Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

by Pamela Meyer

  Marks was delighted by the employees’ energy and the productive vibe of the place. This was exactly what he’d hoped to find when he’d set up the visit. He already knew that the company had reduced production costs by 40 percent of the industry average. Much of its labor was being outsourced to Asia, giving the company an excellent shot at dominating their market in the next few years. The numbers looked good—now all he had to do was confirm that the CEO had enough vision to make the company a safe and worthwhile investment.

  The CEO didn’t waste time with a formal presentation. Instead, he walked Marks around the floor, pointing out various aspects of the work and answering Marks’s questions with ease. Marks noticed that he spoke rapidly, his words sometimes jumbling together, but that otherwise he seemed confident and calm. He was clearly proud of what the company had achieved in a short amount of time, and Marks could see why. After the tour, he thanked the CEO for his time and headed for the elevators. He was almost certain he’d return to his office with good news.

  On his way out, he passed the workstation of a young woman dressed entirely in black. Her leather vest and pierced nose suggested that she’d rather be clubbing than sitting in a cubicle—but then, this was supposed to be a hip young company.

  Marks paused, watching the woman while she stared intently at her computer monitor. Then he walked over and introduced himself.

  “What are you working on this morning?” he asked casually.

  The young woman met his eyes with a direct gaze of her own. “What am I working on? Oh, just software stuff,” she replied.

  They exchanged a few minutes of innocuous conversation, and then Marks walked away. The jig was up. He knew he wouldn’t be investing in this company after all.

  Marks headed straight back to the CEO’s office with a new set of questions. It didn’t take him long to confirm that the young woman, along with many of the other “employees” at the company, was in fact an actor. She’d been hired for the site visit just to make the place look busy and thriving—the opposite of what was really going on. In fact, the company was near bankruptcy, and he had caught the actors red-handed, pocketing salaries meant for a staff that didn’t exist. More important, he had avoided a very bad investment.

  How did he do it? Before we get to the behaviors that reveal deception (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5), let’s step back for a broader view of lying in all its forms.

  SURROUNDED BY LIES

  Steve Marks’s story is just one dramatic example of the kind of deception that frequently occurs nowadays. Daily we hear about the disastrous consequences of trusting a dishonest broker, a crooked adviser, a treacherous employee, a board member who leaks information to the press. And if the barrage of bad news isn’t enough to make you look around and wonder, “Could that happen to me?” the following statistics will likely do the trick:

  One in four Americans believes it’s okay to lie to an insurer.1

  One-third of all résumés contain false information.2

  One in five employees says he is aware of fraud in his workplace.3

  More than three-quarters of lies go undetected.4

  Deception costs businesses $994 billion per year—roughly 7 percent of annual revenue.5

  Dishonesty in the workplace is much more pervasive, and much more frequent, than most people want to believe.

  *

  LIESPOTTING TIP

  Resist the urge to fill in missing information when listening to a person’s story. Pay attention to exactly what is said and not said.

  *

  There’s more. According to studies by several different researchers, most of us encounter nearly two hundred lies a day.6 That means if you’re lucky enough to get eight hours of sleep a night, you’ve likely been on the receiving end of about twelve lies an hour.

  Granted, the majority of these two hundred untruths are white lies, the kind people tell in order to keep conversations going. “Sure, I’d love to see your vacation pictures,” we’ll tell the guy sitting next to us, hoping he doesn’t have more than five hundred or so on his camera. Or we’ll fib to establish something in common; “That’s a great jacket,” we’ll gush, when what we’re thinking is, “…for my aunt Frieda to dress one of her parrots in.” Maybe we just want to avoid embarrassment: “Sorry I’m late—the traffic was murder.” Actually, there was no traffic, but who’s going to confess that she hit the snooze button one too many times?

  White lies aren’t a problem. The problem is the ten or so lies you hear daily that were you to know the truth, would affect the decisions you make regarding your career, your business, your closest relationships, and your personal life.

  “That’s an interesting proposal. I’ll take it up with the board.”

  “Don’t listen to the backstabbers. Our net worth is growing like gangbusters.”

  “We’re definitely looking for someone with your skills. Let me pass your résumé on to HR.”

  “If this weren’t an emerging market, growing fast, I wouldn’t advise you to invest in it.”

  “I’m stuck in Chicago, honey. The client insisted on another dinner.”

  “There is only one condo left…. I’d recommend signing now.”

  These lies are dangerous. Missing them is like missing a warning sign about quicksand ahead. Fortunately, with training you can become so adept at spotting deception signals that it becomes second nature. It will be the rare liar who can get something past you. But the first step toward achieving that level of refined liespotting skill involves developing your basic knowledge and perspective: First, why and how did lies become so pervasive in our culture? We’ll examine this question for the remainder of this chapter. Second, what kind of lies should we be worried about? We will discuss this in Chapter 2.

  WE’RE NO BETTER THAN APES

  Over and over, we ignore obvious signs of deception. In fact, repeated studies have shown that the average adult can distinguish truth from falsehood only 54 percent of the time.7 That’s just barely better than a blind guess! It’s not very confidence-inducing. As it happens, a chimpanzee has virtually the same success rate. What’s more, this statistic is relevant only for the instances when we suspect someone may be lying to us. The more confident we are in our ability to detect lies, the worse we are at it.8

  The reason for our sorry lie-detection skills is simple, though slightly counterintuitive. Although deception is built into the fabric of life, it’s in our best interest, as a species and as a civilization, to maintain what psychologists call a “truth bias.”9 Unless we’re given a reason to believe otherwise, human beings—Americans in particular10—are generally hardwired to assume that what we are told is true and that what we see is real. When somebody says, “Oh, I sent you the report two days ago. You didn’t get my e-mail?” we’re usually inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  It’s not only our bias toward perceiving events as true that stands in the way of recognizing when we’re being deceived. Learning to detect deception means mastering a skill without a clear indicator of success. If you serve a tennis ball wide, your error is obvious; practicing your serve improves your odds of getting the ball in next time. But with deception, you may not receive a hint that you’ve been lied to. Without that feedback loop, how can you adjust your behavior to improve your “performance”? How will you ever learn the distinguishing features of the lies you missed?

  You’d think we’d have gotten wise a few thousand years ago, considering how much evidence exists that some people are simply not to be trusted. Deception and treachery have always been an integral part of the human experience. History’s earliest records, and the narratives upon which religions and civilizations have been built, reveal an endless stream of lies told to gain food, sex, and power.

  A seventeen-thousand-year-old cave painting in the Pyrenees depicts a hunter using skins and antlers to disguise himself as a reindeer and thus more easily infiltrate the herd.11

  In Greek mythology, Zeus, determined to seduce He
ra, changes himself into a cuckoo and flies into her arms during a thunderstorm of his own making, pretending to be in distress and thus earning her affection.

  In the book of Genesis, Cain kills Abel in a jealous fit and lies to God when asked of his brother’s whereabouts: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  From the Trojan horse to Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon’s secret and illegal orders to invade Cambodia; from Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery to Bill “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton; from the lip-synched hits that sank Milli Vanilli to the tale concocted by Chinese officials about which little girl had actually sung the national anthem at the Beijing Olympics; from Charles Ponzi to Bernard Madoff, it’s easy to find examples of lies both legendary and historic. Lies have changed the course of human history on a grand scale, and of human lives on a smaller one.

  Yet the truth bias continues. Without it, our civilization could not survive. Try to conceive of a society in which everyone viewed everyone else with suspicion. How could any normal human transactions and activities take place? Commerce would fail before it began; explorations and discoveries would founder; even normal parent-child relationships would be tangled by mistrust…and they’re not always so great to begin with.

  TRUST VS. DECEIT: AN EVOLUTIONARY ARMS RACE

  All right: we have to trust to survive. Paradoxically, we have to lie to survive as well. Deception bestows a marked advantage on those who can get away with it. To make things more complicated, so does adept deception detection. Again, let’s take a look at our early ancestors to see why both are true.

  Imagine a tribe during a time of famine. When food was plentiful, sharing it made sense. Confident that they had a steady supply, tribe members could afford to be generous to others for the sake of tribal well-being. But when food became scarce, food hoarders were likely to have a better chance of survival…especially if they lied about their hoard. Conversely, other members of the tribe had a survival advantage if they could discern the hoarders’ lies and track down the food for themselves.

  And so an evolutionary arms race begins. The better we get at detecting lies, the better the liars’ stories become. The more sophisticated the stories, the more advanced and refined the techniques required to detect them. We can spot this evolutionary progress almost hourly simply by opening our e-mail. Even as we arm ourselves against the latest junk mail and online scams by installing firewalls and filters, spammers jump a step ahead with ever-newer tricks and manipulations. As of this writing, phishing scams in the United States cost victims $3.2 billion per year.12

  THE STAKES ARE HIGH

  Though there are countless examples of cheating, lying, and betrayal in every human institution—marriage, religion, politics—it’s the business world that provides an excellent environment for examining the constantly morphing nature of lies and deceit. As businesses expand globally at exponential rates, it has become ever more urgent for us to rethink how we decide whom to trust, for the stakes are extraordinarily high.

  In the United States, institutionalized trust allows money and information to change hands quickly. We take such trust for granted. If we pay our loan balance, the bank will give us credit. If we buy FDA-approved food, it is safe to eat. If we hire a reputable and talented accountant, he will accurately manage our company’s finances to the best of his ability. It is only when the bonds of trust are broken that we realize how much we depend on them to keep the gears of business—and wealth—running smoothly.

  Consider Jérôme Kerviel, the “rogue trader” at Société Générale, whose fraudulent trades cost the company more than $7 billion—there is a significant value to truth, and huge costs associated with belatedly unearthing deception. Though Kerviel’s activities didn’t quite destroy SocGen, they destroyed five times more value than Nick Leeson’s rogue trades twelve years earlier—which had caused the collapse of his employer, Barings Bank.13

  In extreme cases, business lies aren’t just expensive: they can kill. In 2008, Chinese authorities discovered that in order to boost the protein levels in milk products, twenty-two of the country’s dairy producers had knowingly used milk adulterated with the toxic chemical melamine. (Four years earlier, a similar milk scandal killed thirteen babies, and in 2007, melamine-tainted pet food made in China killed dogs and cats in the United States.) Seven of the companies had been given permission to run internal quality checks rather than be subjected to inspection from outside regulators. China’s efforts to portray itself as a trustworthy business empire took a devastating hit as six Chinese babies died of the poison, and hundreds of thousands more became ill. Countries affected outside mainland China included Taiwan, Yemen, Bangladesh, Gabon, Burundi, Sweden, Denmark, and New Zealand. Companies affected included Starbucks, which was forced to recall milk from three hundred of its outlets in China.14

  From rogue traders, to CEOs who withhold vitally important information from shareholders, to presidents who perjure themselves to conceal sexual indiscretion, to companies knowingly marketing and selling faulty products, our society pays an enormous price for businesses and leaders that traffic in lies.

  WHERE DID TRUST GO?

  Are we really living in a more dishonest era? Are people fundamentally less trustworthy now than they were a century ago? Unlikely. Human nature doesn’t change much over time. The art—if it is an art—of lying appears to be hardwired into the human brain. In fact, people who cannot lie or spot lies are at a social disadvantage; there’s even some evidence that this inability to deceive or spot deception indicates atypical brain development. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, explains that children with autism do not always realize that people may say things they don’t mean. “For the child with autism, there is only one version of reality,” says Baron-Cohen. “The other version (the world of beliefs and intentions) may be one he rarely glimpses, or grasps too slowly, too late. This tells us something very important: that the skills you need to survive and negotiate the social world involve mind-reading and meta-representation—and that the capacity to deceive is a marker that a child is actually developing typical social skills.”15

  Lies therefore appear to be an essential, if sometimes unwelcome, component of human interaction. And as noted earlier, not just human interaction! Examples of how animals lie abound in scientific literature:

  Some male fish deceive their rivals about their mate choice: when rivals enter their territory, male Atlantic mollies are known to direct their first sexual advances toward females that really aren’t their first pick.

  A laboratory raven named Hugin, exasperated by another raven’s attempts to steal his treats, pretended to find food elsewhere. When the second raven came over to investigate, Hugin rushed back to the real places the treats were cached.16

  In the mammal realm, Koko—the famous “signing” gorilla—once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall.17

  We could probably install computer chips in our brains to zap us every time we told a lie, and there would still be a certain number of Bernie Madoffs in the world figuring out a way around them. So why is the problem of lying more urgent now?

  Because deception has hit epidemic levels. Because the number of media now available to aid in the fabrication and dissemination of lies is growing virtually unchecked and shows no signs of stopping soon. Because the science of deception detection has evolved and can now inform our training. Because the echo of outrage we used to hear when someone cried “Liar!” has all but disappeared.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BREAKDOWN OF TRUST

  For most of history, communication had to be done in person. Relationships were built on regular face-to-face interaction. This is one reason that 80 percent of human communication is nonverbal, the bulk of it (65 percent) being conducted through body language.18 Even the whites of our eyes have evolved to be far more visible than they are in other mammals, making it easier for us to communicate without turning our
heads.

  In the days when speaking face-to-face was the only way to communicate, dozens of subtle cues—body language, tone of voice, expression—were available to help us assess our companions’ trustworthiness. But by increasing our ability to communicate from a distance, technology has drastically eroded the innate people-reading methods that our ancestors relied on for thousands of years. The telephone, for example, allowed distant individuals to speak with one another, but it also eliminated their ability to scrutinize each other while speaking. Previously available cues, perceived by both speakers on a conscious and an unconscious level, completely disappeared. All that was left were the words themselves. Even the tone in which they were spoken was sometimes distorted by bad reception.

  The result? A form of communication with what might be called “less governance” from both partners. Sure, a mom who phones her daughter at college may be able to detect that her daughter is only pretending to be studying (the sound of her tapping away at her keyboard’s IM panel being one giveaway). But say you’re discussing a complicated purchase order full of small print with a salesman you’ve never met: can either of you be absolutely certain you’re both on the level?

  *

  IS THERE ANY WAY TO SPOT AN ONLINE LIAR?

  Cornell University assistant professor of communication Jeff Hancock and two co-researchers conducted a study in which sixty-six volunteers were paired up and asked to hold instant-message conversations. One person in each pair was asked to tell lies about a set of assigned topics. The “liars” were given five minutes to prepare before the instant-messaging began.

  The results, published in 2004, are eye-opening for anyone who communicates online—which of course is almost everyone. Hancock and his coauthors found that the thirty-three liars in the group were more talkative than their partners, using about one-third more words than the truth-tellers. They also used more pronouns and included more sensory verbs such as “see,” “hear,” and “feel.” Hancock speculates that the chattiness was likely prompted by an effort to provide a more detailed, and therefore more convincing, fabrication.