Humans need to know and be able to detect when another person is lying for a world of reasons. It can be boiled down to being a necessary evolutionary-developed survival skill, because in certain instances (say if one person told another that they wouldn’t eat all the food and then did), it could cost someone their life. Of course, a lie detector machine will help, but the most valuable skill when it comes to detecting when someone is lying is recognizing the signs of lying, particularly how our language changes.
Medieval torture devices, polygraphs, blood pressure and breathing monitors, voice stress analyzers, eye trackers, and infrared brain scanners have all been developed to try and tell when someone is lying. However, there are issues with all of these methods.
One issue is that we don’t often have access to this equipment, and although some have worked in certain circumstances, none of them are foolproof and none are reliable enough to be admissible in court.
But there is another major tool we can use to help detect whether someone is lying: communications science.
Instead of outrightly determining whether something is a lie or not, this method aims to analyze the lies themselves.
In part, we lie to paint a better picture of ourselves, connecting our fantasies to who we wish we were, rather than who we are and how we have behaved.
While our brain is off dreaming up who we could have been while we are spilling an uncalculated fabrication to someone, we often let plenty of signals slip by.
Our conscious mind only controls about 5% of our cognitive function, including communication. The other 95% occurs beyond
Here’s the catch: stories that are based on imagined experiences are different from those of lived experiences. In short, it’s hard to dream up a situation in the same detail as it would exist.
This is why a common tactic that detectives use when they interrogate a suspect is asking them very unusual questions about a story, or asking the same question in different ways.
Because it’s very difficult to imagine a full picture (some authors might be able to come close), criminals will often have not accounted for certain details.
What happens is that a different pattern of language use emerges when a person is lying.
A technology called linguistic text analysis has been developed to help identify the kind of way people use language when they’re being deceptive.
When people are lying, they reference themselves less. They tend to speak about another person to distance and disassociate from a situation.
For instance, after a teenager spills wine they shouldn’t have been drinking on a rug, their alibi might be that “there’s not even wine in the house,” instead of “I didn’t spill wine on the rug.”
Liars tend to be more negative because they may feel guilty about lying on a subconscious level.
They might therefore say that they’re running late because the bus was late and go off on a rant about the transit system. Personal responsibility doesn’t really factor in.
Also, when someone is lying they will tend to tell a story in very simple terms because our brain struggles to come up with a complex lie.
Even though the actual details of what someone is saying can be very simple when they’re lying, they can also tend to say it in a convoluted way with a very long sentence structure
People tend to add a lot of details that sound factual to pad the lie. Someone might say “there was nobody here, man or woman, who ever thought about, or even came close to considering, setting foot in, near, or around the property.” In this case they could have just said: “None of us went there.”
When people are trying to come up with a deceptive answer, they tend to stall. One common way of doing this is by repeating the question they are asked.
Because lying is often a form of protection, someone who is about to lie may reply with a suspicious answer or even a suspicious question.
Often people won’t use contractions in their sentences when they are lying, overemphasizing the point.
People will also often tell a story in very strict chronology when they are lying, because otherwise it would be hard to remember. This can be imagined as similar to a child trying to lie by telling a story very simply and step by step.
When someone is lying about something, they will often change the language of the ‘crime’ they have committed to something softer. For example, they will say they didn’t “take” the wallet when they’re asked if they stole it.
Another way people give away that they are lying is by trying to overemphasize that they’re telling the truth by using language like “honestly” or “to tell you the truth.”
When someone is lying, they might build a huge intro and then skip over big events. It’s a tactic to build credibility.
When someone is lying, they will give very specific denials to not implicate themselves, whereas people who are being truthful won’t have a problem giving categorical statements like “I was never there.”
When someone is lying, they hedge their bets. People often do this by saying things like “as far as I remember,” “from what I recall,” or “if you think about it.”
These indicators are only that: indicators. They are the types of behaviors that professionals will often detect when someone is lying. But just because someone is stalling for time doesn’t mean they’re lying, and so on. These are the types of things people do when they’re lying, but it doesn’t mean that because someone is doing them that they’re lying. Keep this in mind before making a final judgment.
