Being better at telling when you’re being lied to than most people could obviously be beneficial for a number of reasons, however, and I think this is kind of funny, people generally find it most useful to apply to their romantic partners as opposed to anyone else where you might think it would be obvious, like the boss, coworkers, someone trying to sell you something, etc.
Most people want to know if the person closest to them, the person that they’re the most vulnerable to, is lying to them or not. Kinda makes sense when you think in terms of vulnerability and therefore how much being lied to could cost you: being lied to by a salesman and not knowing it might cost you a few bucks, but being lied to by your cheating spouse and not catching it has much, much more dire potential consequences.
Now, pay attention to this short public service announcement and stick around for a few extra tips after the show:
A few extra tips
- If you can do this and get away with it (depends on the situation), there’s an almost surefire method of catching them right
then and there: ask them a series of questions in rapid-fire succession about specific simple facts surrounding the event in question, such as location, time, date, people involved, etc. Things that they would have to make up if they were lying, and that will therefore cause them to stumble and pause while their imagination goes into overdrive trying to answer them quickly, things that someone who was telling the truth would be able to spit out without even thinking.
- Conflicting signals: that is, when body language and/or voice tone conflicts with the actual words that are used. It won’t be this obvious, but an exaggerated example would be someone frowning and looking down while saying ‘I loved your gift.’
- Also, lastly, please don’t be too quick to condemn people just because you see one (or even a few) of these, they might be lying but there’s enough of a chance they’re not that you don’t want to
automatically assume they are: it’s when you see several of these indicators all at once that alarm bells should start ringing, and even then that should often serve to get you to investigate further when you might not have otherwise, as opposed to making you automatically decide that they’re guilty on the spot. In short, be careful 🙂
Additional Resources
For anyone who’s REALLY interested in learning about this stuff, I highly recommend you check out Never Be Lied to Again, by David Lieberman.
This is an excellent site with lots of tips on detecting liars, primarily focused on body language.