Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

by Pamela Meyer

  LIESPOTTING

  LIESPOTTING

  Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

  PAMELA MEYER

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

  For Fred

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I Detecting Deception

  One: The Deception Epidemic

  Two: Deception 101—Who, When, and Why

  Three: Reading the Face

  Four: Reading the Body

  Five: Listening to the Words

  Six: The BASIC Interview Method

  II Building Trust

  Seven: Liespotting for High Stakes

  Eight: The Deception Audit

  Nine: Building Your Brain Trust

  Ten: Putting It All Together

  Appendix I Putting BASIC to Work

  Appendix II Test Your Liespotting Skills

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  I didn’t set out to become a liespotter. I am neither a scientist nor a psychologist, and I never imagined I would spend three years researching deception, then develop a system we can use to protect ourselves from it. But I learned that the average person is lied to close to two hundred times a day. I learned that we are no better than monkeys at determining fact from fiction. And I learned that none of the sophisticated lie-detection techniques used by security experts and government agents had been adapted for everyday professional use. It seemed almost criminal not to make it my business to make sure that everyone has access to this invaluable new tool.

  Calling myself a liespotter—a human lie detector—might suggest that I live in anticipation of being deceived, wary and suspicious of everyone with whom I come into contact. Actually, becoming a trained liespotter allows you to do the opposite. You’ll know you have the tools you need to protect yourself in situations in which you might encounter falsehood or obfuscation. Becoming a liespotter doesn’t inspire paranoia—it frees you from it.

  DECEPTION AT WORK

  Like everyone, I’ve experienced deception and suffered the disappointment and disillusionment that accompanies it. I witnessed it in the business world almost before the ink was dry on my diploma. When I headed out into the world as a freshly minted Harvard Business School graduate, I didn’t expect to see dishonesty running rampant. Was I in for a surprise.

  My first job out of school was in the international department of a feature film company. I love film and was delighted to have landed what seemed a dream job, which in many ways it was. Yet I was shocked to discover that the industry was riddled with dodgy yet extremely common accounting practices. For example, it wasn’t unusual to find that the millions we had offered for an independent film in a “pre-buy” had immediately gone instead to bankroll the seller’s prior debt in what amounted to a kind of Ponzi scheme. It was also not unusual for the head of a company to pay a friend to determine the value of his company’s film catalogs. That valuation would then be used by investment bankers to establish the value of the company itself. The bankers, however, knowing they would receive a small percentage of the IPO, had every incentive to inflate the company’s already inflated worth—and they did.

  Fraudulent behavior was so common, especially in those days and especially when dealing with companies that didn’t have stable revenue streams, that most people seemed almost inured to it, as though it were a price to pay for doing business in such an exciting industry. Still, the dirty dealing shocked me, and though I loved the business, I felt disillusioned. When the film company moved to Los Angeles I decided to accept a job at National Geographic Television, where I ultimately served as vice president of the program enterprises division.

  DECEPTION IN NATURE

  I loved the job, and I had the good fortune to work in an extremely honest environment. My colleagues’ behavior was unimpeachable, and I had nothing but trust and respect for the people with whom I worked.

  Yet every day, I witnessed extraordinary acts of deception.

  In charge of acquiring natural history films for the National Geographic Explorer television series, I spent countless hours watching nature videos submitted by almost every independent filmmaker or television station in the world. Watching that many nature shows, it became impossible for me not to see that deception is intrinsic in nature—predators camouflage themselves against seabeds and forest floors, spiders build models of themselves to avoid detection, birds fake injury to lure enemies away from their nests.

  The more cognitively advanced the animal, the more sophisticated the deceit. The most entertaining videos were those featuring primates and dolphins—they are masters of guile and trickery—but they were also the most revealing. The creative schemes these mammals used to get away with unacceptable behavior weren’t all that different from what humans have dreamt up. Even plants could be con artists: the orchid Ophrys speculum uses pheromones and coloring to excite male wasps and fool them into thinking they are copulating with a female wasp, when in fact all that rubbing is simply helping the orchid spread its pollen.

  I began to suspect that if lying and fraud are innate in the animal kingdom, humans must also be hardwired for deception. When years later I began the research that would ultimately become the backbone of this book, I discovered that scientists have firmly established that lying is in fact one of the major building blocks of human social life.

  FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE

  You’d think that my exposure to and interest in dishonesty would mean I might be a little more attuned to it when I saw it. That, unfortunately, was not the case. It turns out that when it came to detecting lies and fraud, I was as gullible as anybody else.

  In 1994, I left National Geographic to start my own company, Manhattan Studios. Searching for an assistant, I interviewed a large pool of candidates and thought I’d found a perfect match for my needs: a brilliant, personable Ivy League grad. She quickly exceeded my expectations, handling every job I gave her with exemplary professionalism. It was the heyday of the mid-nineties Internet boom, and she seemed enamored with the potential of the Web business. She did research, she acted as a project manager, she ran our Web site—she could do anything. In a small company, it’s hard not to get attached to your colleagues, especially when working the long hours required by any start-up. I felt close to most of my staff, and in particular to this individual who knew so much about my life and who had told me so much about her own.

  The company was thriving when I was offered a full-time job at the Ford Foundation running their media fund, which by default lessened how much time and attention I could spend on what was going on at Manhattan Studios. I trusted my staff implicitly, however, to handle the daily workings of the company and fill me in as necessary.

  One Saturday, knowing I had fallen behind, I started going through the company books. I found that the numbers didn’t add up. I tried again, but still, there was a discrepancy. I quickly called my assistant and told her that there had to be a mistake somewhere and I needed her to come in and help me find it. I was taken aback by her reply: “I think I’m pregnant. I can’t come in.”

  I began to suspect that something was wrong. It didn’t take long to discover that while I wasn’t paying attention, this bright, capable woman had embezzled an enormous amount of money, forging checks to herself and pulling them out of the statements when they came in. Though she didn’t go so far as to steal my identity, she had memorized my credit card number and bought herself a computer with it, and had even posed as me to receive the free nutritional counseling that came with my gym membership.

  I was floored. How could I have so badly misjudge
d her? How could someone I liked and respected so much have betrayed me this way? When she finally offered an explanation, I found myself almost hoping she would say something that would allow me to accept her apology. That didn’t happen. I fired her, I got restitution, and I agreed not to take her to court.

  Like most people in my situation, I found it impossible not to take the deception personally. I was angry with myself for having delegated so much of the management of my company to others, and I no longer trusted my judgment. The experience made me take greater precautions when deciding whom to interview and how to check references. It was a wake-up call.

  THE BUSINESS OF LIESPOTTING

  By the time I attended my twentieth Harvard Business School reunion, the experience with my assistant had faded to a footnote in an otherwise rewarding career that involved developing, branding, and disseminating content-based properties across many media venues—television, print, and online. It was at this reunion, however, that I was inspired to dive deep into the science and art of professional lie detection. Michael Wheeler, a professor of management practice who specializes in negotiation dynamics, gave a fascinating seminar on lie-detection techniques.

  To illustrate how weak our lie-detection skills are, he played video clips of the game show Friend or Foe?, in which pairs of contestants, strangers before they arrived at the studio, became teammates and worked together to answer questions and earn cash winnings. The team that answered the most questions correctly then had to approach the “Trust Box” and make an appeal to their teammate as to how they should divvy up their earnings:

  If both chose to be a “friend,” each teammate walked away with half of the cash prize.

  If one chose to be a “friend” and one a “foe,” the person who chose “foe” got all the money; the “friend” got none.

  If both chose to be a “foe,” neither got anything.

  We watched the contestants trying to convince their teammates that they would choose “friend”—that they wouldn’t do them in and try to take all the winnings for themselves. Then we guessed who was telling the truth. When the results were revealed, our predictions fell short about 50 percent of the time. Dr. Wheeler then slowed down the video to show us how to read the contestants’ faces for clues that revealed who was truly a friend and who was a foe. Suddenly, we could see meaning in a furrowed brow, a half smile, or a cock of the head. We were discovering a brand-new nonverbal language that the contestants weren’t even aware they were using. The graduates of Harvard Business School, most of them highly accomplished in their fields, were captivated. In a group of two or three hundred people, no one was tapping on a BlackBerry; no one was sneaking out the back to get an early start on the cocktail hour. The questions came fast and furious; everyone was eager to know more.

  The seminar, and my former classmates’ response to it, struck a chord with me. Imagine how much time and money we’d save if we could conduct business confident in our ability to detect falsehood, and even avoid it. How much would such a skill be worth in terms of decreased anxiety and suspicion? What if there was a way to use such knowledge to create more efficient and productive business relationships? Armed with lie-detection skills, would it be possible for each of us to build our own inviolable “kitchen cabinet,” a mutually supportive network whose members we could trust implicitly, and who could trust us?

  I quickly discovered that there was no school in which you could enroll to learn deception detection, and that I would have to cobble together my own liespotting curriculum. First, I arranged to study with Erika Rosenberg, a research partner of Paul Ekman’s. Ekman was recently voted one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential Americans for his pioneering research into facial micro-expressions (and appeared in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink). I undertook the training in Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, learning every combination of the fleeting voluntary and involuntary facial expressions that reveal emotion on the human face.

  Being able to read how our faces reveal our true emotions is key to being able to tell whether someone is lying. I also undertook additional training in reading emotions on the face. My goal, however, was not just to help people learn how to detect lies, but also to help them avoid getting lied to in the first place. I realized that leaders need to be able to augment face-reading techniques with a cognitive approach that would reveal motive: why people lie and what goes through their minds when they do. Leaders need to understand the psychology of lying.

  This realization led me to study the Reid Technique of advanced interrogation, which is used to train FBI, military, and police interrogators. In addition to analyzing body language and facial expressions, proponents of the Reid method use finely honed interrogation and interview techniques to encourage crime suspects to reveal their guilt or innocence. Over the years, Reid trainers had compiled vast amounts of information on why someone might commit a crime into an enormous casebook, an eight-hundred-page “bible” containing virtually every scenario an interrogator might encounter. One part of the book explains that when questioned, guilty suspects reveal surprisingly consistent behavior patterns and rationalizations for their crimes. Here was a list of the ten things someone might tell himself to justify why it was acceptable to steal from his employer; there was a list of the five reasons someone might give for embellishing a résumé. The Reid trainers had heard it all before. They had identified the “ground truths,” and now I wanted to learn if any of their findings had been validated scientifically.

  With the help of a research team, I spent two years collecting, analyzing, and comparing de cades’ worth of disparate scientific data from military and intelligence agencies, police departments, government investigators, and academia to create a comprehensive survey on deception detection. I incorporated the best of the micro-facial recognition and interrogation training into my research to break new ground in detecting dishonesty in corporate boardrooms, managers’ meetings, job interviews, negotiations, and many other high-stakes business situations. I then created the BASIC method—an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, yet streamlined guide to lie-proof conversations, negotiations, and interviews. The book you hold in your hands is the culmination of my efforts to summarize and synthesize the best of lie-detection research and adapt it into a proactive tool for rooting out dishonesty in our lives.

  A LIESPOTTING OVERVIEW

  No matter how good a liespotter you are—and you’re probably not as good as you believe—you can improve. The techniques you will learn here can improve your detection ability by 25 to 50 percent.1 How much difference would that make to you? If a bank were to train all of its loan officers in liespotting techniques and increase their accuracy by a mere 5 percent, that bank could save hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans. Imagine what a 50 percent increase could do for your productivity and profit.

  Liespotting distills a large quantity of specialized knowledge into a practical system that works both inside and outside the office. Part One begins with a broad overview of lying, exploring three patterns of deception as the foundation on which we’ll work. We won’t focus on detecting white lies, the ones we use to smooth the jagged edges of our social interactions, such as telling someone his new tie is snazzy when it’s actually ten years out of date, or that you love the restaurant he picked for your morning meeting when in fact it serves the worst coffee in town. As natural as is our inclination to lie, the world would be a sadder, rougher place if we tried to eradicate another natural inclination, which is to make people like us and to put them at ease. Rather, Liespotting will introduce the BASIC method, which combines facial recognition with advanced interrogation techniques. It will show you how to read the map of the human face and body, as well as how to decode human language and vocal tone, exposing the myriad signs people inadvertently leave behind when they are working to hide the truth about something that really matters.

  Part Two addresses the most common high-stakes business situations in which lying occurs—business ne
gotiations and job interviews—and provides tailored strategies for countering deception in each. Part Two also introduces the deception audit: simple steps executives can take to identify pervasive sources of deception within an organization, and to prevent them from taking root again in its culture.

  Finally, you’ll learn how to confidently build your own customized inner circle, a small, handpicked community of people to whom you can turn to support you in the hardest moments. We all have plenty of people to choose from for brainstorming, problem solving, and job referrals. But who are the five people you consider to be your professional “family,” the ones who will never let you fail?

  No matter what your field, chances are you could use a powerful arsenal to help purge your professional life of dishonest, destructive behavior. Liespotting techniques will take you even farther—they’ll help you avoid inviting such influences into your life in the first place; they’ll help you gauge the motives of those two hundred Facebook “friends” you have actually never met; and they’ll help you filter the tsunami of deceptive offers, e-mails, and information that inundates us daily.

  Detecting deception is a crucial skill that offers countless financial, psychological, and even emotional benefits. It will allow you to navigate a complicated professional landscape with confidence, providing you with a next-generation set of tools and techniques to be decisive, to negotiate purposefully, and to excel at your chosen craft.

  I

  DETECTING DECEPTION

  ONE

  THE DECEPTION EPIDEMIC

  Steve Marks, a venture capitalist in Northern California, was feeling great as he walked into the CEO’s office. It was the fall of 2005, and he had arranged to visit a young computer animation company to determine whether it would be worth an investment. It looked like a good fit already. The company, located in San Francisco’s funky South of Market neighborhood, seemed abuzz with busy, hiply dressed young animators working furiously at their desks and striding purposefully down the long, open workspace.