Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

by Pamela Meyer

  Liespotting isn’t just about sniffing out liars in the short term; it’s also about building a sustainable infrastructure of trust for the long haul.

  TWO

  DECEPTION 101—WHO, WHEN, AND WHY

  Most of us think we’re fairly good liars, but there is a simple test to determine whether we’re right. Using your dominant hand, draw a capital “Q” on your forehead. Don’t think about it, just do it. In which direction did you draw your “Q”? With the tail facing your left eye, so someone facing you could read it, or with the tail facing your right eye, so it could be read from your perspective?

  How someone draws the letter may reveal his inclination to “self-monitor”—to be aware of and concerned with the way the world perceives him. Low self-monitors draw their “Q” with the tail facing right, so they can easily read it. This may indicate that they have a hard time viewing themselves from any perspective but their own. It also suggests that their behavior tends to remain consistent no matter how their circumstances might change.

  Someone who draws the “Q” with the tail facing left—so a person facing him can easily read it—may have a natural ability to view the world from another’s vantage point. This may indicate that he is skilled at adapting his behavior to suit a situation and therefore at manipulating the way others perceive him—very good skills for a liar to have. A high self-monitor will have a much easier time than a low self-monitor at controlling the verbal and nonverbal cues that normally trip people up when they lie.1

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  HIGH SELF-MONITORS CLIMB HIGH UP THE CORPORATE LADDER

  It should come as no surprise to learn that many high-ranking male executives and politicians are high self-monitors. An eight-year study of 159 graduates from Cornell’s MBA program revealed that 75 percent of all promotions were given to “corporate chameleons”: men who were also high self-monitors. Interestingly, women’s capacity for high or low self-monitoring did not seem to affect their likelihood of promotion. As the study’s researcher suggests, one explanation may be that “high self-monitors mold themselves to fit the job.” Men have plenty of male role models whom they can emulate, whereas women have far fewer female role models and may be castigated when they try to adopt the same masculine qualities that garner their male peers so much respect.2

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  Say you draw the letter “Q” on your forehead with the tail facing left, revealing that you might be a high self-monitor. What does that mean? Are you someone who can’t be trusted? Not at all. The test measures only how you’re likely to filter information, not the strength of your moral or ethical values. Most people, however, are low self-monitors, more concerned with their own reactions to experience than with the reactions of others. (Humans tend to be a narcissistic bunch.) The key to good liespotting, then, is learning to think like a high self-monitor. It’s about increasing your awareness of what motivates other people to do what they do, including why they lie. Understanding when and why someone might tell a lie, and the possible rationalization behind it, is crucial to improving your ability to detect it.

  LYING STARTS EARLY

  Whoever once said that “children and fools always speak the truth” never spent much time around kids. Human beings learn to lie at a shockingly early age, a fact that won’t surprise many parents. By the time they’re six months old, babies know that their behavior elicits a response from their caretaker, and they quickly learn to take advantage. They will fake a cry when nothing is wrong, to get attention—pausing in the middle of a howl to confirm that Mom is running over—or they will pretend to laugh because they see that it delights the adults around them.3

  In a series of experiments with children aged six months to three years, mothers expressed surprise at how cleverly kids barely old enough to walk tried to distract them from the fact that they were doing something they shouldn’t. One eleven-month-old boy, caught in the act of sticking his hand in the dirt of a house plant, “quickly turned his outstretched hand into a wave…as though he was saying, ‘Oh, I wasn’t really going to touch the dirt, Mom; I was waving at you.’” A baby girl, also eleven months old, stared straight into her mother’s eyes to distract her from the fact that she was surreptitiously dropping unwanted toast onto the floor.

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  LIESPOTTING TIP

  A child will often cover her mouth when telling a lie. Deceptive adults will try to stifle this universal impulse, but they may quickly touch or sweep across their mouth as if to “speak no evil.”

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  Vasudevi Reddy, the head of the psychology department at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, asserts that lying at this age shouldn’t be interpreted as proof that humans are fundamentally dishonest. Deception is merely one way that babies learn to interact socially and emotionally before they can talk.4 Research examining the behavior of older children, however, suggests that somewhere along the way, kids figure out that there are times when lying can seem a better option than telling the truth. In one famous study, when three-year-olds were left alone in a room and told not to look at a toy, a hidden camera showed that 90 percent of the children peeked. When questioned later, however, only 38 percent admitted to it. When the same experiment was repeated with five-year-olds, none of the cheaters admitted that they’d peeked at the toy.5

  Of course, most parents would like to believe that their kids know lying is unacceptable, but these experiments suggest that as children grow up, they don’t become more truthful—they simply improve their lies. Learning to lie is a trial-and-error process, almost a game of risk versus reward. Say a child steals a cookie and is confronted by a parent. If he confesses, he’ll be scolded. The same goes if he’s caught lying about having taken the cookie. But what if he lies and doesn’t get caught? Then there’s a positive outcome: cookie, but no punishment! The child has just begun the learning cycle of generating feedback, then picking up clues that train him for more complex lies later in life.6

  In fairness to kids, social scientists are also beginning to target the lies parents tell their children. Kang Lee, a researcher at the University of Toronto, says his team was surprised by how often parents lied. “Our findings showed that even the parents who most strongly promoted the importance of honesty with their children engaged in parenting by lying.”7

  WHO LIES THE MOST?

  Men or Women?

  Though adult men and women lie in roughly equal numbers, they diverge in the types of lies they tell:

  Men tend to lie in an attempt to appear more powerful, interesting, or successful than they are. They tend to lie about themselves eight times more than they do about others.8

  Women lie more often to protect other people’s feelings or to make others feel better about themselves.9

  Numerous research papers contend that women become more uncomfortable when telling lies than do men.10 When telling serious lies, women described themselves as more guilty, anxious, and fearful than the men did.11

  There is some evidence that over time, as women get to know each other, they read their female friends’ deceptive ways more accurately than their male counterparts do with their male friends.12

  Those least likely to lie have strong same-sex relationships and score high on psychological tests regarding responsibility.13

  Married or Unmarried Couples?

  Women suffer emotionally and psychologically from being on the receiving end of lies more than men do.14

  One study found that 85 percent of college-age couples interviewed lied about prior relationships and indiscretions.15

  Here’s an argument for marriage. Studies found that people lied in one in ten interactions with their spouses, whereas they lied in one in three interactions with romantic partners who were not spouses.16 However, though we may be generally more truthful with our spouses, we also save the biggest whoppers for them.17

  Extroverts or Introverts?

  Extroverted, sociable people lie more often than socially withdrawn people; they feel more comfortable
lying; and they persist longer when they are lying.18

  Frequent liars are extremely concerned with the impression they make on others.19

  WHAT KIND OF LIES DO WE TELL?

  In general, more than 50 percent of our lies are purely “self-oriented,” meaning that they benefit the liar. A job candidate who embellishes her résumé and lies about her experience during an interview is clearly lying for her own benefit, not anyone else’s.20

  About 25 percent of our lies are “other-oriented,”21 intended to protect someone else. “Your presentation was great,” we might tell a colleague, when the only way we could stay awake was by playing Sudoku under the conference table.

  The final category of lies we tell are both self-and other-oriented. Journalist Joe Klein swore he hadn’t written Primary Colors, the roman à clef based on President Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. His lie protected him as well as his sources, but it also (perhaps unintentionally) benefited his publisher, who saw book sales soar as the national media debated the novel’s authorship.

  We tend to tell more other-oriented lies to women, and more self-oriented lies to men.22

  White lies often are a combination of self-oriented and other-oriented. Saying “I love the tie you gave me” is a polite way for a son to spare his mother’s feelings—as well as spare himself the sight of Mom’s tearstained face.

  Researchers have found that “false positive” lies—those in which a person pretends to like someone or something more than he actually does—are ten to twenty times more common than “false negative” lies, when the liar pretends to dislike something:23 a liberal employee might tell a false negative lie by claiming to dislike a Democratic presidential administration in front of his conservative Republican boss. A competitive coworker might praise your idea and encourage you to bring it to your supervisor, knowing full well that the supervisor has already criticized a similar idea.

  To Coworkers or Strangers?

  On the whole, adults lie in all kinds of situations. But one statistic is particularly relevant to anyone in the work force: most people are significantly more likely to lie to coworkers than to strangers.24

  Why? Experts have put forward a number of theories. Some psychologists suggest that people are more protective of their public persona at work than anywhere else. Power counts for a lot in the theater of operations that is the workplace. Honesty—revealing what we really think and feel and want—can make us extremely vulnerable. If you reveal a weakness by telling the truth to a stranger, there’s no harm done. You’ll never see your seatmate on the train again; who cares what he thinks? If you do the same at work, there’s a risk that you’ll permanently alter your coworkers’ perception of you. And you’ll have to deal with the consequences forever…or at least until you switch jobs.

  Another theory: successful business leaders in particular might be inclined to lie because they so often tie their self-worth to the external trappings of their job—the money, the publicity, the deference they receive from others, the high-powered friends. Constant external gratification might permit them to dissociate from their core set of internal values. Their reliance on a corporate title or other expression of power for energy or to make tough decisions propels them in the short run. However, they can wind up losing their sense of personal responsibility along the way:

  Away from the job, John’s success in his roles as father, husband, or friend depends almost exclusively on living up to his own set of values as well as to the values of those with whom he interacts. Yet at work, his success as CEO is reflected largely by the numbers on the company’s profit-and-loss statement. Living up to the expectations of stockholders, employees, and even the press may convince John that the ends justify the means when it comes to business—even if that means making choices he might have once deemed unethical. Too much of this kind of rationalization, and John starts to slide down that old slippery slope. His stock price is up, revenues are up, but so are under-the-table bribes in foreign offices—and so are rumors that he’s keeping two sets of books.

  Our culture trains us to play numerous roles—worker, parent, spouse. It takes a mature, self-aware person to integrate the same “me,” and the same set of values, into each role. Unlike, say, parenting, work often forces individuals to focus on short-term results. When we’re constantly pressured to excel, it can be hard to weigh the long-term consequences of lying to a coworker the same way we might in a personal relationship. After all, the main goal in the personal relationship is to deepen and enhance our commitment to another person. That kind of goal might seem almost comically irrelevant in the workplace. We’ll see in Chapter 9 why it’s not.

  WHY WE LIE

  Understanding why people lie is the crucial first step to becoming an expert liespotter. Whether the lie is the tiniest fib or the most staggering whopper, self-oriented or other-oriented, complex or simple, most acts of deception are generally inspired by one or more of nine motives.25 Motives for lying fall into two broad categories: offensive motives and defensive motives.

  When playing offense, in sports or in life, we look to score points, advance our position, and back the other guy into a corner. Defense, by contrast, is all about protecting ourselves, holding our ground, minimizing pain or embarrassment. The lies we tell, in either situation, will be for one of the following reasons:

  Offensive Motives

  To Obtain a Reward That’s Not Otherwise Easily Available. Sometimes the lure of a fat bonus is enough to justify offering an unauthorized perk, maybe in the form of a gift certificate or tickets offered to close a deal, even when an employee knows it’s against company policy to provide any form of kickback.

  It’s been alleged that Airtech International, a supplier to the Department of Defense, bribed DOD employees to obtain preferential services. “At one time or another, Airtech has supplied some form of nonconforming [substandard] product to every aircraft manufacturer in the world,” stated a 2008 memo from the U.S. Army’s Major Procurement Fraud Unit. “However, Airtech operates in the perfect industry for fraud: an industry that leaves little evidence and rewards dishonesty due to the potential liability costs.”26 On its Web site, Airtech denied all wrongdoing.27

  To Gain Advantage Over Another Person or a Situation. The CEO of Company A might tell a competitor at Company B that she has no interest in purchasing Company C, though in fact she’s in the midst of negotiating with Company C. Or, as is quite common, Company A might feign interest in purchasing Company B and conduct a due diligence investigation just to get a peek under the weaker competitor’s hood. When I was consulting to online service provider Prodigy in 1996, America Online, our competitor, feigned great interest in purchasing the company, took a detailed look at the operation, and subsequently purchased CompuServe, the third player in the online arena.

  To Create a Positive Impression and Win the Admiration of Others. This is what people are trying to do when they embellish their résumés. It’s why they might overstate their involvement in a charity or their contribution to a project. It’s also why bud get meetings are often filled with sales projections that look good in the short run but will never be met.

  A survey taken at CareerBuilder.com turned up the following blatant résumé-stretchers:

  Putting someone else’s photo on a résumé

  Pretending to be a member of the Kennedy family

  Including examples of work that had actually been performed by the interviewer

  Claiming military experience from a time before the applicant’s birth

  The survey also found that some industries seemed to attract more résumé liars than others. Sixty percent of employers in the hospitality industry reported lies they’d discovered on applications, while only 45 percent of the hiring managers in the government made the same claim. Still, “only 45 percent” is almost half.28

  To Exercise Power Over Others by Controlling Information. In business, information is power, and some people take greater steps than others t
o hoard it. Withholding the truth is a potent way to maintain control over others, and can be as manipulative and damaging as telling a lie.

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  THE BUSINESS OF LYING—LITERALLY

  The tradition of lying about alibis is so robust that a business now exists solely to facilitate the creation and maintenance of solid cover stories. It’s called Alibi Network, and apparently it can provide its clients with any lies they need.

  Want to conduct an affair without endangering your marriage? “We can send you a job offer letter, invitation to attend career training, employee manual and all other supporting documentation,” the company’s literature says, “to help you steal a few days away.”

  Embarrassed by the stigma of being unemployed? “You can use the cover of being an employee of one of our many partner companies. We will provide you with all necessary infrastructure such as business cards, work phone number, email and personal secretary if needed.”

  What if you have a job, but just don’t feel like showing up today? Alibi Network will “pretend to be your doctor/dentist or a spouse, etc. and tell your boss that you can’t come in.”

  Sounds like something Ferris Bueller might have dreamed up, but it’s real. You can find dozens more “lie offers” and even get your own “alibi specialist” at www.alibinetwork.com.

  Who could have predicted this particular challenge to workplace integrity?

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  Defensive Motives

  To Avoid Being Punished or to Avoid Embarrassment. “If you back me into a corner, I’ll always lie to you,” a fourteen-year-old boy tells his mother—and it does seem as though the threat of shame or punishment brings a special urgency to lie. More than one study has demonstrated that the more children are punished, the likelier they are to lie.29

  In The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Emmanuel Carrere recounts the nightmarish history of a man whose inability to admit to failure caused him to spin a web of lies that ended up destroying his entire family. For eighteen years, Jean-Claude Romand passed himself off as a doctor for the World Health Organization. In fact, he had quit medical school after failing to turn up for an important exam—and had never been even a low-level employee of the WHO. As the years passed, Romand became more and more trapped by the fictions he’d created. Though he dressed and left the house each day as if heading to work, what ever money he earned came from swindling elderly relatives. When Romand’s imaginary world finally began to unravel, he murdered his wife, children, and parents, and attempted suicide.30