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6 silent signs you’re being lied to

<h4>Is there a liar in the room?</h4> Lies occur between friends, teachers and students, husbands and wives, lawyers and clients – yet nobody wants to be caught. “I’ve interviewed crooks more apt to admit to a major crime than to lying,” says Glenn Woods, a criminal profiler, who’s been studying deceptive behaviour for more than a decade. “Everybody lies to some degree.” Of course, there’s a gulf that separates little white lies from the whoppers, but learning how to tell if someone is lying is a skill that’ll always come in handy. Here’s what to watch for. 1. Listen to the voices Pay attention to voice changes like change in pitch or cracking; they may well indicate deceit. “A person’s voice pitch tends to be a bit higher when they’re lying than when they’re telling the truth,” says Dr Mary Ann Campbell, assistant professor of psychology. “It doesn’t mean they’re lying for sure, but there’s a higher likelihood.” 2. Watch those words What about written material? Can we spot misleading behaviour in letters, emails and even resumés? Professor David Skillicorn and his students in the School of Computing at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, created software – based on the deception model developed at the University of Texas at Austin – that can sniff out lies in emails and other written material by studying the frequency and kinds of words used. Skillicorn says liars tend to use fewer exclusive words such as but, or and except. They also tend to use more negative-emotion words such as ashamed, upset and embarrassed. “These are the words that send up red flags,” says Skillicorn. “It’s as though some part of the brain is feeling bad and this comes out in the writing.” 3. Look past shifty eyes While most people may interpret darting, unfocused eyes as a classic sign of lying, it’s vital to consider the context of the behaviour. For example, experienced poker players are careful not to make too much of eye “tells.” People usually look to the left or right when thinking about an answer. Someone not making eye contact should arouse suspicion, but eye contact, cautions Woods, can be a tricky evaluation tool: consider that a psychopath can look you in the eye and lie with ease. And in some cultures, it’s considered inappropriate to maintain eye contact. 4. Get better at body language Even though a high percentage of communication is thought to be non-verbal, no single part of the body – such as the eyes or hands – reveals the whole story when it comes to lying. Campbell says people who are lying often become more still: Hand gestures that normally accompany talking may occur with less frequency or intensity, and there may be fewer arm and leg movements. “The person becomes more focused on telling the lie,” explains Campbell, “so they get quieter in their body.” 5. Ask questions – quickly If you suspect you’re being deceived, try this technique, which experts say can trip up a liar. Try asking questions quickly – one after the other. “The initial lie is easy,” explains Kang Lee, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development. “The follow-up lie is more difficult. When you continue to ask questions and put people on the spot, it gets harder to maintain the lie.” 6. Check for emotional “leaks” Micro-expressions that flit across the face often expose a person’s real thoughts. “If you were to watch people on videotape, frame by frame, you would see them showing their true emotion just before they show the fake expression designed to cover up the lie,” says Campbell. But these ultra-brief facial movements, some only lasting a quarter of a second, aren’t easy to spot. Even professionals trained in lie detection can’t always isolate them. And deliberate liars tend to add other expressions, like smiling, to disguise a lie. So, here’s hoping that the next time someone lobs a lie your way, you’ll know just how to catch it. Image: Getty This article is written by Diane Sewell originally appeared on <a href="https://www.readersdigest.co.nz/true-stories-lifestyle/relationships/6-silent-signs-youre-being-lied-to" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reader's Digest</a>.

Relationships

Child actor from Liar Liar all grown up

The child actor who starred in Liar Liar alongside Hollywood star Jim Carrey has completely grown up. Well, obviously, that’s what happens to humans. Justin Cooper played the role of Max Reede, the child whose birthday wish was that his father, Fletcher (Carrey), would not be able to lie for 24 hours. The 1997 film was an absolute box office smash, and while Cooper went on to star in other shows and movies, he has since left showbiz behind completely. The 33-year-old is currently an Executive Producer for FoxSports Radio. As one ages, their style changes too – and that’s certainly what happened in Cooper’s case. The adorable haircut he had in the film has disappeared to one of a grown up man, teamed with a beard and glasses. Is this what success looks like? Before quitting the big and small screen industry, Cooper went on to star in Full House, General Hospital, The Magnificent Seven, Dennis 2: Dennis Strikes Again, Brother’s Keeper, All About Us and The Practice. Images: YouTube and Twitter

Movies

7 clues anyone can use to spot a liar

Is their face giving it away? You may think a smile can easily disguise your true feelings, but the expressions that flash across a liar’s face will give away what they are really thinking – whether they know it or not. Experts advise paying close attention to hard-to-hide micro-expressions; these clues are often so difficult to detect that even trained experts have trouble discerning them. But you may be able to spot a liar by the red colour on their cheeks since anxiety can cause people to blush. Other ways to tell if someone is lying? Flared nostrils, lip nibbling, deep breathing and rapid blinking, which hint that the brain is working overtime. Does the body language follow the story? It’s more important to examine a person’s entire demeanour, as there’s no one feature that’s apt to give away how to spot a liar. Honesty is characterised by features that are in sync with one another – so besides posture, note the fit between face, body, voice and speech. Like an animal avoiding detection, a liar may pull his arms and legs inward or keep his movements to a minimum – anything to appear smaller. Liars often shove their hands behind their back because those fidgety digits might give them away. How is ther person smiling? How to tell if someone is lying could come down to something as simple as a smile. A bright grin can sometimes mask a person’s true feelings. Pay close attention to how a person smiles as well as other facial movements. You may be able to detect the emotions he or she is trying to hide – such as fear, anger and disgust. A true smile will incorporate both a person’s lips and eyes. How is the person speaking? Although a change in voice can be the tip-off in how to spot a liar, experts say that to be sure, you should also pay attention to a person’s speech rate and breathing pattern – if it either speeds up or slows down, chances are you’re not hearing the whole truth. What is the person saying? Here’s how to tell if someone is lying; listen to their choice of words. Liars tend to avoid exclusionary words like “but,” “nor,” “except,” and “whereas,” because they have trouble with complex thought processes. Also, they are less likely to use the words “I,” “me,” and “mine.” In their attempts to distance themselves psychologically from their tall tales, liars will tend to communicate using fewer personal pronouns. Is your subject behaving uncharacteristically? Experts believe changes in a person’s baseline – how they generally conduct themselves – are worthy of your attention for how to spot a liar. You should weigh the rate of speech, the tone of voice, posture and hand gestures against what you know, along with the context of the situation. When your husband says “I loved the tie you bought me” while he’s wearing a tight smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, expect to see him in a turtleneck. Is the question simple or embarrassing? It’s normal for someone to look away when asked a difficult question. But when someone avoids your gaze when asked a simple question, you should be suspicious. This article first appeared in <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.readersdigest.co.nz/true-stories-lifestyle/relationships/7-clues-anyone-can-use-to-spot-a-liar" target="_blank">Reader’s Digest</a>. For more of what you love from the world’s best-loved magazine, <a rel="noopener" href="http://readersdigest.innovations.co.nz/c/readersdigestemailsubscribe?utm_source=over60&utm_medium=articles&utm_campaign=RDSUB&keycode=WRA87V" target="_blank">here’s our best subscription offer.</a> Image: Getty Images <img style="width: 100px !important; height: 100px !important;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7820640/1.png" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/f30947086c8e47b89cb076eb5bb9b3e2" />

Mind

“Liars killed her and her baby”: Desperate nurse’s anguished accusation

A nurse has shared her own horrific story of losing a 14-year-old patient to coronavirus. The US intensive care unit nurse, Jessica, revealed the young teen’s parents were anti-vaxxer. Jessica recounted the "helpless" situation to Twitter, saying four patients died of the devastating illness in a single shift. "Tonight I helplessly held the hand of and stroked the hair of a beautiful 14-year-old girl as she exited his world," she wrote on Twitter. "She was looking forward to starting high school and eventually becoming a veterinarian. It was so senseless! <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> parents had not forbidden us from intubating her. A free vaccination would have prevented it all! This little girl was robbed of her whole life and of fulfilling all of her dreams. She had been with us 9 days and was able to communicate well until taking a turn for the worse — Jessica M. MSN, FNP-C (@Jessicam6946) <a href="https://twitter.com/Jessicam6946/status/1426569588825858051?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 14, 2021</a></blockquote> Jessica said her parents refused for their daughter to have a tube placed down her throat to assist with her breathing. "I truly believe she could have been saved if her parents had not forbidden us from intubating her," Jessica explained. "A free vaccination would have prevented it all! This little girl was robbed of her whole life and of fulfilling all of her dreams." <img style="width: 500px; height: 281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7819915/hospital.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/dd37337f6dc8477c8ddcd468397ecb21" /> Image: Shutterstock The teenage patient had been in hospital for nine days, prior to her death. Jessica went on to share a number of deaths she believed were preventable had the patient received COVID vaccinations. She said medical staff lost a 25-year-old mother who was 15 weeks pregnant, just two hours after the death of the young teen. "She had refused the vaccines because of the lies about them causing infertility and harming her baby," Jessica explained. The nurse went on to claim that anti-vax rhetoric was what was causing the deaths of otherwise healthy people. "Liars killed her, her baby, and robbed a two-year-old little boy of his mommy and sibling. Not to mention robbing a husband of his wife and child." The nurse said it was the first time since March that the hospital unit had lost more than three patients in one night. A 45-year-old was the oldest to die that evening. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> mommy and sibling. Not to mention robbing a husband of his wife and child. Those were 2 of 4 deaths we had tonight with the oldest being 45 years old! It was the 1st time since late March we have lost more than 3 covid patients in a single shift. Then we find out this morning — Jessica M. MSN, FNP-C (@Jessicam6946) <a href="https://twitter.com/Jessicam6946/status/1426569591942172673?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 14, 2021</a></blockquote> The vaccination rate across Australia shows that at least 50.2 per cent of people have had their first dose. So far, 28.2 per cent are fully vaccinated. Health Minister Greg Hunt has said rising rates reflected the "huge" turnouts for vaccinations. "It is being sustained, so over a 10-day period now, we have had more than 2.4 million doses delivered," he said.

Caring

Why it's so hard to sniff out a liar

Why is it such a challenge to recognise deception – both on and off the poker table – even with past experience to draw on and lots of cues seemingly available? Most of us are proficient liars. We all lie, probably <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01366.x/">every day</a>, about something or other. Ever answered the standard question of “how are you?” with a less-than-forthright reply? We understand the concept of lying <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/47/1/39/">before we turn four</a>: Charles Darwin <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Darwin/infant.htm">reported his son</a>, a few months shy of his third birthday, trying to lie and there are data suggesting the behaviour can manifest from as young as <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9507.00220/abstract">two years</a>. And just as everyone engages in deceptions, everyone wants to know how to tell if someone else is lying. It seems as though it should be easy – there are “<a href="http://parade.condenast.com/57236/viannguyen/former-cia-officers-share-6-ways-to-tell-if-someones-lying/">tells</a>”: sweating, eye movements, micro-expressions, changes in body posture and even changes in speech patterns, that can help us recognise a lie. Those signals are a type of natural polygraph. Like mechanical lie-detector tests, they rely on a set of physiological changes that occur when we lie. Telling a porky pie, even a so-called white lie, requires cognitive and emotional effort. <iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/p3Uos2fzIJ0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> Someone’s lying in this video. Can you spot who it is? Lying activates our <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/autonomic+nervous+system">autonomic nervous system</a>, and the more venal the lie – the more there is at stake – the more activated the autonomic nervous system becomes. Why is it so hard to detect a lie? <h2>Pants on fire (if only it was that easy)</h2> The answers are surprising. First, there is “noise” in the lie-detection system: there are many things that activate the human autonomic nervous system. Nervousness is a good example. People typically get nervous when <ul> <li>they are being interrogated, about anything</li> <li>they meet for the first time someone to whom they are attracted (which, by the way, is one of the circumstances under which we are very likely to lie about something)</li> <li>the stakes are high – when much depends on what they do, or how well they do it</li> <li>there’s confrontation involved: a deadline, great expectations … even in-laws.</li> </ul> When we are nervous we sweat more. We sweat a <a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sweating-and-body-odor/basics/causes/con-20014438">different type of sweat</a> and so we smell different. We fidget and our hair stands on end. We either don’t make any or make exaggerated eye contact. We change the way we speak and, without knowing it, the pitch of our voice changes. Those changes also occur when we are lying. So it is a myth that there exists a reliable, unique set of cues that signal someone is lying. Some behavioural cues certainly are correlated with lying, but most of those also are correlated with other behaviours too. Second, there is the cost to the lie-detector of a “false alarm”. Socially speaking, it’s a high-stakes game: the fear of the damage and embarrassment wrought by mistakenly calling someone out on a lie, combined with the high burden of proof involved, stack the decks against successful “prosecution”. Perhaps most surprisingly though, we are generally <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-4v3fSm6z7IC&dq=The+liar+in+your+life:+The+way+to+truthful+relationships&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_sBpU_TKNYqqkgWk54DoAQ&redir_esc=y">less interested</a> than we think in actually discerning the truth. We are, very often, willing to accept as truth lies that smooth social interactions. Similarly, lies that are congruent with our world-views or, and especially, with our self-image will less often be “called out”. In other words, we actually are very skilled at not recognising lies. <h2>I lie, therefore I think</h2> Of course, the little white lies we tell to keep conversations flowing or to compliment (or at least avoid offending!) our friend/partner/boss seem hardly interesting. Juicier are the venal deceits that, when detected, leave trust shattered and lives changed. As it turns out, all lies, big or small, are tactical deceptions. Tactical deceptions require the liar to actively manipulate information to mislead another. They are interesting because the creation of such a deception has been interpreted as evidence that the liar has developed a <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/theomind/">theory of mind</a> – I lie, therefore I think. If that is true the implications are broad: both old world and new world monkeys have been observed in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691785/">tactical deceptions</a>. The same is true for other <a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/038743_primates_liars_gorilla.html">great apes</a>, and even <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347202930563">ravens</a>. <h2>Lies, damned lies, and experts</h2> <a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics.html">Mark Twain</a>, lamenting his lack of skill with numbers, stratified statistics as a worse than average form of lying. Nonetheless – and acknowledging there is no small opportunity for irony when a researcher asks about how often people lie – who lies and how often are open questions across the behavioural sciences. We do know almost everyone lies. Women and men lie on average equally often, but about <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15324834BASP2402_8#.U2nB3_mSzsQ">different things</a>. There is some evidence too that <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3998987">men are better liars</a> than women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, estimates of how often we lie vary wildly. That is partly because context is important. Lying is, after all, a type of social glue, and – not surprisingly – people lie in surveys. So the next time you pull up a chair at the casino or with mates at a poker night, remember – while you may find it hard to tell if your opponents are lying, they’re probably also finding you hard to read.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25487/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /> <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/ricky-van-der-zwan-34212">Ricky van der Zwan</a>, Associate Professor in Neuroscience and Psychology, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/southern-cross-university-1160">Southern Cross University</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anna-brooks-93597">Anna Brooks</a>, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/southern-cross-university-1160">Southern Cross University</a> This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/hows-your-poker-face-why-its-so-hard-to-sniff-out-a-liar-25487">original article</a>.

Relationships

“I am a liar. I stole valour”: Judge's creative sentencing for two criminals who posed as war veterans

A judge in Montana has laid down the law and ordered two men to be publicly shamed to learn a lesson after they pretended to be war veterans to attempt to get a lesser sentence for their crimes. Ryan Morris, 28, and Troy Nelson, 33, both pretended to be veterans in a bid to get their cases moved to a Veterans Court, where they would receive a lighter sentence for their crimes. This plot backfired and the two men now have other tasks to complete as well as serving their sentences. Judge Greg Pinski gave Morris 10 years for violating his felony burglary probation and gave Nelson 5 years for drug possession. Three years of both of their sentences were suspended. However, before each man is eligible for parole, Pinski ordered that they must hand write each name of the 6,756 Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The men must also write out the obituaries of the 40 Montanans killed in these conflicts and send handwritten letters to a number of veterans’ groups apologising for their actions. <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"><iframe class="embed-responsive-item" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A8aPzrlN7VA"></iframe></div> On top of that, during every Memorial and Veterans Day, the two must stand at the Montana Veterans Memorial in Great Falls for eight hours wearing a sign that reads: “I am a liar. I am not a veteran. I stole valour. I have dishonoured all veterans.” The men also have to perform 441 hours of community service, which is equal to the number of Montanans killed during the Korean war.

Retirement Life

The new and reliable way to spot a liar

Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes the Fulfilment at Any Age blog for Psychology Today. Figuring out who will be truthful is as important a determination to make as any you might make in your life. Your quest to identify what's a lie ranges from distilling the newsfeed you receive on a moment-to-moment basis to trying to decide if a salesperson is giving you a truly good deal for a truly good product. Psychology addresses the question of dishonesty from a range of perspectives, such as interpreting <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/body-language">body language</a> or counting the number of “uh’s” in a person’s speech. However, it would also make sense that <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/personality">personality</a> would figure into the equation. Putting this idea to the test, University of Cape Town (South Africa) psychologist Yolandi-Eloise Jansevan van Rensburg and colleagues (2018) explored academic dishonesty in a context easily investigated with college undergraduates. Although their focus is on this specific type of cheating, the results of this study also have implications for <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/empathy">understanding</a> dishonestly on a larger scale. Van Rensburg and her colleagues note that a large percentage (43%) of college students admit to having cheated at some point and in some way on exams. This estimate comes from a range of studies conducted between 2002 and 2013, with nearly 135,000 participants. In a way, although <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/infidelity">cheating on</a> campus is a headache primarily for instructors, the problem also takes on significance when you consider that some of those cheaters are now serving the public, sometimes in situations involving life or death decisions. Who wants a cheater conducting <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/neuroscience">brain</a> surgery or doing your taxes? The personality traits that the South African researchers believed would be most related to academic <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/deception">deception</a> stem from the so-called “HEXACO” model that includes as one if its components the honesty-humility dimension. As you can most likely guess from the term, scores on this personality attribute are related to what the researchers call “counter-academic behaviour.” In other words, people with low scores on the honesty end of the continuum should be more likely to commit “multiple ethical transgressions within an academic context” that would include cheating and plagiarising among other behaviours such as abusing substances and holding low personal standards. Whether honesty-humility scores would include cheating specifically within this range of counter-academic behaviour became the study’s empirical question. According to van Rensburg et al., it is necessary to break the honesty-humility scores down further in the effort to predict cheating. Honesty refers to being fair and trustworthy, and unwilling to engage in behaviours designed to provide personal gain such as exploiting, stealing, lying, and of course, cheating. People high in humility avoid being greedy and regard themselves as not particularly entitled to special treatment. Putting the two together, people may want to get ahead and hope to get special treatment (i.e. be low in humility), but honesty puts the brakes on their doing so, acting as a “control element” against engaging in counterproductive behaviour. Using an online sample of 308 South African students ranging from 18 to 47 years of age, with an average age of 23, van Rensburg and her collaborators assessed cheating both with direct questions about counter-academic behaviour as well as with a disguised measure of cheating in the form of an online task that participants were to score themselves. The online cheating task was administered prior to the personality test to ensure that participants wouldn’t guess the actual purpose of the study and then be influenced by the honesty questions when they performed the task. The online cheating measure was cleverly designed to tempt participants to cheat by giving them the opportunity to win money if they performed well. Participants were told they should not use any unauthorised help such as using a calculator, nor to change their answers once they started seeing the correct scores. After completing the task, participants then reported on whether or not they had cheated in the process of scoring themselves or using any of that unauthorised help. To assess counter-academic behaviour, the researchers asked participants a series of questions regarding such examples as submitting a class paper or project that was not their own work (misrepresentation) and turning in work that was of poor quality and lower than their true potential or ability (low personal standards). Think now about what you would do in the online task scenario. Would you try to change your answers or give yourself an honest grade based on which ones you got right and which you got wrong? If you believe you would refrain from cheating, why would this be? Would you feel it was unfair to receive unearned money or would you just feel that you were being insincere? Think too about whether you’d really want money you hadn’t earned. Is it worth it to get an extra few dollars in terms of your own self-respect and integrity, or would you stop at nothing to try to game the system? As it turned out, the fairness dimension ranked above all else in predicting who self-reports engaging in counter-academic behaviour. With fairness including an adherence to social norms and unwillingness to take advantage of others, the authors reasoned, people with high scores on this trait should stay away from all forms of behaving badly in academic settings. For the online cheating test, though, it was greed avoidance that provided the strongest predictive value. That material gain, small though it was, provided sufficient incentive for the greedy students to grab what they could. Breaking honesty-humility down into its components, then, and differentiating between general college misbehaviour and cheating on a specific task allowed the South African <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/teamwork">team</a> to pinpoint the distinct personality traits that lead people to lie to get what they feel they deserve. If you generalise beyond an academic situation, the findings suggest that the people most likely to cheat their way to the top are, at their core, greedy. Their desire to acquire material goods allows them to suspend their own sense of right and wrong. Those individuals who uphold the values of fairness will, by contrast, avoid the more general range of unsavoury behaviours that include ethical transgressions. If you want to figure out who to trust, the van Rensburg et al. study suggests you do a quick assessment of fairness and greed avoidance. Even if you dangle attractive goodies to the people high in greed avoidance, they’ll be able to resist temptation. You can conduct your own experiments of giving them the opportunity to earn something they don’t deserve and see how they behave. The people who believe in fairness, similarly, can be put to the test by finding out if they would try to get away with bending the rules if they could. Of course, you can also see if they do. If a salesperson fails to charge them for an item, do they point this out, or furtively leave the scene as fast as possible? Finding fulfillment in your own personal search for success means not cheating to get what you want. Learning to figure out who to trust in your relationships means looking not so much at their nonverbal communication but at the more easily observable, and perhaps reliable, conduct. Written by Susan Krauss Whitbourne. Republished with permission of <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com">Psychology Today. </a>

Relationships

5 easy ways to catch a liar according to a CIA agent

We’ve all experienced that creepy feeling in conversation when it feels like the person we’re talking to isn’t being completely honest, but some people are so adept that spinning webs of deceptions that it can be difficult to tell if they’re actually lying. But you can actually spot a liar relatively easily, if you know what to look for. In an interview with <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/" target="_blank">Daily Mail Online</a>, former CIA agent Jason Hanson explains how you can spot a liar by being on the lookout for the five following tell-tale signs: <ol> <li>They take too long to answer questions</li> <li>They freeze up</li> <li>They say no, but nod yes</li> <li>They recommend a lenient punishment for the guilty party</li> <li>They overreact to being questioned</li> </ol> As Hanson explains, “As human beings we are terrible liars. So if you ask someone a question such as: "Have you stolen something?" or "Have you done drugs?" and they sit there and they hem and they haw, and it takes them time, that means they are buying time to come up with a lie.” Have you ever encountered something like this? What are your tips for figuring out if someone is lying to you? Let us know in the comments. Video credit: Daily Mail Online Related links: <a href="/lifestyle/family-pets/2016/07/little-white-lies-you-should-avoid-with-kids/">5 worst little white lies you can tell your grandkids</a> <a href="/lifestyle/relationships/2016/07/the-37-per-cent-rule-of-online-dating/">The 37 per cent rule of online dating</a> <a href="/health/mind/2016/06/overcoming-pain-using-the-power-of-the-mind/">Overcoming pain using the power of the mind</a>

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6 silent signs you’re being lied to

Child actor from Liar Liar all grown up

7 clues anyone can use to spot a liar

“Liars killed her and her baby”: Desperate nurse’s anguished accusation

Why it's so hard to sniff out a liar

“I am a liar. I stole valour”: Judge's creative sentencing for two criminals who posed as war veterans

The new and reliable way to spot a liar

5 easy ways to catch a liar according to a CIA agent