Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception
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There will be times, though, when your goal must be more than dodging a lie. In certain crucial situations, you need to know the truth—the whole truth. To obtain it, you must learn to ask the right questions at the right time and to listen in a way you never have before. In other words, you need to conduct a BASIC lie-proof interview.
FIVE STEPS TO THE TRUTH
The BASIC interview method combines the best of facial, voice, and body indicator recognition techniques with an advanced interrogation system designed to elicit trust and cooperation from someone you suspect of deceit. It’s supremely effective for sniffing out deception—but its greatest value is the insight it will give you into what makes people tick.
BASIC has only five steps:
Baseline Behavior
Ask Open-ended Questions
Study the Clusters
Intuit the Gaps
Confirm
It is not an interrogation technique. Rather, it is a conversation guide that provides a way to structure dialogue so the person you’re speaking with willingly shows you the way to the truth; all you have to do is look, listen, and follow. The BASIC method helps you develop rapport, uncover a new perspective on the dilemma at hand, and encourage people to tell you more than they ever intended to.
You’ll notice that many of the BASIC steps overlap and are done simultaneously, and that much of the process relies on your good intuition and empathy. Some lie-detection trainers insist that there is a set list of behavioral clues and that if you spot three out of five of them, for example, you’ve definitely caught someone in a lie. But that approach is too formulaic. It doesn’t take into account the fact that human beings are complicated, unpredictable, and contradictory—anything but formulaic. What if you see only one behavioral clue, but the intensity of that behavior is extremely significant? BASIC is designed to give you the maximum flexibility to follow your hunches and question everything you see and hear until you feel certain you have the answers you are looking for.
BASIC STEPS
Step #1: Baseline Behavior
You’ve probably been baselining people for years without realizing it. When we spend time with people, we take note—consciously or unconsciously—of their mannerisms, their speech patterns, their good and bad habits. We know, for example, that it’s useless to ask the normally friendly Jim for anything earlier than eleven a.m. on Wednesday because he’s irritable before his regularly scheduled ten a.m. meeting with the president of the company. We know that it’s not a good idea to dismiss it when calm, even-tempered Amy raises her voice in a meeting—she does that only when she has a serious concern or disagreement, and her point is usually valid. We know that Kyle picks at his cuticles and that Wanda has a nervous tic that sometimes makes her stutter.
We have baselined Jim, Amy, Kyle, and Wanda, so we know how they behave under normal circumstances. Since we’re already familiar with how these coworkers behave when they’re not lying, we should have an easy time spotting any unusual facial, verbal, or behavioral clues they might display when they are lying. We also know that they have habits that can sometimes look like clues to deception—Kyle’s cuticle picking, for instance—but that are just part of their ordinary behavior (irritating, perhaps, but not worth noticing).
Baselining your colleagues gives you a reliable reference point, a standard you can use for measuring changes in their behavior. It’s a good skill to develop with everyone around you—old colleagues, new friends, or perfect strangers. You can practice baselining by striking up a conversation over the coffee machine or in the thirty seconds it takes to ride down the elevator. And a little effort can pay off in spades.
After all, you never know who’s going to make a difference in your professional or personal life. That intern faxing your documents could become your next marketing director; the person you chat with at the airport while waiting for your delayed flight could be your next big romance. Whether you can take your time to get to know people through repeated interactions or you need to baseline on the fly, there are five behaviors you want to observe closely:
Laugh: What does the subject’s laugh sound like?
Voice: How fast, how loud, and at what pitch does the subject usually speak?
Posture: What is the subject’s posture normally like?
Gestures: How often does the subject gesticulate, wave his hands in the air, fidget, cross and uncross his feet?
Reactions: How does the subject’s face and posture change when she reacts to or discusses something sad, exciting, or infuriating?
You don’t have to change anything about the way you normally interact with people to observe these details. The only difference is that now you’re going to pay closer attention to what you see and hear when you interact. Pay attention, too, to how others handle frustration or conflict. How does Kyle behave in meetings when someone disagrees with him? How does Amy treat vendors on the phone? The point is to note the subtle details of how people look and sound when they’re talking about the ordinary stuff of life and work.
This is not meant to suggest that your own emotional baseline should be paranoia or distrust of your coworkers. You don’t baseline people because they might try to trick you one day. You don’t behave politely to people because that way they’ll be likelier to give you what you want. Common courtesy is expected of well-adjusted members of society; attention to the behavior and concerns of those around you is a form of common courtesy and of mature management. Being a good leader and manager is not just about getting business done, but about making sure that the people who work with you know that you notice them, that you recognize they have lives outside the office, and that you value what they contribute to your organization. Your attention will make people feel more invested in their work and more committed to your team, which naturally translates into more loyalty and honesty.
Profiling Let’s say, though, that for some reason you sense that a particular coworker is acting subtly different. You can’t quite put a finger on what has alerted you, but your antennae are up. Here’s where profiling may be useful.
Profiling is an extension of the baselining process. What do you know about the person you’re baselining? Is he financially secure? Has he gone through any recent emotional crises? Is there a history of drug or alcohol abuse? Are there any reported anger-management issues, unusual personality shifts, or recent antisocial behavior incidents? How is his self-esteem? Is he vulnerable to flattery? Does he tend to blame others for his own mistakes? Does he seem to have a “victim” mentality? What’s his attitude toward authority? Does he normally follow the rules, or is he a rebel? Does he seem to be living beyond his means?
Again, you’re not asking these questions in order to prejudice yourself against the employee or employees in question. Behavioral profiling is value-neutral. (Abuses of profiling are, of course, another matter.) If you’re profiling an employee, chances are you’re doing so as the first step toward solving a problem you may not have fully identified. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation in which you feel compelled to dig deeper beneath the surface of your organization. When that happens, it’s time to take the next step.
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BASIC STEP #1 REVIEW: BASELINE BEHAVIOR
Pay particular attention to everyday behaviors:
Laughter
Body movement
Posture
Vocal quality
Reaction times and expressions
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Step #2: Ask Open-Ended Questions
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s because you have a hunch that someone you’re dealing with may be acting dishonestly, and you need to know more. When you’re baselining, you’re not digging for information about a specific incident; you’re just getting a feel for how someone looks and sounds on a regular basis under relaxed, normal circumstances. Your questions don’t have to have any particular structure, they just need to be sincere and to elicit a genuine, natural response. The second BASIC step, however, requires
a little more strategy.
Obviously, simply asking, “You aren’t really interested in my graphic design services, are you? You just want to get a price quote to take to my competitor” may not get you a truthful answer. If your colleague is in fact practicing some kind of subterfuge, he will simply answer “No.” This will cut off further communication and limit your opportunity to liespot. So you need to prepare open-ended questions that encourage discussion and information sharing.
What Exactly Is an Open-Ended Question? Let’s start by looking at a closed question. A closed question is one that can be answered with a brief “yes” or “no.” It doesn’t encourage the person with whom you’re speaking to offer any more information than you’ve demanded. If that person is leaning toward dishonesty, a closed question slams the door on your chances of learning more. Here are examples of closed questions:
“Have you been meeting with any of our competitors?”
“Did you take the 6:15 flight to New Jersey?”
“Are you sure you put those reports on my desk before you left for the day?”
Imagine what a different response you might get if, instead, you asked:
“How did you decide that you’d prefer to do a deal with us, rather than with Continental Metrics?”
“What happened after you started driving to the airport?”
“What else were you trying to finish up before you left the office?”
You can ask open or closed questions when you’re baselining; it doesn’t matter. When your suspicion is aroused, though, the kind of questions you ask matters quite a bit.
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LIESPOTTING TIP
Responding to a tough question by repeating it in full is a delaying tactic to allow time to construct a deceptive answer. When a truthful person just wants to make sure he heard correctly, he’ll usually repeat only part of the question.
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Open-ended questions encourage people to give you an expanded reply. They also allow you to keep what you know to yourself. Here’s a simple example: your employee James missed a key meeting this morning, and you want to find out why. If you were to ask him, “So you and George left the office, and then you went to dinner, and then you went home?” all James has to do is confirm or deny what you just said. There will be no reason for him to tell you more. But now imagine that instead you ask, “You and George left the office. What did you do afterward?”
If James is honest, he’ll tell you the truth. Maybe he and George debated whether to eat burgers or Indian food and finally flipped a coin before heading to the pub on the corner, which turned out to be a great place to brainstorm about the new Web site they’re designing, which is why James got home late, overslept, and missed this morning’s meeting. If James is hiding something, however, he now has to think about what you might already know, what he wants you to know, and what he wants to keep from you. He may also have to consider whether George’s story lines up with his.
In the seconds that James processes these thoughts and starts to formulate an answer, you’ve been watching to see what facial and behavioral clues he’s let slip. You follow up with, “How often do you guys work after hours?” This might prompt James to say, “Too often,” which could indicate an attitude of entitlement. Or he might say, “All the time, but we have fun,” which could imply that James likes his work but that the missed meeting was a case of too many beers, not work-related fatigue. In either case, you’ve just learned more than you would have by asking a closed question.
There are four goals to keep in mind when you ask open-ended questions.
Establish what you know and what you want to know.
Develop rapport.
Elicit a response.
Tell the right story.
Establish What You Know, and What You Want to Know. Before you start asking any questions, you should line up as many facts about the specific incident you’re investigating as possible. You should determine clearly what information you want to find out now, and what you can wait to learn later.
Make a list of the evidence you need for the particular event you want to investigate. Think through what is relevant, fact-based evidence and what might be merely hearsay.
Next, list what you know about the person you’re going to interview. Is there anything on that list that could affect your objectivity? Imagine, for example, that your marketing director is accused of selling confidential trade secrets to a competitor—and you also know he’s having an affair with his secretary. This knowledge might cause you to bring certain preconceived opinions to the interview, opinions that would differ from the ones you’d bring if instead you knew that he was a devoted family man. You therefore need to be certain that you’re not prejudiced against him for reasons that are irrelevant to your inquiry.
Even if you’re almost certain that this marketing director is guilty, you need to approach each conversation with an open mind. Control your impulse to interrupt; assume nothing; and finally, suspend your bias. The last thing you want is to be so wrapped up in the certainty that you’re right that you overlook evidence proving that, in fact, you’re wrong.
Prepare all the questions you could ask that will establish the “who, what, when, and where” about the incident you want to discuss. Then list the likely responses, and formulate a counter-reply to each imagined response. Each question you throw out will be like a bone; your job is to see which one your subject finds tastiest. The idea is to be prepared for what ever you hear so you can keep the conversation going. This is where a well-developed sense of empathy is crucial, since you are planning out a verbal mirroring process that will help you build rapport.
Arms akimbo is a confident, even confrontational, pose.
Crossed arms means your message is not getting through.
Open palms indicate receptiveness and warmth.
Develop Rapport. It is no secret that the less threatening, judgmental, and suspicious you are, the more likely someone will be to open up to you. As you begin your interview, you can build rapport through standard “active listening.” Active listening doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with your companion, but it demonstrates your investment in and understanding of what’s being communicated. The most basic examples include:
Maintaining eye contact
Mirroring your subject’s body language and the pace of his speech
Laughing at your subject’s jokes
Sitting in a nonthreatening, open-armed position
Avoiding arguments
But you will need to go even farther to develop a spirit of cooperation. You will need to find common ground with your listener: “I’ve had some real time management challenges myself in my day.” You’ll also need to reassure him that you’re not judging his character: “I can tell you work hard to provide for your family, and I respect that.”
Watch your language. You’ll lose rapport immediately if you use legal and graphic terms. If your subject is under investigation for embezzlement, for example, never use the legal term “embezzlement,” or even the term “steal.” Say, rather, “It seems someone took some money.” Remember that your subject may be working to distance himself from what ever he has done. Using words that suggest he’s guilty of something may cause him to clam up.
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DON’T ASK WHY
The number one way to put someone on the defensive is to ask, “Why?” Instead, ask, “What made you do that?”
“What made you change the meeting time?” will elicit a better response than “Why did you change the meeting time?” The same goes for “What made you get home so late?” or “What prevented you from finishing the job?” Formulating your “Why” questions in this way assumes that there must be a legitimate reason for your subject’s behavior—and that you’re ready to understand that reason.
Remove “Why” from your vocabulary immediately, and you’ll see a remarkable difference in how people respond to you.
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Everyone, whether innocent
or guilty, fears being misunderstood, so don’t take a challenging stance. Instead, you want to reassure your subject that you understand him and that you sympathize with his frustrations, conflicts, and obligations. When people feel they are being treated with compassion and understanding, they are much more likely to open up to you.
Elicit an Observable Response. Approach your subject as casually as possible in a comfortable, private, and calm environment that’s free from distraction. Whether he’s guilty or innocent, he won’t want to feel like a bug under a microscope. The less intimidating you are, the faster you’ll get the information you want.
Keep the setting neutral. If your subject is afraid of heights, you won’t want to take him to the top of the building in a glass-enclosed office looking fifty-four floors down to the street. You’ll never know if his fidgeting, furtive glances, and hand tapping are caused by your questions or his fear of being up so high. His response will be neither reliable nor observable. Don’t interview someone in public if you can avoid it; public distractions, too, increase the likelihood that the behavior you observe will be unreliable.
Make it clear when the interview is officially over, but continue chatting. Most guilty subjects will exhibit enormous post-interview relief—a change in posture, a new breathing pattern, a nervous joke or laugh. These behaviors can be just as useful to you as the interview itself.
Tell the Right Story. Every liar has a rationalization—a story he tells himself so that he can live with his lie. Rationalizing helps liars explain why they shouldn’t be judged harshly for stealing money, lying on their résumés, brokering a Ponzi scheme, getting stoned at lunch, paying kickbacks to their friends…
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LIESPOTTING TIP
Pay attention as you end an interrogation. If someone who’s been on the hot seat expresses visible relief that the questioning is over, it may be because his deceptive story worked.