by Pamela Meyer
Slips of the tongue do occasionally take place outside Democratic National Conventions, of course. And they prove neither deception nor the intent to deceive. Nevertheless, they’re often revealing.
In January 2003, two months before the bodies of Laci Peterson and her unborn son were found on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Diane Sawyer interviewed Laci’s husband, Scott, on Good Morning America.11 Sawyer asked Peterson, “What kind of marriage was it?” He replied, “God, the first word that comes to mind is, you know, glorious. I mean, we took care of each other, very well. She was amazing. She is amazing.” Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife in November 2004; his use of the past tense with Sawyer is noteworthy because it suggests that he already knew she was dead.
Non-contracted Denials. “I was not there!” is a non-contracted denial. “I wasn’t there” is a contracted denial. Someone trying to hide his guilt may use formal grammar more than he normally would. To many, avoiding contractions can sound emphatic—“I did not take the money!” “I did not touch her!” When an honest person is accused of something he didn’t do, his first instinct is to reject the accusation as quickly and forcefully as possible: “I didn’t do it!” Non-contracted denials are spoken slowly, possibly reflecting more forethought and less emotion than a genuine plea of innocence. They can be a sign of someone who’s trying to oversell his honesty.
Specific Denials. People who are telling the truth tend to offer categorical denials of wrongdoing. “I’ve been in business for thirty years and I’ve never cheated anyone. We don’t do backroom deals, and we don’t intend to start now.” Liars often prefer to be much more specific: “I did not try to cheat you” “We are not negotiating with United Motors.”
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BETRAYED BY HIS OWN WORDS
Long before Bill Clinton finally confessed that he had covered up his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, he revealed several clues to his guilt during interviews and press conferences. Videos and transcripts show that our forty-second president relied on many deceptive verbal habits as he denied the accusations against him:
Bolstering Statement
(January 17, 1998, deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case)
Q: Have you ever met with Monica Lewinsky in the White House between the hours of midnight and six A.M.?
A: I certainly don’t think so.
Grammatical Error
(Interview with Jim Lehrer, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, January 21, 1998)
Q: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?
A: There is not a sexual relationship—that is accurate.
Non-contracted Denial and Distancing Language
(White House news conference on education, January 26, 1998)
“I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Specific Denial and Distancing Language
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” instead of, “I never cheated on anyone my whole life.”12
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Speech Disfluencies. Approximately 20 percent of our “words” are actually disfluencies: those seemingly random and meaningless sounds, sighs, and pauses that color and interrupt our normal, everyday speech.
When people know what they want to say, and they’re confident saying it, they tend to express themselves straightforwardly:
“I came home last night around twelve-thirty.”
“He can be hard to work with, but we get along okay.”
“No, I’ve never met her before.”
“What is it you want to know?”
Wary, stressed, or nervous subjects try to slow down their speech to gain more time to think about what they’re saying and to plan ahead for what they might need to say next. Silence makes most people uncomfortable, though, so the subjects feel compelled to fill the pauses with sound. Consider how filled pauses change the tone of the unremarkable sentences above:
“Uh, I came home last night around twelve-thirty.”
“He can be, like, hard to work with”—sigh—“but we get along okay.”
“No”—short laugh—“I’ve never met her before.”
The speaker clears her throat: “What is it you want to know?”
Consider it, but don’t rely on it as proof. The act of being questioned makes a lot of people nervous. And we’re all acquainted with people whose speech tics include the incessant repetition of “like” and “you know.” Some researchers suggest that the frequency of disfluencies relative to a speaker’s normal conversational style is more revealing than whether they’re being used.13
Pronoun Inaccuracies or Inconsistencies. Pronouns give us responsibility.14 We’ve seen with distancing statements that when people don’t want to associate too closely with an event, they’ll often describe it without the use of pronouns. “Got up this morning. Went out for a run with the dogs, then took a shower and changed. Got to work and went straight to the meeting. Didn’t even stop in to check e-mails.”
Another way someone might distance himself through language when exploring a threatening topic is by replacing the pronoun “I” with “you.” “You just don’t cheat,” a subject might say. Or: “You know that you’re supposed to make that quota, and then you wonder how the heck you’re going to do it.”15
Vocal Quality
Vocal quality is the least reliable indicator. Some clues that suggest deception include:
The voice taking a higher pitch.16
Long pauses before speaking. (This often occurs in high-stakes situations.)17
Speaking at an overall slower rate, with more errors and hesitations (“ums” and “ahs”).18
The voice taking on a strained or tense quality.
All of these clues rely on extremely subjective criteria. What sounds “strained” or “tense” to one person could sound perfectly normal to another. Also, as with other indicators, the simple fact that someone is being questioned may cause him to speak in an unnatural way. Liespotters should therefore consider vocal quality only in conjunction with other facial, body language, and verbal indicators.
The primary aspects of vocal quality to listen for are cadence, tone, and volume. Because it takes substantial concentration to maintain a lie or to remember the details of a fabricated story, liars will often speak unusually slowly. Many times their nerves will also cause their voice pitch to rise. Yet as liars work to stay in control of their lie, they often overcontrol their voices. When a liar tries to keep his body from betraying him by becoming unnaturally still, his voice will often also take on a matching flat monotone. It may also soften and take on an almost pleading quality.
Fear can make someone speak in an unnaturally loud or soft voice, but of course someone who is afraid isn’t necessarily a liar. A liar’s voice, however, will often get quieter as he speaks, almost as though he is hoping he can sneak his answers by without someone’s noticing. One who is truly concerned that his words will betray him may try to remain silent and simply nod, shake his head, or shrug his shoulders.
We’ve learned that it can be significant when facial expressions don’t properly coordinate with body language—when a subject scowls a split second after pounding his fist on the table, for instance. Inappropriate verbal response time can be a similar sign of dishonesty. Someone who blurts out a response before you’ve finished your question might be letting his nerves get the best of him; someone who takes an uncomfortable amount of time to reply to questions might be working harder than he should to formulate the “right” answer. Of course, you’ll want to take into account the subject’s baseline speaking habits before rushing to assume he’s fabricating a lie.
Attitude
After listening closely to the details of someone’s speech, take a mental step back to consider what the combination of his facial expressions, body language, and verbal clues says about his attitude toward being questioned. Attitude is a crucial indicator.
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Is the subject interested in helping you solve a problem or answer a question? Is he forthright or evasive? How confidently does he speak? A deceptive person might be guarded and hesitant to firmly acknowledge or deny anything you suggest about his actions or behavior. A truthful person will cooperate from the start and will signal that he is on your side.
If the subject does get worked up, pay attention to how long it takes him to settle down. When faced with an unfair accusation, innocent, wrongly accused people get angry, go on the offensive, and take a long time to get over their anger. Liars, however, will get extremely defensive, hurling guilt-trip and protest statements like “I cannot believe you’re accusing me of this!,” make a big show of anger, and then calm down quickly once they believe they’ve postured enough to convince you that you are causing them emotional distress.
STORY ANALYSIS
Psychologists and psychotherapists have long relied on the power of narrative storytelling to help their patients make sense of their world. In fact, it’s been said that we are our narratives. For evidence that this may be true, pay attention to how people shape their stories about themselves. As it turns out, there is a big difference between the way we narrate events that have really happened to us and those we’ve invented.
It would seem reasonable to assume that memories, like stories, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But reason doesn’t have much of a role in guiding memory. Avinoam Sapir is a former Israeli police officer, a lie-detection expert, and the developer of Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN), a technique designed to interpret deception in written statements. Sapir notes that true stories drawn from real memories aren’t typically narrated in chronological order; that’s not the way the brain organizes them. The more dramatic the story, the less chronologic its structure.
Why? Because our emotions guide our memories. The more powerfully we experience an event, the more likely we are to make it the first thing we talk about, filling in the less emotionally fraught details later.19 For example, a tip-off that Wade, the salesman we met at the beginning of this chapter, was making up a story is that as soon as he “remembered” the day his boss was asking him about, he didn’t mention his car trouble. Yet the car trouble was supposedly the whole reason why he had missed his appointment. It should have been the most emotionally charged part of his memory, but he recounted the details of his breakfast and morning errand first. He told the story chronologically—that telltale indicator that his memory was being guided by his imagination and not by his emotions.
That’s not to say that any story that doesn’t start with high drama is a fabrication. But truthful stories—though they may not be told in chronological order—will still contain three distinct stages: a prologue, a main event section, and an epilogue.
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A TRUTHFUL RENDITION
If Wade’s story from earlier in the chapter about why he missed his afternoon meeting had been true, his response to Jeff’s question “Can you tell me what happened?” may have sounded more like this:
“Jeff, the day got off to a bad start and only got worse. I was running late to my morning meeting and skipped breakfast. Then when I came out to start my car after lunch, I couldn’t get it started. The battery had died. But the worst part was, earlier that morning I had a long phone call on my drive in, and so now my cell phone was dead too. Murphy’s Law, right? Car and cell phone both dead at exactly the wrong moment…. Well, I was so embarrassed and frustrated at that point, I probably looked like a madman banging on the car hood, which didn’t help me getting help from a passerby. It pains me to even think about what I must have looked like.
“Anyway, long story short, I finally got the owner of the sandwich shop to help jump the car, but by then I’d missed the Fischer meeting by a good hour…and no call either. Oh God, she must have been seething because I had pressed her to push up the appointment to that day. She wasn’t thrilled when I called to apologize, needless to say. Jeff, I tell ya, I just hope there’s no lasting damage from this. I’m just so embarrassed by the whole thing.”
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Whether it contains details from the beginning or the end of the story, the prologue sets the scene for the main event. This part of the story is usually light on detail when someone is telling the truth. It should only take up about one-third, or less, of the total time it takes to tell the whole story.20 In a lie, however, the prologue might be quite detailed. This is often where the liar’s story contains a lot of truthful elements, such as time and place. The liar feels comfortable in this relative safety zone—after all, he’s not lying yet. He will spend as much time as possible here.
The main event section that follows in a truthful story is normally the longest part, since it’s the whole point of telling the story, and is where most of the action lies. In a false narrative, the main event section is often glossed over. An unusually short main event section should give a liespotter pause. It’s the part of the story that answers the question, “What happened?”21 Under truthful circumstances, therefore, it should be the focus of someone’s account.
Last, an honest storyteller will usually provide an epilogue. While it’s unlikely to be the most dramatic part of his account, the epilogue can be very emotional—possibly even more emotion-laden than the main story. Often, when we experience frightening or surprising events, we’re so caught up in what’s happening to us that we don’t have time to process how we feel about them. It’s only later, once a perceived threat has passed, that we’ll calm down enough to be able to acknowledge the emotions that have been triggered. Therefore, those emotions are likely to crop up as we describe the aftereffects of the main event.
Ninety percent of the time, a liar’s story will not include an epilogue; he’ll simply conclude with the main event. An epilogue would require him to fabricate the way the event affected him. But of course it didn’t affect him at all, because it never really happened—or at least it didn’t happen the way he says it did. Liars will do their best to avoid lying unnecessarily, so once they think they have said what needs to be said, they’ll stop talking.
True stories are often jumbled and filled with irrelevant as well as sensory details.22 Deceptive stories, like Wade’s, are often logical and streamlined, yet lacking in vivid sensory descriptions.
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MAKE A LIAR RETELL THE STORY
One way interrogators often weaken a suspect’s confidence is to ask questions that force him to jump around in his story. Since there are no facts to anchor the sequence of events, liars will spend a lot of mental energy making sure the details of their story line follow a logical pattern. Real stories, however, often don’t make perfect sense, and someone telling the truth won’t worry too much about making sure all the details line up perfectly. In addition, someone telling a true story shouldn’t have too much trouble when asked to go back and retell a piece of his story—he’ll just pick up the narrative thread. Liars will often stumble around as they try to find an appropriate starting point.
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WATCH AND LISTEN FOR CLUSTERS
You won’t always be able to elicit a story from someone you suspect of deceit, and a slip of the tongue or heavy bolstering language won’t be enough to pinpoint a lie accurately. But the more you encourage someone to talk, the better chance you’ll have to identify a cluster of verbal clues. Checking these clusters of verbal clues against the subject’s nonverbal behavior is an almost foolproof way to determine if you’re in the presence of deception. All you have to do is create the right environment, ask the right questions, and watch and listen carefully. How to do that is the subject of the next chapter.
SIX
THE BASIC INTERVIEW METHOD
You can gain a priceless advantage by training yourself to recognize the signs of deception automatically. The asymmetrical look of contempt, the “I have something to hide” posture, the misplaced protest statement, the weak denial—you’ll encounter these over and over throughout your life, in all kinds of contex
ts. When you’re better equipped to notice them, you’re also better equipped to cope with life’s challenges.
If you’re buying a house, you’ll be alert to the seller’s attempts to hide the fact that the basement floods regularly. When your sixteen-year-old comes home at three a.m. and tells you he’s late because his friend’s car got a flat tire, you’ll be able to trust that he’s telling the truth. When your boss rubs his eyes and drags his hand over his mouth while listening to your weekly report, you’ll see the red flag and know he’s got significant concerns.
Once you know how to read facial, verbal, and behavioral clues to deception, you may be tempted to look for them everywhere. And you’re guaranteed to find them—whether you’re interacting with people in the hallway or the parking lot, in formal meetings or at the mall, on business trips or possibly even at your own dinner table.
In daily life and in normal interactions, some lying is essential. Anyone who spouted the truth nonstop would quickly walk into disaster. If you have trouble envisioning why, see the film Liar Liar, in which Jim Carrey plays a duplicitous lawyer and chronic liar who is magically unable to tell a lie for twenty-four hours.
He tells a beautiful and well-endowed new neighbor in the elevator that everyone has been nice to her because she’s “got big jugs.”
At work, to an unfortunately coiffed woman who chirps, “Hi, Mr. Reede! You like my new dress?” he snarls, “What ever takes the focus off your head.”
To a rotund associate who asks, “What’s up, Fletcher?” He says, “Your cholesterol, Fatty.”
To a bland blond colleague who greets him, he says, “Hey…you’re not important enough to remember.”
We really don’t want to tell—nor should we want to hear—the unvarnished truth all the time. Nor do we always need the lengthy details of a lie. Sometimes it’s enough to recognize that a person is lying and then move on. Sometimes the awareness that you’re being lied to is all you need to extricate yourself from a bad situation. If all you want to know is whether a house for sale is structurally sound—and you sense that the real estate agent isn’t being forthright about that musty smell—you can simply choose to exclude that house (and that agent) from consideration.