9 Ways to Tell if Someone is Lying

Hello friends!

Knowing when someone is lying can be extremely helpful. Not just for a police officer who is investigating a crime and has to deal with professional liars, but we can all benefit from being able to tell the truth from a lie. After all, it is useful to know if a potential partner is trustworthy, if the child is trying to deceive or if the seller is trying to deceive us.

In psychology, we learn more intuitively than consciously when a candidate is being evaluated for a job, whether he is lying or not, just as we can tell whether a patient’s story is more fantasy than reality. However, although the training may be more practical than theoretical, there is psychology knowledge that helps us to discover when someone is lying.

Freud – and later Jung tested this technique in the laboratory – had a fantastic record. He asked the person to tell again what he had just said. When having to retell a dream, a memory, an event, the points where there was a contradiction were evaluated as the most important psychically. Perhaps they did not always indicate the existence of a lie, but they did indicate what the patient was trying to hide, the point at which his complex was focused.

Another way we also found is to ask the person to tell the story in reverse chronological order, that is, backwards. Although it is complicated to say even a truth in that order, it is extremely complex to do so if it is a lie.

9 ways to tell if someone is lying

The 9 ways to tell if someone is lying were described by postdoc Susan Krauss Whitbourne, in an article published in Psychology Today. What you will read below is not a literal translation of the text. I rewrote, in my own words, what we can read there. Dr. Whitbourne, in turn, was based on the scientific work “Validating a new assessment method for deception detection: Introducing a Psychologically Based Credibility Assessment Tool”. “.

This work is the disclosure of the construction of a test created at the University of Texas, in 2013, by Jacqueline Evans, the PBCAT (Psychologically Based Credibility Assessment Tool).

1) Leave out sensory details

Sensory details are details that utilize the five senses: what we can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. When telling a lie, the small details that are normally used to embellish a true story are dropped. This is because, later, if there is a need to tell the story again, it will be difficult to remember them.

Thus, a person telling a true story might mention the colors of an outfit, a song that was playing or how the food was, at home or in a restaurant, etc. Anyway, the lie tends to be silent on the small details.

2) Sorry for the bad memory

When we tell the truth, chances are we don’t have any kind of problem remembering what happened. On the other hand, when a lie is created, the memory can be used as an excuse, as a justification for not only hiding the details – as in the previous way – but also with the intention of putting an end to the unpleasant and distressing moment of giving away. a false witness.

In summary, the person who is lying may make frequent allusions to “I don’t remember”, “I forgot (this or that)” or “I have a poor memory”.

3) Make spontaneous corrections

It is frequent that the person who is telling a lie keeps correcting what he is telling, spontaneously, that is, without external pressure. In many cases, we heard the person correct himself: “it was a Monday, it wasn’t a Tuesday, maybe a Wednesday” or “his name was José, I don’t know, maybe João or Jonas”…

The idea here is that the corrections are attempts to hide the possible flaws in the lie and, on the other hand, could also hide the nervousness, if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time it ends up just revealing that the person is nervous.

4) Keep everything short and sweet

The longer, more complete and detailed a story is, the harder it is to memorize. For this reason, lying tends to keep things “short and clear”, that is, it tends to reduce necessary information to a minimum. With this, it is also seen that the longer the narrative, the greater the content of what is told, the greater the tendency to be true because if it is true, it is easy to bring the memory to light, while it is much more complicated to invent a story. complete, with all the details and settings, and then still being able to remember exactly what was told.

5) The lie makes no sense and is full of contradictions

One of the ways to find out if the person is speaking the truth or a lie is the total coherence of his speech. If she says one thing at the beginning, another in the middle, and yet another at the end, it is likely that some point is untrue.

In the Human Resources area, we can clearly see when a candidate is lying about an aspect because the selection process is, in general, long. So, if in an interview, the candidate behaves like a person with one personality type, in a test he acts in another way and, finally, in a group dynamic, in yet another way, it is almost certain that in one of these assessment points there has been a lie.

We can see the same when a criminal psychologist analyzes the testimonies of a crime. Coherence is a sign of truth and inconsistency a sign of lies.

6) The lie has to be thought through

As the lie has to be constructed, the person who is lying often appears as if he is thinking a lot, as if he is making a great effort to remember what happened, while he is trying to create the lie. Of course, this is one more clue that can indicate whether it is a lie or not. The effort to remember, to think, is therefore one more indication that it may be a lie.

7) There is nervousness, tension and restlessness

As lying is an internal contradiction (in the sense that the person knows the truth and thus holds two contradictory thoughts), it also causes certain physiological effects. The most common are nervousness, tension and restlessness. The internal contradiction leads the person to be restless and, likewise, the lack of coherence – another way of understanding the contradiction – causes certain observable behaviors to appear.

After all, when telling a truth, we don’t need to be tense, restless and nervous, do we?

8) There are few complaints and few negative comments

This way of finding out whether it is true or not may be difficult to agree with at first. But it’s easy to see that a person who wants to pass off a lie as the truth is not going to want to make a negative impression. So there are few complaints and little to no negative comments. The intention is, then, to make a good impression so that the lie is not discovered.

9) Speech is slower than normal

When a person is telling a lie, how he has to deal with the internal contradiction, with the lack of coherence, how he has to create a new scenario for his story and, at the same time, remember details that he just made up, it is natural that speech slows down and becomes slower than normal. Also this last way is perhaps not obvious, as we are used to associating that the lie is told quickly. However, this is the case when the lie is rehearsed (for example, a seller who tells a thousand times the lie about the quality of a product), but in everyday life, for an unrehearsed lie, the speech tends to decrease of speed.

See more here – The Psychology of Lying – Why Does Everyone Lie?