I hear this often on TV shows and from what I understand, it is generally taught to policemen. What I hear is that if a person looks up to right, they are lying. This is another myth (see November’s blog on Body Language) that originated from NLP and was taken out of context and taught wholesale to people without having the entire understanding of what they were saying.
I think what happens (I’m only guessing) that someone takes a class or read something and they extract information out the class to teach to others. This information is usually something they find relevant in their own lives or it makes sense to them. It doesn’t have anything to do with truth. In the past, I have been guilty of the same thing. Early on in my NLP career, I became a victim to this type of information extraction so that I could impress audiences or build my expertise and authority. Today, knowing what I know about speakers and trainers in general, I want to check out any information before imparting it to others. Disseminating bad information will do more harm to ones’ credibility than good. You never know who is in the audience.
NLP was originally developed to help people model excellence in human communication, learning and behavior. It helped us understand how people operated as systems. Early on in NLP, eye patterns (or eye cues) were taught to people as part of understanding internal computation (the sequence of patterning, Strategy, a person uses to do things or think, like how they make decisions). Strategies are programs that run in the mind to do everything we do. Discerning the Internal Computation was part of strategy elicitation. Eye patterns were taught to therapists to so that they would pay attention to the internal processing of the client and/or match that processing to develop rapport. NLP was also developed as a MODEL, not a theory. Models are about what works, not necessarily what is true. Theories tend to espouse truths, even though they are only theories.
When eyes go up and to the left, a person was accessing remembered information (edipic) and when eyes go up and to the right, a person was accessing constructed information. Somehow, over the years “constructed information” meant a person was making it up and therefore lying. BUT many right handed, normally organized people construct out of recall. The images are extracted out of a remembered memory. In FROGS INTO PRINCES by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (page 21), you’ll find that when Bandler and Grinder asked a number of the same questions to various participants, they go similar but not entirely the same eye movements. Some people would do one thing and another would do something else. To enhance rapport and understanding, a person would then match the words with the eye movements: visual eye movements with visual “see” predicate words and phrases. In fact, on a biochemical level, all memories are 'constructed. (1) The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Ernest Lawrence Rossi, 1986, W.W. Norton & Company, page 69. How 'constructed' a memory has to be to trigger that eye-accessing pattern isn't clear.
Then somewhere someone got the idea that if you asked a person a question and they got the answer out of visual construct that meant that they were lying. NO, NO, NO. it means nothing of the kind. The whole idea of NLP was to get people to stop generalizing about people. In fact, as I recall, someone close to Richard Bandler once stated that they were sorry that they ever taught that information to people because it was so distorted and misused.
Stever Robbins wrote a great article about NLP and Lying. He said that just because you ask a question to elicit certain eye cues doesn’t mean you are going to get them. He says, As part of the experiment, I asked, "How many chairs do you have in your living room?" expecting them to access visual information. They would have a KINESTHETIC eye-accessing cue. That counted as a non-correlation. During the debrief, the subject said, "Remember when you asked about the chairs? I suddenly remembered how wonderful it felt when my mother rocked me to sleep in those chairs." (He went on about the wonderful FEELING for a few more seconds.) Just because I wanted him to access certain information didn't mean he did. In police interrogation, I can imagine anyone--innocent or not--worrying about how their answers will be taken. If they worry by constructing scenarios in their mind, that could produce a 'constructed' accessing cue.”Accessing eye cues may also be a reference to where information is stored spatially in submodalities. Therefore, accessing memories is only the first step in using the information.
A better approach to lie detection is to learn to notice unconscious physiological responses: pupil dilation, pore size, skin flush, muscle tone changes, breathing, etc. Calibrate carefully. Ask lots of questions that you know the answers to, until you are sure you can tell what combinations of nonverbal responses correspond to truth. If they happen to lie to one of your questions and you know they're lying, you'll also have the chance to calibrate a lie. Good poker players do this when they look for a "tell" in the other players. Often times a person’s voice pitch and tone will change when they are not telling the truth or there will be voice stress. Even that isn’t accurate.
Also, unless you know someone REALLY, REALLY well, the chances that you can tell they are lying are small. The bottom line on lie detection is that you simply can't tell from any of the simply NLP observations whether or not someone's lying. You may have said something or asked a question which triggered the person thinking about a childhood trauma or a memory of a heated conversation. Or the eye movement may have had nothing whatsoever to do with your words. A person could have had an unrelated sudden thought.
Robbins says, Sometimes if I think someone's lying, I'll simply re-ask the question a couple dozen times in a couple dozen different ways. Or I'll ask, "Really? Are you sure?" Or I'll ask for details. Those aren't NLP By the way, if you really thought that they were lying with that eye movement, your suspicions may have caused you to have a pronounced nonverbal reaction. Hopefully, they interpreted that correctly.
Stever's (and Susan’s) sage advice: don't hang around with people you think lie to you. It makes life much easier.
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