qualitative characteristics of memories to decide whether a memory is based on an actual experience or not. So, it is assumed that externally derived memories contain more references to sensory information (visual details, colours, sounds, smells, taste, and touch), contextual information (about space and time), emotions and feelings, and semantic information. On the other hand, internally derived memories are supposed to contain more references to cognitive operations at the time of encoding i.e. a person will reason “I must have dreamt this, because I know I’ve never been to China.”

One piece of information to look out for when trying to detect a liar is whether or not the person describes inferences that they made at the time of the event e.g. “His reactions gave me the impression that he was angry” or “It seemed to me that he didn’t know where he was going”. This criterion would also include repeated thinking about they are describing, and is probably the least helpful and most contentious part of Reality monitoring theory.

So, rather than detect liars, it’s actually much easier to determine people telling the truth, and in fact, the other criteria from Reality monitoring theory, are all concerned with judging whether people are more likely to be telling the truth. Thus, the more of these criteria that you can identify, the more likely the information being given to you is the truth:

Clarity/Vividness: The information that the person gives you should be clear, sharp and vivid (instead of dim and vague).

Realism: The information that the person gives you should be plausible, realistic and make sense.

Sensory information: This criterion is present if the statement includes perceptual information such as visual details (e.g. “I saw the man get into the car”), sounds (e.g. “She really shouted at me”), physical sensations (e.g. “It really hurt”), smells (e.g. “It had a smell of bacon”) and tastes (e.g. “The wine was very fruity”).

Emotions and feelings: This criterion is present if information is included about how the person felt during the event (e.g. “I was very anxious”)

Spatial information: This criterion is present if the statement includes information about locations (e.g. “It was in the park”) or the spatial arrangement of people and / or objects (e.g. “The man was sitting to the left of his girlfriend” or “The radio was obscured by the curtains”)

Temporal information: This criterion is present if the statement includes information about when the event happened, either from the time of year or time of day, (e.g. “It was early in the afternoon”) or explicitly describes a sequence of events (e.g. “When she heard the noise, she became nervous and left” or “As soon as the man entered the pub, the girl started smiling”)

Reconstructability of the story: This criterion is present if, despite the complexity of the story, it is possible to reconstruct the events on the basis of the information told to you.

How well does this work?

In laboratory studies of Reality monitoring theory using adults, Sporer was able to detect 75% of truths, 68% of lies and 71% overall. Then Vrij, Edward, Roberts and Bull managed 77% of truths, 74% of lies and 72% overall. So, whilst not perfect, this method is a massive improvement in accuracy over all the methods detailed above.

You might also enjoy reading:-

• A challenge for Body language ‘experts’
• More truths about Body language
• 25 Things I Learned From the Movies
• Manipulation: Sleight of Mouth
• Another nail in the coffin for Body Language

Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociology

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