Ekman maintains that Micro Expressions give away real feelings that are being hidden, and that...with the proper training...you can spot these expressions and discover what people are really thinking. Ekman has produced many fine examples of such behaviour, and I'm certainly not about to argue with the man. He is a professor of psychology after all. And, in order to prove his whole theory about micro expressions wasn't cultural, he went and spent some time with tribal people in the ass-end of nowhere to prove that these expressions are universal and somehow inherent within all of us regardless of our geographical upbringing.
So far, so scientific. In Lie To Me, Tim Roth's team are experts on body language and other forms of unconscious communication. Once upon a time, I was obsessed with such a thing. I read and believed the bullshit notion that communication is only 10% verbal and 90% body language. Its the same bullshit statistic as you only use 10% of your brain. Absolute garbage.
If I made an open body language gesture to you, if I smiled using both my zygomaticus major AND my orbicularis occuli, yet I said something antagonistic, chances are you'd still be as pissed as if I hadn't bothered with all that facial muscle movement.
Sure, body language is important, but its not as important as some would like to make out.
Now then, in the context of lying, body language really comes into its own. I have read many a pop-psychology book on lie detection and 'Tells'. Tells are any piece of body language that portrays what you're really feeling, despite what you might be saying. I can now share some of this information with you, which means you don't have to spend the money or the time on it...like I did.
We'll begin with the NLP'ers. NLP, or Neuro- Linguistic Programming, is a 'hot topic' in psychology. Some believe it to be bullshit, others believe it to be a very important step in mental health. I won't go into the whole movement now, just the lie detector bits. Take a look at this:
These are what's known as 'Eye Accessing Cues', and in the field of NLP, they can assist with therapy. They can also be used to catch out those pesky liars. The idea is, you establish a base line, so you ask a normal question that someone has to think about, for instance "What colour is the front door of your house?" Sure you know it, but its not information at the front of your mind at the moment. So, you go into your brain to access it. You'll therefore, according to the chart above, move your eyes up and to my right. You're visually remembering your front door. Now I know that you concur with the chart, I can say "What did you get up to last night?". If you spin me a story about just going to the pub, you can probably just reel that off, so I'd ask "Who was with you?". Now you'll need to make up some names if you're lying, or remember them if you're telling the truth. If you look up and to the right, I'll know you're searching for factual information, up and to the left, and you're making it up. Left to lie.
Good innit? If only it was reliable. It isn't, and its dangerous to think it is. Accusing someone of lying on the strength of this chart is a daft thing to do. Use the chart as a guide, but employ other techniques too. For instance, a good one - and you have to be deep into accusatory mode here - is to ask the person what they did, and then ask you to tell them the same thing again, but backwards. So they start with the last thing they did and work back to the first. For a liar who has constructed his story, it will be extremely difficult. For someone telling the truth, it will be hard, but entirely possible. And I got that little doozy from a book called 'What Every Body Is Saying' which was written by an FBI Counter-Intelligence Agent. He didn't scare me with his words.
Despite all these 'tricks', if I can call them that, in my experience the best way to spot a lie is to find a pattern break. An example of this would be....let's take that thing that everyone seems to believe in but is more bullshit: that people never look you in the eye when they're lying. If anything, because this rumour has gotten so out of hand, people are more likely to begin and maintain eye contact with you because they want to convince you that they're telling the truth.
If however, they've spent the rest of the conversation looking away from you whilst explaining other things and then give you eye contact on something important, they've broken their pattern. This should immediately get your lie detector going.
It could be that they really want you to believe them, but a pattern break is important. Derren Brown uses pattern breaks to induce hypnosis, albeit a form of waking hypnosis. Watch some of his early specials and you'll see him shake hands with people, then grab their wrist with his other hand. At the same time, he'll give his hypnotic speech. This works because a hand shake is a common thing with unwritten rules. You know how to do it, and you know what to expect. When something unexpected happens (the wrist grab), your brain panics and struggles for an answer. It opens up for direction, and the direction you get is Derren's instructions. Its like he's hacked his way into your brain, and for a split second he gets to control you. Powerful stuff.
Anyway, for me the thing with the pattern break indicates the best way of detecting a lie. That is, to let your unconscious do it for you. You know when someone's lying. You can feel it. You feel uneasy about what they're saying but don't know why. Its because your unconscious has detected a pattern break, an obvious one, and its nagging at you asking for an answer. If you're actively seeking a pattern break, you'll find one, and again you could end up wrongfully accusing someone.
Being lied to is never very pleasant, but I'd argue that its important for human beings to learn to lie, and to put that into practice. Life would be so much more complicated if we all told the truth about everything. Imagine it, if your partner asked you if they looked alright before you went out for the night, and you had to sit there and explain all the ways in which - in your opinion - they didn't look alright. Not only would they be upset, but you'd have to justify everything you're saying, you'd never get out the fucking door. So, you employ heuristics, you go for the path of least resistance.
- Do I look alright?
- Yeah you look great.
Open, step, gone. I suppose this is what's known as a 'white lie', and these are good things to save people's feelings and your time. The white lie's older brother is a bastard, and he can hurt when he's around. I don't believe in fate, destiny, or karma, but I believe that the truth always comes out. Given a long enough time line, and the fallibility of humans, the truth will always make an appearance. I find comfort in that. The ability to detect a lie can be good for you, but you'll only ever keep it to yourself, because people will deny things until they're blue in the face. Your accusations will only ever be met with more and more denial. Is it worth it?
You'll know when someone is lying to you, you then have to decide whether or not to accept that information or to just keep going and hope that things will get better. Here, you could well be lying to yourself. Spot that one if you can. They could be lying for a good reason, a reason its best you're not aware of. It was kind of disheartening to invest time and energy into this lie detection malarkey, only to then come to the conclusion that we're all good lie detectors, we just have to make ourselves aware of it. To then conclude that even if we spot a lie perhaps we shouldn't say anything makes things even worse. Its good to have these skills though. They work alright for Cal Lightman.
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