Do You Know When Someone is Deceiving you?

Every day we hear of someone being taken for money on some scheme or fraud.  How many marriages come apart over infidelity?  Every time I hear of that one I think, were they asleep?  How could a person not know their partner is having sex with someone else?  There are many myths surrounding lying.  I wrote about this in 2009.  (See the blogs on my website, The Lies about Lying.)  I recently took a class about detecting deception and interrogation designed for police officers and insurance fraud case workers.  It was eye opening!  Below are some things I learned.  By the way, Stan Walters is working on a program for business people and I’m bringing him to Dallas in the near future.  You will want to be there!  No NLP experience needed and it works hand in hand with NLP skills. Why do people lie? In Psychology Today, one article lists these 4 reasons: 1.     Reinforcement. The seeds of lying are planted and mature while people are in school. Desperate due to procrastination, heavy course loads, the need to work, students make a tiny foray into the world of the excuse-maker and liar. They aren't called on their "family emergency" by their instructor, so the next time they become more bold. Getting away with the excuse or lie strengthens their inclination to lie the next time. 2.     Memory distortions. The second reason is that lies and excuses build on each other and create their own reality. People who lie about their past tell one little story that doesn't seem "so bad." The next time, having told that story, it becomes part of their long-term memory. What psychologists call source memory, or our recall for where something happened to us, can be faulty, and we forget that we told that tiny fib. The fib becomes part of our long-term memory. We are also vulnerable to the planting of false memories. If I read a string of words to you such as "cake, candy, honey, sugar," and later ask you if the word "sweet" was in the list, the chances are good that you'll think it was. The sweet words in the list conjure up the category label and now it becomes part of your neural network. According to the cognitive explanation, then, lies and excuses build on each other and create their own supposed truthful memories. 3.     Protection of positive sense of identity. This less rational view our sense of self, or identity. People want to believe that they are ethical, honest, and morally upstanding. They will go through all sorts of mental shenanigans to maintain this view, even when their behavior is in direct conflict with "reality." Rather than admit that they lied, cheated, or worse, they twist the facts around so that, in their minds, they didn't. It's not consistent with your identity as an honest person to admit that you made up an excuse, so rather than do this, you start to believe in the excuse. Or you might use that famous defense mechanism known as "projection" in which you attribute the blame to someone else.” 4.     Self-serving biases. Social psychologists point out that we one set of guidelines to evaluate ourselves and another to evaluate others. In line with the identity explanation, the way we evaluate ourselves is pretty lax. We'll blame the situation, not ourselves, when we make excuses or lie. But catch someone else in a lie- that's a different story. This person is bad, morally defective, and someone we should avoid at all costs if not penalize. This process, known as the "fundamental attribution error" (does this bring back memories of your intro psych class?), is an important one in the excuse-making, lying, and even procrastination literature.” So we know people lie.  How can we detect it?  Most of us have been fibbed to.  We missed it  because we weren’t trained to detect when a person is lying. These are a few tidbits from the class I took with Stan: Stan Walters teaches there are different forms of lying: Omission (withholding the truth) and Embellishment (altering or changing the truth).  Omission is much harder to detect than embellishment.  He says people lie to avoid punishment, perceived reward, or fear of the unknown.  Symptoms of lying are all of the result of internal conflicts or incongruence and appear for the following reasons: 1.     Guilt about lying 2.     Joy of lying (getting away with it) 3.     Fear of being discovered Deceptive behaviors are diagnosed in clusters and NOT individually. There is no single behavior, verbal or non-verbal, that proves truth or deception .  (No, you cannot tell if a person is lying by watching their eyes!)  Clusters of lying behaviors appear two or more at the same time:  verbal-verbal, verbal-nonverbal, or nonverbal-nonverbal. Before you can detect deception, you must have a baseline of the person’s normal behavior.  This establishes a reference point which can be used to notice changes from that baseline. Signs of stress are often misunderstood as signs of lying.  Just because a person shows signs of stress doesn’t mean they are being deceptive  Individuals under stress can exhibit 5 different responses: anger, depression, denial, bargaining, and acceptance.  Forms of stress: general (experienced in uncomfortable situations), incriminating (generated by both truthful and deception people), discriminators (cues that are more likely to pinpoint moments of lying).  Other stress cues include stuttering, stammering, mumbling, pausing, para-linguistic cues, like ‘ah’, ‘uh’s, ‘er’s,’ whew, tsk, groans, moans, whistling, growling, nervous laugh and sighs. Anger, presence or absence of it, does not indicates deception or truthfulness. Verbal cues are usually the easiest to detect.  Body language is the most difficult to interpret and has a higher rate of error. Here are some cues which may indicate deception WHEN DISCUSSING CRITICAL AREAS: 1.     Memory lapses – can’t remember, can’t recall, not sure, no recollection 2.     Denial flag expressions: ‘you aren’t going to believe this’, honestly, really, trust me, believe me, truthfully, seriously, frankly, I couldn’t lie, straight up, off the record, just between us, truthfully speaking, I have no reason to lie, to be 100% honest 3.     Key weighted expressions: by the way, one more thing, incidentally 4.     Modifiers: possibly, rarely, usually, almost sometime, basically, essentially are a few of the modifiers 5.     Guilt phrases: unsolicited remarks by a subject that indicated inner guilt: indicates that everyone is blaming them, admits appearance of guilt. 6.     Blocking statements: “Why would I….?”  “How could anyone in their right mind get involved in something like this?”  are examples. 7.     Simple stalling tactics: ask a question with a question (used a lot by politicians), repeat question verbatim, cough, clear throat, pretends not to understand. 8.     Surgical denial: The deceiver usually denies allegations in specific terms; the truthful deny accusations in general terms. And this list goes on.  REMEMBER, IN AND OF THEMSELVES, THE ABOVE DOESN’T INDICATE DECEPTION. Only when in clusters and compared to a person’s baseline. I’ll have more on this subject later, HONESTLY! Look for the announcement for the class on deception in the newsletter, on my website or email.