Surprising way to tell if someone’s lying
You might think how much eye contact someone is making or how much they’re fidgeting are the big tell-tale signs that someone is lying to you, but according to Harvard Business School professor and psychologist, Amy Cuddy, there is actually no one cue that's a giveaway for lying.
In her book Presence, the psychologist says there’s no point looking or waiting for the one big “reveal” (or the “Aha, I knew you were lying!” moment) if you want to catch out a lie. Instead, the best way to spot lies is to look for differences and discrepancies across all channels of communication, such as facial expressions, posture, and speech.
"Lying is hard work," Cuddy says. "We're telling one story while suppressing another, and if that's not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we're also trying suppress. We just don't have the brainpower to manage it all without letting something go – without ‘leaking.’"
To spot a liar, you need to catch these “leaks”, and the best way to do that is to look for differences between what people are saying and what they are doing. Cuddy says to look for conflicting emotions such as a happy tone but an agitated facial expression. That is often more telling than if someone isn’t looking into your eyes.
But before you go accusing people of dishonesty, remember that people are generally awful at spotting lies. According to Cuddy, most people identify lies only slightly better than someone guessing. Why? People focus too much on what people are saying, and not enough on both their actions and the content of speech.
"When we're consciously looking for signs of deception or truth, we pay too much attention to words and not enough to the nonverbal gestalt of what's going on," Cuddy says. "Truth reveals itself more clearly through actions than it does through our words."
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