Know the mutant; kill the mutant. This Chinese idiom reminds you that if you are lied to you would be failed desperately. You must commond the skills of telling if your opponents are telling lies. In business, politics and romance, it would be nice to know when we’re being lied to. Unfortunately humans aren’t very good at detecting lies. Our natural tendency is to trust others, and for day-to-day, low-stakes interactions, that makes sense.
In fact, being able to distinguish lies from truth is important not just in our personal lives but in the economy at large. Trust lubricates virtually every transaction we undertake. It’s no stretch to argue that by reducing trust, liars make us collectively poorer.
One way to test for lying, is to watch carefully on his or her body language. Often when people lie, they try too hard to be natural, and they give more detail than is necessary. And forced smiles. A real smile involves more muscles, while a forced smile will use just the muscles around the mouth. The lie here may only be about their feelings, of course.
Another way to test for lying, is to measure a persons desire to avoid a subject, which will sometimes indicate dishonesty or guilt. If you think the person is lying, change the subject quickly. A lying person will often go along easily, and may even visibly relax. An innocent person is more likely to be slightly confused by the change and want to finish their thoughts.
Liars’ stories often lack detail, says Lindsay Moran, a former CIA officer and author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy. Her solution: Push your subject for particulars. The more minutiae a liar has to provide, the more likely he is to slip up. Suppose your wife Jane says she was at her mother’s house, and you think she is lying. Rather than saying, “I’m calling your mother to verify this,” you could use a subtle approach. You might say, “That reminds me, I’m going to stop by your mother’s house today to fix that door for her.”
But you should apply these methods carefully on approperable opponents. If your wife was lying, the idea of you seeing her mother should make her nervous. She may give you reasons why you shouldn’t go there. Of course, if your relationship has reached the point where you feel the necessity to resort to these techniques, a simple lie may not be the worst of your problems. Still, sometimes you need to know, so here are a few more ways to tell if someone is lying.
They are using your words. Using your exact words to respond can be an indication of lying. You say, for example, “Did you leave this here?” and they respond, “No, I did not leave this here.” They use un-contracted words. A lack of contractions is more common when lying. For example, instead of saying “I didn’t sleep with her,” a man might say,” I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Again, compare to base behavior, though, as some people may not use contractions often anyhow.
For most of us, though, it’s not magicians or criminal masterminds we need to worry about when it comes to detecting deceivers. In fact, we should be most on guard against ourselves. “Often we don’t want to know when somebody is lying.” In short, we are programmed to believe compliments and avoid painful truths, both of which make a liar’s task much easier.