8 ms·

Better and worse ways to spot a liar

256 points by williamhpark 11y ago

korginator 11y ago
You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.
- bhouston 11y ago
  You probably are not Arab then... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/palestine-israel-west-bank-americans-detained-ben-gurion.html http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/palestine-... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-border-entry-denied-arab-americans-jordan.html# http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-bor... http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-american-two-arab-american-womens-story-of-being-detained-and-interrogated-at-ben-gurion http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-...
- personlurking 11y ago
  I once vacationed in Colombia and upon return to the States (I'm American) was questioned by two 'tough guys' upon entry. I was with my brother and they both asked us 3-4 rapid-fire simple, unopen questions, repeating the questions in virtually the same ways about 3 different times in just a few minutes. Our only thought in the moment was they must have been simpletons or simply bad at their job. - Why were you there? - Vacation. - How long were you there? - 2 weeks. - Who did you go with? - Him (points to brother) Treating people like idiots, and while asking dumb questions, doesn't seem to be the best way to spot a liar. I'm glad the science of it is improving.
- paganel 11y ago
  The way I see it there are at least two possible ways to "fight" against this, that is if you're on the liar's side. The first one is to offer to whoever is questioning you a "local maximum" victory, i.e. to pretend to hide a smaller lie compared to the bigger one you're supposed to be hiding. In the case you mentioned, you could pretend to be "covering up" the fact that you've been cheating on your SO, hence all the non-concordances related to your past locations. When the guys questioning you finally realize that you're lying on something, they'd think you had been doing so out of fear of not being seen as an unfaithful spouse, when in reality you want to blow things up (just to give an example). The downside to this strategy is that this fails when the "admission criteria" is 0 and 1, you're either a liar, which means you're out, or not, which means you're in. The one mitigating factor is that almost everybody lies all the time. The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling. This is a little sociopath bordering on schizophrenic, but I've seen some people doing it almost to perfection (granted, the stakes were not very high). The one weak point of this is that you have to know exactly when and how to push the on/off switch.
  - adekok 11y ago
    > The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling. That is harder than it sounds. Even sociopaths have a hard time outright lying. Or keeping lies straight. The technique being used here is one of consistency. Is your story consistent? Does it have all of the details one expects from a normal story? Are there any hesitations when recalling the story? It is very difficult to come up with consistent and detailed lies on a moments notice. The better approach (used by lying CEOs on news shows) is to have a different story that you tell in detail.
    - nucleardog 11y ago
      If you have time to prepare your lies then it just requires a sort of reframing. Do all your imagining ahead of time. Walk through and construct the lie. Fill in the details. You're not just imagining this one thing, you're imagining an entire alternate reality where this thing is true and all the implications that follow from that. When it comes time to answer questions the person is asking about the alternate reality you've imagined. No need to make things up - just recall back. I guess I'm saying the same thing as you, just in a different way - don't make something up on a moments notice, just have a different story that you tell.
  - pandler 11y ago
    I find it's sometimes easier to convince someone that you are lying when you aren't. I usually only do that when I am trying to pull someone into a prank, and I need them to believe something. Most people will pick up on the easy body language and verbal cues of a lie, and they won't consider that it's just a facade. Now that I think of it, I see that happen quite a bit at the poker table too. You can draw chips out of other players by making them think that you're just trying to bluff, but you really have a good hand.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling One of my favorite quips from the internet is: All really good salesmen temporarily believe whatever bullshit they are selling at the time. It's kind of like method acting. They're not lying if they believe it themselves!
- deleted 11y ago
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- oe 11y ago
  I've seen this in London too. I don't mind it. It's probably more effective than all the other security theatrics in an airport.
zamalek 11y ago
> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because of the useless information we don't know if it's true either.
- rwmj 11y ago
  After a bit of searching it's probably this study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis Granhag, Pär; Strömwall, Leid (2004). The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    No, that's from 11 years ago. The actual paper was linked lower down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180932
    - rwmj 11y ago
      I'm talking about the "study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy" which was asked by the grandparent post, not the paper by the people interviewed in the article.
      - mavhc 11y ago
        When will journalists reach the high standards of wikipedia and link to their sources?
        DonHopkins 11y ago
        When they're no longer paid to lie.
deleted 11y ago
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- reitanqild 11y ago
  > How is it possible that academic research remains so awful at disseminating knowledge - presenting results in an open, accessible manner isn't exactly difficult? Read to me less like academic research and more like a before/after show by the training consultant. But I only read if very fast.
Sharlin 11y ago
So, what's the rate of false positives, given that only 1 in 1000 is a true positive?
- tomchristie 11y ago
  From the source: "CCE agents identified 24 times more mock passengers (66%; 60% at Month 1 and 72% at Month 6) than suspicious signs agents (3%; 6% at Month 1 and 0% at Month 6)" ... "base rates of identification of genuine travelers identified as being deceptive in the 6 months before the trial (1 in 1,247 passengers) did not differ during the trial with suspicious signs (1 in 1,219 passengers), or CCE (1 in 1,295 passengers)" So my reading is 2/3 mock passengers identified as true positives, 1/1000 real passengers identified as false positives. (With some provisos as noted in the paper)
tomchristie 11y ago
The paper itself: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf
smegel 11y ago
> Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. Yet juries in rape trials supposedly do it all the time...or don't they?
- Udo 11y ago
  Why single out rape trials specifically?
  - smegel 11y ago
    Are any other kinds of trials little more than a game of spot-the-liar?
  - netrus 11y ago
    Rape is interesting in this regard because it is an especially severe crime that might be very hard to proof. Murder has a body and a weapon, but rape might be indistinguishable from consensual sex, when you just look at hard physical evidence (medical examination, text messages, ...). If you want to give justice to most rape victims, you have to decide who is lying, and who is saying the truth.
    - draugadrotten 11y ago
      > If you want to give justice to most rape victims, you have to decide who is lying, and who is saying the truth. It is also possible that both victim and rapist are telling the truth, but it still is an open question if it's a rape. Example: Julian Assange case with the broken condom.
    - seren 11y ago
      Most white collar crimes also fall in that category. Was it pure negligence or was it engineered ?
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Rape is also a crime where people incorrectly judge what a real victim acts like, and are likely to assume actual victims are lying.
benihana 11y ago
>Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. What is ironic about that? If I understand how to lie to other humans, why is it anything but expected that I would be able to recognize that skill in other people?
- rogeryu 11y ago
  If you as a liar are good at detecting liars, then wouldn't it be logical that you could detect honesty as well, being the opposite? Well then take the opposite. What about honest people, do they recognize honest people better? I don't know, just asking, wondering. It could even be that honest people recognize honesty better than liars, while at the same time liars are better lie detectors. Then there has to be a middle group I guess - what are they?
  - balfirevic 11y ago
    Presumably, liars don't lie all the time, so they do both lying and honesty enough to be able to tell the difference. I also don't really know, but it sounds plausible :)
  - kaoD 11y ago
    The difference: lies pretend to sound honest, while honesty doesn't pretend to sound like lies.
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  For one thing, you can never be sure if they really detected a liar or they are just lying about it. ;-)
- lazyant 11y ago
  Also 'crazy' people were more apt at recognizing other people with mental problems that the doctors
samuellb 11y ago
Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go. Once I had to work with a freelance web master and we were trying to cancel his contract and make him transfer the domain name to us (an association I was working for). I confronted him by asking politely for a written copy of his contract because I thought he was lying about the length of the contract. He was insulted and claimed there was a verbal agreement several years ago. I don't know if he was right or wrong about that, but after that he would make up things about basically anything (such as, that changing the owner/registrar of our domain would cause his other customers' files to be deleted etc.). We now offered him money to break out of the "contract" early, but now he was already stuck in his lies. If he would say that it was technically possible to move the domain name, he would also expose his earlier lies. After almost a year of arguing with him, he offered to transfer the domain before the end of the "contract". But for "technical reasons" it had to be done after the hosting company had shut down the web site and e-mail, which caused some downtime for us. In retrospect it would have been much easier if I hadn't questioned him in the first time.
- jimworm 11y ago
  Pointing out a lie does little when it can't be punished with consequences; you were relying on the freelancer's conscience for a favourable outcome. Border agents have the law, manpower, firepower, and territory on their side and are ready to use it at a moment's notice.
- zhte415 11y ago
  Great example. Perhaps questioning him too and him feeling he was being pushed too far broke his implicit sense of trust, feeling loss of favourability. It may have been a verbal agreement. It may have been his interpretation / perception of a verbal agreement (warped by assumptions, or by time), or it may have been a lie. Hard to tell. A nice simple example that I'll remember, thanks.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  But that's a different goal - you worked out he was a liar easily. If you want to get someone to do something then yes you have to use different techniques (allow them to save face etc.).
dovereconomics 11y ago
Spotting petty liars is the least of one's problem. As normal people expose more information in the Internet, it becomes increasingly difficult to be a liar, almost impossible. Still, the 'big lies' are just getting stronger and these techniques are useless on them. How many political identities can be dismantled by 'surprise'?
hessenwolf 11y ago
But they tested it with fake liars, who, in my humble opinion, are less likely to exhibit emotions, and more likely to be too lazy to come up with good details on the fly for back stories. Maybe it is just me that is sweatier and wilier when stressed.
piokoch 11y ago
"Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans" It is so sad that nowdays it is not seen as absurdal that some kind of policeman is asking passangers about their travel plans. The journalist get excited that new methods of catching "cheating passangers" are beind developed. Apparently in the brave new World we have created this is considered normal.
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  Have border guards not always asked those questions? I'm pretty sure it's been like that since before the 20th century.
  - splat 11y ago
    Border guards and passports as we conceive them didn't really exist until the 20th century. The historian Paul Fussell wrote in his book Abroad: "[B]efore 1915 His Majesty's Government did not require a passport for departure, nor did any European state require one for admittance except the two notoriously backward and neurotic countries of Russia and the Ottoman Empire." And it wasn't until 1945 that Americans were generally required to hold a passport to travel abroad during peacetime. [1] [1]: http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html
    - JonnieCache 11y ago
      Thanks, I was vaguely aware that it was around the turn of the century that these things came in. An american in 1940 may not have needed a passport to leave, but would they have needed one to get in somewhere else? Surely the nations of europe at that time would have been suspicious of basically everyone?
    - deleted 11y ago
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    - rayiner 11y ago
j_s 11y ago
In the 3-season TV show Lie to Me (IMDB: 8.0), the protagonist relies on "micro-expressions" to catch criminals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  Like many theories coming from psychology, micro-expressions are a story without a proof. It's probably the same projection of the investigator's suspicions that takes place when reading tea leaves.
- dalore 11y ago
  Great show. But the article does mention micro-expressions: > Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions” that might give the game away. but then goes on to say: > ... this too seems to have been disproved.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Basically all kinds of things can indicate stress factors. Stress can indicate lying, but it can also indicate a whole host of other things such as someone getting frustrated about the entire situation, or worried that you seem to think they might be lying... You can spot liars based on body language, but then you first need to know how that specific person reacts in normal situations vs. when they're lying.
thom 11y ago
"Lying is a skill like any other, and if you want to maintain a level of excellence, you have to practise constantly." Words every founder should live by. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg
tbbreener 11y ago
Crossing into the US from Canada, its seems that boarder officials have always asked those type of questions.
justzisguyuknow 11y ago
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.
- jshap70 11y ago
  Except I am bad with names, so when they ask somebody's name and you can't remember it then you get pulled aside for more questioning.
  - veb 11y ago
    Or if you didn't hear the persons name properly or have a speech impediment ...
- patcheudor 11y ago
  I do wonder, and this is a serious question. Why would someone trying to be deceitful because they have something very serious to hide even take the chance on speaking with a security agent? I'm not suggesting they "plead the fifth," but rather carry a card explaining that they are mute. Doctors papers are easy to forge. If the incident leading to the condition happened recently, then that would be an excuse for not knowing sign language. Yes, they may still need to write their answers, but it is universally accepted that most people don't like to write so they could keep their answers brief without raising suspicion. By writing slowly, they may even drive the interviewer to the point they cut the questioning short. Very serious bad guys could even get a botox injection beforehand, paralyzing their lips or get their mouth wired shut. My point is that at the end of the day, the goal here is to catch very serious bad guys. Any truly dangerous person with the intent and actual capability to do something very bad should have tools of deceit on par with their capabilities for harm up to and including getting one's mouth wired shut. Note that for this discussion I'm discounting "shoe bomber" types as not really having a capability for harm. I suppose that at the end of the day, that's who techniques like these are aimed at in the first place. Alas, there is no such thing as perfect security.
justzisguyuknow 11y ago
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.
venomsnake 11y ago
TL:DR - mostly listen and give them enough rope to hang themselves.
enesunal 11y ago
lying is an art, and only an artist can see that art.
rayiner 11y ago
Seems to bear a lot of similarity to standard deposition/examination technique. Because a lot of important things are decided on a paper record the standard techniques involve asking open ended questions and drilling down to details, often going back to cover the same ground again, hoping to elicit testimony that's implausible or contradictory.
adekok 11y ago
There are ways to work around this. The key is to not lie, but to tell a different truth. I used to do this in high school, when my parents were grilling me. Friday night: go out with quiet friends. Saturday AM questioning: "How was your evening?" "Fine". "OK". Saturday night, go out with less quiet friends. :) The Sunday AM questioning was rather more rigorous. So I described what I did Friday. There were telling hesitations, of course. But 90% of the questions had immediate and honest answers. Just with the day changed.
- adekok 11y ago
  And no, I don't recommend lying to border guards. :(
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Too late, you are already added in TSA's extra-check list from your previous comment.
- kenjackson 11y ago
  Seems like this would leave you open to date inconsistencies... "Oh, that's weird, I saw that they closed the theatre last night due to a water leak -- how did you watch a movie at it?"
- hackuser 11y ago
  Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your parents how much they really knew.
  - adekok 11y ago
    What makes you think I'm not already a parent?
watsonc73 11y ago
From what I understand you typically need a 'base-line' of normality to know when someone has deviated from that. People can get nervous or make mistakes at any point. The best way to set the base-line is to have a general conversation to put them at ease and then ask the more consequential questions. This could lead to longer queues though which would be an unfortunate side effect. TL;DR Use the deviation from the base-line to work out if someone is lying.
- veb 11y ago
  That's how the polygraphing process works, right? Isn't that generally regarded as useless?
  - watsonc73 11y ago
    In short yes but the approach I've seen work is less 'science' and more about judgement calls when analysing micro expressions. Without the base-line, it's hard to work out what a normal reaction is and what could potentially be a tell.
- mratzloff 11y ago
  Incidentally, this is how I interview people. Random BS for 5-10 minutes followed by interview questions. It also works for one on ones with staff to tell a recent funny anecdote about some subject they're interested in to get them to breathe and open up a little.
  - watsonc73 11y ago
    I do the same when interviewing. I came across this technique when looking at a Body Language course hosted by Vanessa Van Edwards. Most of it was superfluous but I thought the parts around 'reading' the truth from non verbal clues was very interesting.
vidarh 11y ago
I read "What every body is saying" by Joe Navarro, an ex. FBI agent a few years back, and one of things it spent a lot of time on was tearing apart the notion that we can recognise liars by body language without knowing them well first. People do have "tells", but as the article says, they vary wildly from person to person. They're still interesting to look out for, though, as they're helpful hints to let you direct your conversation to probe at areas that makes someone nervous and/or to figure out what someones different tells means.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  I think poker is another area where people think that the ability to identify "tells" or read people's body language is what matters most, but are mistaken. When really you are rarely going to have played enough with a person to identify a tell, know what an identified tell implies (lie or truth) exactly, or experience an identified tell and its truth value in a spot where it would have changed the outcome.
  - kofejnik 11y ago
    I believe you are quite wrong. Tells are real and they work, although they do differ from person to person, and expert opponents might deliberately give deceitful tells. Source: used to play a lot of live poker.
    - TheCowboy 11y ago
      I played professionally for a number of years. A lot of Internet and live. I also have a large number of friends from the scene as well. That's fine if you believe that, but it is possible to be a winning live player and not use tells. Tells being used are more anecdotes than typical situations that come up. At live poker, the number of hands ranges from 15 to 30 per hour. Most hands don't go to showdown, so you simply never get the information you need. Unless you are playing higher stakes with a smaller player pool, or a small home game, you may not have the same opponent at your table for a long time even if they're a regular. Giving off tells assumes that opponents are perceptive enough to notice, or naive enough to fall for overly obviously tells. This is asking too much for a lot of weaker opponents. And most people won't be involved in the hand and paying attention. The most useful "tells" may not even qualify as such. They're usually weak or bad players trying their hand at bad acting in a way that tends to be obvious after you've played enough. You also run into the problem that even amateurs can familiarize themselves with tells and try giving off "reverse tells" which reduces it to a game of "leveling". Most of the time the best decision is irrelevant of whatever behavior an opponent is perceived to be exhibiting. If I'm following through on a bluff against an opponent on a flush draw (comes 35% of the time if they see the turn and river), and their draw comes in and they sigh "guess I'm beat" and shove into me on the river, I can't call with ten-high.
jqm 11y ago
Cops have been doing something like this for a long time. Most times I have gotten pulled over for simple speeding there is always a question about where I'm going, where I'm coming from and sometimes a few more "casual" questions as well. And I'm not even suspicious looking. I also wondered why where I was coming from had any relevance to the speed I was currently driving but always sort of figured it was some kind of fishing technique.
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
One thing's certain. The U.S. Government wasted billions of taxpayer money training TSA agents--often recruited from ads on pizza boxes--in useless behavior analysis techniques.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  If you view TSA not as an organization designed to prevent attacks, but rather as an employment (employes people who would be flipping burgers instead) and contracting agency (provides billions of dollars for security companies who design "behavioral techniques" or make machines called "Rapiscan") then you see as a very successful agency.
- Asbostos 11y ago
  You want to see useless security theater, go to China. Every building has a live-on-site guard who's entirely unable to detect or prevent thefts, won't intervene in a fight, or do anything other than lock the doors at night. Some of them wear military style clothes and have prominently displayed riot gear (shields and sticks), despite being clearly too frail to actually hold back anybody determined. Train stations x-ray your bags, not just for going to the train but also for access to the ticket office. They don't notice/care if you go through with kitchen knives in your bag, despite the recent terrorist attack that was done using knives. You can sometimes bypass the X-ray by just walking past and refusing to put you bag in it too! A Beijing train station has a podium outside with a soldier standing on it holding a stick. Not sure what that's for.
paulhauggis 11y ago
Its funny how no method seems acceptable here on hn. Maybe its better to do nothing and wait to be attacked?
beachstartup 11y ago
i lie every time i go on vacation by myself. after having to explain myself one time for absolutely no reason, now i just don't even bother. apparently traveling alone for pleasure is highly suspicious. i tell them i'm traveling on business, or act vaguely rude to the border agent with very curt responses. apparently they're good at filtering the real liars because i've never been hassled since.
- deleted 11y ago
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veb 11y ago
I grew up very deaf. I went to mainstream schools, I did everything everyone else would do... except hear much at all. I wore hearing aids which helped somewhat, but that just makes all that jumbled noise louder, which isn't that helpful. I was deaf since birth. So at a very early age I picked up body-language, micro-expressions and of course lip-reading which were rather an integral way for me to communicate! > "The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of body language" Um. Yes there is. Everyone uses body-language. Everyone uses their mouth, their eyes and their hands. Take in sign language. While it's not the same in every country, someone fluent in any sign language can understand BSL (Brazil Sign Language) or NZSL (New Zealand...), ASL etc. Why? Because sign language is the most literal thing you can think of. If I look at someone and point to them, then point to someone else, what do you suppose that means? The only issue is local dialect/slang which is easy enough to figure out. I'd like this BBC article to try this on deaf people and see what the results would be. It would be extremely different. Even for people who just wear hearing aids: a frown, does not mean anger... it means they're trying to understand you. If that person misheard a previous question, but then didn't mishear it the second time then... are they lying? No. For myself in particular, when I was trying to have conversation with people I had a few difficulties. For this, think of dyslexia, say the brains language processor. For some people with dyslexia an example sentence could look like: "I ___ to ___ shop ___ the ______ ____ ___ car". It's exactly the same for someone who is deaf. However, they need to be working that language processor in their head 300% capacity. Not only are you lip-reading, using sound from your hearing aids, you're factoring in context, location, the person talking to you, body-language and so on. So a deaf person, will then fill in those blanks in my above example and hope they got it right. Except, by that stage, more has been said and you're now trying to remember what was said just a few minutes ago. Then you're defeated. However, if you watched my body language in ann airport you'd probably shoot me or whatever customs does. I'd be the ideal 'liar' that this BBC article refers to. Since I got my cochlear implant, (I jumped from 4% hearing to something like 80% upwards) my world has grown incredibly. Not only do I have my previous skills, but I can now add verbal input into my once stressed language processor. It's incredible what I can pick up on. Now that I have that extra sense/input, I find that I can tell whether someone is not being truthful or honest. Another poster here said that "give them enough rope to hang themselves with" and that's very true. Someone rambling? Watch their hands. Someone straight to the point, confident, and uses no body language -- very confident of themselves. So simply throw them off. Does their attitude change? If it does, what does that mean? Context comes into play here, and customs simply don't have the time. Nor will Police. Someone trying to explain the minute details of their drive to work, watch their eyes and see where they go (looks you in the eye, wall, phone?). Then stop. Who exactly remembers details that they've got no reason to remember? So they'll tell the short version, 'cos they have done it 1,000 times. Then if you're probed such as this article says... you'll end up getting anxious, and contradict yourself. "oh, maybe I did take Stuart Street...". I am a firm believer that body language is really a good way to determine language nuances, even in different languages. It works. I've been friends with people who didn't know English, but I could communicate with them effectively enough. Giving someone a few weeks of body language training, is going to do squat. Getting experts, again I'm not sure -- have they ever had to rely on it? Perhaps they should wear headphones with whitenoise and interrogate people, with someone who is listening -- and compare notes. I kind of feel like writing a blog post to refute this article, with proper examples etc. Would anyone be interested? I apologise if I sound disjointed it's 3am in NZ right now, and I just had the need to go "no this is not quite right". P.S. When I went to Singapore, a customs person glared at me and nodded to the guy with the gun and so I smiled and I said, "Hi! I hope you haven't had a horrible night so far -- hopefully my documentation is in order and you'll not have to deal with boring stuff!" and she went from >:{ to :-) and nodded to the gun guy walking behind me, who turned around back to his spot. I got all that from a split second glance. It's actually even easier for me now with my implant to do this sort of thing in case actual spoken communication is required. EDIT: As per article, it is common sense -- but you need to know someone well enough to take judgement, which these guys have no time for. Speaking for myself, I learned over a long period of time to do that as quick as possible. Otherwise, I'd have been left to fail.
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
Good lies are mostly truths...
pelario 11y ago
Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. It strikes me to the degree that the folklore is mixed with the (so called dubious) science. I was always interested in the topic, and had indeed read a book when I was teenager, with ideas such as the iconic example of Clinton touching his nose. About 5 years ago I went to the topic again; learned that one of the biggest authority in the topic was Paul Ekman and read a couple of his books Surprise surprise, the main takeaways were ideas such as: (...) not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies. Or There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out. Ekman repeated all over the place that there is no body language for lies, only for emotions, and that the emotions can have a variety of causes. And that was already clear the last century! If some security entity has bought something that promised to spot lies, it was probably folklore-based and no science-based.
jeffdavis 11y ago
I would guess that the success of these methods is also dependent on the stakes. Asking how honest someone is might get them to confess a small misdeed, but not a nafarious plot. The general technique is probably effective though.
casion 11y ago
These sort of things really bother me, because they cause me a lot of trouble. I am really uncomfortable in front of people, and no matter how honest I am, I am show my discomfort in interacting with people quite a lot. I look around the room while talking to people, I shuffle around, sometimes I sweat just talking about the weather... I have social anxiety obviously, but it's awkward to start a conversation with anyone by saying, "Oh hey, this interaction is going to be really awkward because I have social anxiety." I tried it for a while and most people seemed to just blow it off. It's caused me quite a few issues with friends who frequently think I'm lying when asked 'truth-seeking questions. More importantly authority figures tend to misinterpret this as me being deceptive or uncooperative. --- The most recent example was a police officer that came to my house to see if I had seen my neighbor's car recently. The car had been stolen and they were trying to determine the last known time it was present. As usual, during the rather normal questions I was rocking back and forth, chewing on my nails and shuffling my feet. I'm painfully aware of these things and consciously try to stop each little tick, one by one. It didn't take long for the officer to ask why I was so nervous, and the he promptly switched the subject and asked if I had any hobbies. I'm fairly obsessive about my hobbies, and I pretty much immediately started rambling about what I was doing. I suspect I stopped most of my 'nervous ticks', because he interrupted my ramble to ask why I was lying about not having seen the car lately. It was extremely offputting, since I wasn't lying. I got really nervous again, and started thinking about how I 'screwed up' the interaction. Instead of responding to his question I simply told him that I had really bad social anxiety and this questioning was really difficult for me. That didn't help at all. I ended up with another officer at my door, with more questions that I had no answers to, and I became more and more nervous. Needless to say this went on for ~30 minutes just standing at my front door until I suppose they realized that I was either telling the truth, or was a completely unreliable witness (I was!). --- Things like that aren't rare for me. It sucks, and early in my life it caused me to simply lie a lot. People almost always thought I was 'up to something' or 'not telling the true', so I would just go with it. I eventually learned the value of consistent honesty, but I am treated the same regardless. It goes without saying that this being in my head during every single personal encounter causes me even more anxiety and unsuredness about my responses to someone. edit: I noticed I actually started rocking back and forth and itching my head randomly while writing this post... bleh.
btilly 11y ago
Reading this article reminds me of how the STAR interviewing technique manages to drag truthful answers out of candidates about what you really want to know about them: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star-interview_b_3310122.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star-i...
j_s 11y ago
Any pointers on how to flip this around and purposely use body language to consciously reinforce what I'm trying to say rather than accidentally undermine it?
yakult 11y ago
Lie detection via facial cues / body language strikes me as the sort of thing best done with a neural network: thousands of tiny noisy cues each with very weak correlations that need to be combined with solid statistics. Humans can't process this many cues at once and bias drowns out the signal, but a smart NN hooked up to a powerful camera is another story. The 'active' method in the article is useful, but has a limitation: you need to be able to ask questions in real-time. Collating the answers and automating truth evaluation would be a pretty interesting AI problem. It should also be possible to have an AI formulate the statistically optimum questions to ask, Akinator style. P.s. That would be the killer app for Google Glass, right there. Would also increase chance of being thrown out of pubs by 1000%, but hey.
pm24601 11y ago
Can an informed liar counter this technique? It would be really cool if the liars were rehearsed in the technique.
joe_the_user 11y ago
The whole procedure seems to hinge on catching some people assigned to engage in a naive effort at deception - people who have constructed a story from whole cloth. It seems likely that anyone attempted a sophisticated act of deception wouldn't invent a story but rather take their true experiences and rearrange them to fill holes where things they wouldn't describe are, giving them an unlimited number of true details to recite. Spending some time on learning the rearrangement would give someone a stronger grasp of their supposed itinerary than the average person has of their actual itinerary. Which is to say this probably catches confused people and people hiding harmless but embarrassing facts but probably isn't useful against "determined evil doers".
ionised 11y ago
I consider myself one of history's finest liars.

256 points by williamhpark 11y ago

You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.

bhouston 11y ago
You probably are not Arab then... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/palestine-israel-west-bank-americans-detained-ben-gurion.html http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/palestine-... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-border-entry-denied-arab-americans-jordan.html# http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-bor... http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-american-two-arab-american-womens-story-of-being-detained-and-interrogated-at-ben-gurion http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-...
personlurking 11y ago
I once vacationed in Colombia and upon return to the States (I'm American) was questioned by two 'tough guys' upon entry. I was with my brother and they both asked us 3-4 rapid-fire simple, unopen questions, repeating the questions in virtually the same ways about 3 different times in just a few minutes. Our only thought in the moment was they must have been simpletons or simply bad at their job. - Why were you there? - Vacation. - How long were you there? - 2 weeks. - Who did you go with? - Him (points to brother) Treating people like idiots, and while asking dumb questions, doesn't seem to be the best way to spot a liar. I'm glad the science of it is improving.
paganel 11y ago
The way I see it there are at least two possible ways to "fight" against this, that is if you're on the liar's side. The first one is to offer to whoever is questioning you a "local maximum" victory, i.e. to pretend to hide a smaller lie compared to the bigger one you're supposed to be hiding. In the case you mentioned, you could pretend to be "covering up" the fact that you've been cheating on your SO, hence all the non-concordances related to your past locations. When the guys questioning you finally realize that you're lying on something, they'd think you had been doing so out of fear of not being seen as an unfaithful spouse, when in reality you want to blow things up (just to give an example). The downside to this strategy is that this fails when the "admission criteria" is 0 and 1, you're either a liar, which means you're out, or not, which means you're in. The one mitigating factor is that almost everybody lies all the time. The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling. This is a little sociopath bordering on schizophrenic, but I've seen some people doing it almost to perfection (granted, the stakes were not very high). The one weak point of this is that you have to know exactly when and how to push the on/off switch.
- adekok 11y ago
  > The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling. That is harder than it sounds. Even sociopaths have a hard time outright lying. Or keeping lies straight. The technique being used here is one of consistency. Is your story consistent? Does it have all of the details one expects from a normal story? Are there any hesitations when recalling the story? It is very difficult to come up with consistent and detailed lies on a moments notice. The better approach (used by lying CEOs on news shows) is to have a different story that you tell in detail.
  - nucleardog 11y ago
    If you have time to prepare your lies then it just requires a sort of reframing. Do all your imagining ahead of time. Walk through and construct the lie. Fill in the details. You're not just imagining this one thing, you're imagining an entire alternate reality where this thing is true and all the implications that follow from that. When it comes time to answer questions the person is asking about the alternate reality you've imagined. No need to make things up - just recall back. I guess I'm saying the same thing as you, just in a different way - don't make something up on a moments notice, just have a different story that you tell.
- pandler 11y ago
  I find it's sometimes easier to convince someone that you are lying when you aren't. I usually only do that when I am trying to pull someone into a prank, and I need them to believe something. Most people will pick up on the easy body language and verbal cues of a lie, and they won't consider that it's just a facade. Now that I think of it, I see that happen quite a bit at the poker table too. You can draw chips out of other players by making them think that you're just trying to bluff, but you really have a good hand.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling One of my favorite quips from the internet is: All really good salesmen temporarily believe whatever bullshit they are selling at the time. It's kind of like method acting. They're not lying if they believe it themselves!
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oe 11y ago
I've seen this in London too. I don't mind it. It's probably more effective than all the other security theatrics in an airport.

zamalek 11y ago

> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because of the useless information we don't know if it's true either.

rwmj 11y ago
After a bit of searching it's probably this study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis Granhag, Pär; Strömwall, Leid (2004). The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  No, that's from 11 years ago. The actual paper was linked lower down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180932
  - rwmj 11y ago
    I'm talking about the "study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy" which was asked by the grandparent post, not the paper by the people interviewed in the article.
    - mavhc 11y ago
      When will journalists reach the high standards of wikipedia and link to their sources?
      - DonHopkins 11y ago
        When they're no longer paid to lie.

deleted 11y ago

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reitanqild 11y ago
> How is it possible that academic research remains so awful at disseminating knowledge - presenting results in an open, accessible manner isn't exactly difficult? Read to me less like academic research and more like a before/after show by the training consultant. But I only read if very fast.

Sharlin 11y ago

So, what's the rate of false positives, given that only 1 in 1000 is a true positive?

tomchristie 11y ago
From the source: "CCE agents identified 24 times more mock passengers (66%; 60% at Month 1 and 72% at Month 6) than suspicious signs agents (3%; 6% at Month 1 and 0% at Month 6)" ... "base rates of identification of genuine travelers identified as being deceptive in the 6 months before the trial (1 in 1,247 passengers) did not differ during the trial with suspicious signs (1 in 1,219 passengers), or CCE (1 in 1,295 passengers)" So my reading is 2/3 mock passengers identified as true positives, 1/1000 real passengers identified as false positives. (With some provisos as noted in the paper)

tomchristie 11y ago

The paper itself: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf

smegel 11y ago

> Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. Yet juries in rape trials supposedly do it all the time...or don't they?

Udo 11y ago
Why single out rape trials specifically?
- smegel 11y ago
  Are any other kinds of trials little more than a game of spot-the-liar?
- netrus 11y ago
  Rape is interesting in this regard because it is an especially severe crime that might be very hard to proof. Murder has a body and a weapon, but rape might be indistinguishable from consensual sex, when you just look at hard physical evidence (medical examination, text messages, ...). If you want to give justice to most rape victims, you have to decide who is lying, and who is saying the truth.
  - draugadrotten 11y ago
    > If you want to give justice to most rape victims, you have to decide who is lying, and who is saying the truth. It is also possible that both victim and rapist are telling the truth, but it still is an open question if it's a rape. Example: Julian Assange case with the broken condom.
  - seren 11y ago
    Most white collar crimes also fall in that category. Was it pure negligence or was it engineered ?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Rape is also a crime where people incorrectly judge what a real victim acts like, and are likely to assume actual victims are lying.

benihana 11y ago

>Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. What is ironic about that? If I understand how to lie to other humans, why is it anything but expected that I would be able to recognize that skill in other people?

rogeryu 11y ago
If you as a liar are good at detecting liars, then wouldn't it be logical that you could detect honesty as well, being the opposite? Well then take the opposite. What about honest people, do they recognize honest people better? I don't know, just asking, wondering. It could even be that honest people recognize honesty better than liars, while at the same time liars are better lie detectors. Then there has to be a middle group I guess - what are they?
- balfirevic 11y ago
  Presumably, liars don't lie all the time, so they do both lying and honesty enough to be able to tell the difference. I also don't really know, but it sounds plausible :)
- kaoD 11y ago
  The difference: lies pretend to sound honest, while honesty doesn't pretend to sound like lies.
Drdrdrq 11y ago
For one thing, you can never be sure if they really detected a liar or they are just lying about it. ;-)
lazyant 11y ago
Also 'crazy' people were more apt at recognizing other people with mental problems that the doctors

samuellb 11y ago

Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go. Once I had to work with a freelance web master and we were trying to cancel his contract and make him transfer the domain name to us (an association I was working for). I confronted him by asking politely for a written copy of his contract because I thought he was lying about the length of the contract. He was insulted and claimed there was a verbal agreement several years ago. I don't know if he was right or wrong about that, but after that he would make up things about basically anything (such as, that changing the owner/registrar of our domain would cause his other customers' files to be deleted etc.). We now offered him money to break out of the "contract" early, but now he was already stuck in his lies. If he would say that it was technically possible to move the domain name, he would also expose his earlier lies. After almost a year of arguing with him, he offered to transfer the domain before the end of the "contract". But for "technical reasons" it had to be done after the hosting company had shut down the web site and e-mail, which caused some downtime for us. In retrospect it would have been much easier if I hadn't questioned him in the first time.

jimworm 11y ago
Pointing out a lie does little when it can't be punished with consequences; you were relying on the freelancer's conscience for a favourable outcome. Border agents have the law, manpower, firepower, and territory on their side and are ready to use it at a moment's notice.
zhte415 11y ago
Great example. Perhaps questioning him too and him feeling he was being pushed too far broke his implicit sense of trust, feeling loss of favourability. It may have been a verbal agreement. It may have been his interpretation / perception of a verbal agreement (warped by assumptions, or by time), or it may have been a lie. Hard to tell. A nice simple example that I'll remember, thanks.
IshKebab 11y ago
But that's a different goal - you worked out he was a liar easily. If you want to get someone to do something then yes you have to use different techniques (allow them to save face etc.).

dovereconomics 11y ago

Spotting petty liars is the least of one's problem. As normal people expose more information in the Internet, it becomes increasingly difficult to be a liar, almost impossible. Still, the 'big lies' are just getting stronger and these techniques are useless on them. How many political identities can be dismantled by 'surprise'?

hessenwolf 11y ago

But they tested it with fake liars, who, in my humble opinion, are less likely to exhibit emotions, and more likely to be too lazy to come up with good details on the fly for back stories. Maybe it is just me that is sweatier and wilier when stressed.

piokoch 11y ago

"Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans" It is so sad that nowdays it is not seen as absurdal that some kind of policeman is asking passangers about their travel plans. The journalist get excited that new methods of catching "cheating passangers" are beind developed. Apparently in the brave new World we have created this is considered normal.

JonnieCache 11y ago
Have border guards not always asked those questions? I'm pretty sure it's been like that since before the 20th century.
- splat 11y ago
  Border guards and passports as we conceive them didn't really exist until the 20th century. The historian Paul Fussell wrote in his book Abroad: "[B]efore 1915 His Majesty's Government did not require a passport for departure, nor did any European state require one for admittance except the two notoriously backward and neurotic countries of Russia and the Ottoman Empire." And it wasn't until 1945 that Americans were generally required to hold a passport to travel abroad during peacetime. [1] [1]: http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html
  - JonnieCache 11y ago
    Thanks, I was vaguely aware that it was around the turn of the century that these things came in. An american in 1940 may not have needed a passport to leave, but would they have needed one to get in somewhere else? Surely the nations of europe at that time would have been suspicious of basically everyone?
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - rayiner 11y ago

j_s 11y ago

In the 3-season TV show Lie to Me (IMDB: 8.0), the protagonist relies on "micro-expressions" to catch criminals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
Like many theories coming from psychology, micro-expressions are a story without a proof. It's probably the same projection of the investigator's suspicions that takes place when reading tea leaves.
dalore 11y ago
Great show. But the article does mention micro-expressions: > Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions” that might give the game away. but then goes on to say: > ... this too seems to have been disproved.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Basically all kinds of things can indicate stress factors. Stress can indicate lying, but it can also indicate a whole host of other things such as someone getting frustrated about the entire situation, or worried that you seem to think they might be lying... You can spot liars based on body language, but then you first need to know how that specific person reacts in normal situations vs. when they're lying.

thom 11y ago

"Lying is a skill like any other, and if you want to maintain a level of excellence, you have to practise constantly." Words every founder should live by. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg

tbbreener 11y ago

Crossing into the US from Canada, its seems that boarder officials have always asked those type of questions.

justzisguyuknow 11y ago

This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.

jshap70 11y ago
Except I am bad with names, so when they ask somebody's name and you can't remember it then you get pulled aside for more questioning.
- veb 11y ago
  Or if you didn't hear the persons name properly or have a speech impediment ...
patcheudor 11y ago
I do wonder, and this is a serious question. Why would someone trying to be deceitful because they have something very serious to hide even take the chance on speaking with a security agent? I'm not suggesting they "plead the fifth," but rather carry a card explaining that they are mute. Doctors papers are easy to forge. If the incident leading to the condition happened recently, then that would be an excuse for not knowing sign language. Yes, they may still need to write their answers, but it is universally accepted that most people don't like to write so they could keep their answers brief without raising suspicion. By writing slowly, they may even drive the interviewer to the point they cut the questioning short. Very serious bad guys could even get a botox injection beforehand, paralyzing their lips or get their mouth wired shut. My point is that at the end of the day, the goal here is to catch very serious bad guys. Any truly dangerous person with the intent and actual capability to do something very bad should have tools of deceit on par with their capabilities for harm up to and including getting one's mouth wired shut. Note that for this discussion I'm discounting "shoe bomber" types as not really having a capability for harm. I suppose that at the end of the day, that's who techniques like these are aimed at in the first place. Alas, there is no such thing as perfect security.

justzisguyuknow 11y ago

venomsnake 11y ago

TL:DR - mostly listen and give them enough rope to hang themselves.

enesunal 11y ago

lying is an art, and only an artist can see that art.

rayiner 11y ago

Seems to bear a lot of similarity to standard deposition/examination technique. Because a lot of important things are decided on a paper record the standard techniques involve asking open ended questions and drilling down to details, often going back to cover the same ground again, hoping to elicit testimony that's implausible or contradictory.

adekok 11y ago

There are ways to work around this. The key is to not lie, but to tell a different truth. I used to do this in high school, when my parents were grilling me. Friday night: go out with quiet friends. Saturday AM questioning: "How was your evening?" "Fine". "OK". Saturday night, go out with less quiet friends. :) The Sunday AM questioning was rather more rigorous. So I described what I did Friday. There were telling hesitations, of course. But 90% of the questions had immediate and honest answers. Just with the day changed.

adekok 11y ago
And no, I don't recommend lying to border guards. :(
- coldtea 11y ago
  Too late, you are already added in TSA's extra-check list from your previous comment.
kenjackson 11y ago
Seems like this would leave you open to date inconsistencies... "Oh, that's weird, I saw that they closed the theatre last night due to a water leak -- how did you watch a movie at it?"
hackuser 11y ago
Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your parents how much they really knew.
- adekok 11y ago
  What makes you think I'm not already a parent?

watsonc73 11y ago

From what I understand you typically need a 'base-line' of normality to know when someone has deviated from that. People can get nervous or make mistakes at any point. The best way to set the base-line is to have a general conversation to put them at ease and then ask the more consequential questions. This could lead to longer queues though which would be an unfortunate side effect. TL;DR Use the deviation from the base-line to work out if someone is lying.

veb 11y ago
That's how the polygraphing process works, right? Isn't that generally regarded as useless?
- watsonc73 11y ago
  In short yes but the approach I've seen work is less 'science' and more about judgement calls when analysing micro expressions. Without the base-line, it's hard to work out what a normal reaction is and what could potentially be a tell.
mratzloff 11y ago
Incidentally, this is how I interview people. Random BS for 5-10 minutes followed by interview questions. It also works for one on ones with staff to tell a recent funny anecdote about some subject they're interested in to get them to breathe and open up a little.
- watsonc73 11y ago
  I do the same when interviewing. I came across this technique when looking at a Body Language course hosted by Vanessa Van Edwards. Most of it was superfluous but I thought the parts around 'reading' the truth from non verbal clues was very interesting.

vidarh 11y ago

I read "What every body is saying" by Joe Navarro, an ex. FBI agent a few years back, and one of things it spent a lot of time on was tearing apart the notion that we can recognise liars by body language without knowing them well first. People do have "tells", but as the article says, they vary wildly from person to person. They're still interesting to look out for, though, as they're helpful hints to let you direct your conversation to probe at areas that makes someone nervous and/or to figure out what someones different tells means.

TheCowboy 11y ago
I think poker is another area where people think that the ability to identify "tells" or read people's body language is what matters most, but are mistaken. When really you are rarely going to have played enough with a person to identify a tell, know what an identified tell implies (lie or truth) exactly, or experience an identified tell and its truth value in a spot where it would have changed the outcome.
- kofejnik 11y ago
  I believe you are quite wrong. Tells are real and they work, although they do differ from person to person, and expert opponents might deliberately give deceitful tells. Source: used to play a lot of live poker.
  - TheCowboy 11y ago
    I played professionally for a number of years. A lot of Internet and live. I also have a large number of friends from the scene as well. That's fine if you believe that, but it is possible to be a winning live player and not use tells. Tells being used are more anecdotes than typical situations that come up. At live poker, the number of hands ranges from 15 to 30 per hour. Most hands don't go to showdown, so you simply never get the information you need. Unless you are playing higher stakes with a smaller player pool, or a small home game, you may not have the same opponent at your table for a long time even if they're a regular. Giving off tells assumes that opponents are perceptive enough to notice, or naive enough to fall for overly obviously tells. This is asking too much for a lot of weaker opponents. And most people won't be involved in the hand and paying attention. The most useful "tells" may not even qualify as such. They're usually weak or bad players trying their hand at bad acting in a way that tends to be obvious after you've played enough. You also run into the problem that even amateurs can familiarize themselves with tells and try giving off "reverse tells" which reduces it to a game of "leveling". Most of the time the best decision is irrelevant of whatever behavior an opponent is perceived to be exhibiting. If I'm following through on a bluff against an opponent on a flush draw (comes 35% of the time if they see the turn and river), and their draw comes in and they sigh "guess I'm beat" and shove into me on the river, I can't call with ten-high.

jqm 11y ago

Cops have been doing something like this for a long time. Most times I have gotten pulled over for simple speeding there is always a question about where I'm going, where I'm coming from and sometimes a few more "casual" questions as well. And I'm not even suspicious looking. I also wondered why where I was coming from had any relevance to the speed I was currently driving but always sort of figured it was some kind of fishing technique.

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

One thing's certain. The U.S. Government wasted billions of taxpayer money training TSA agents--often recruited from ads on pizza boxes--in useless behavior analysis techniques.

rdtsc 11y ago
If you view TSA not as an organization designed to prevent attacks, but rather as an employment (employes people who would be flipping burgers instead) and contracting agency (provides billions of dollars for security companies who design "behavioral techniques" or make machines called "Rapiscan") then you see as a very successful agency.
Asbostos 11y ago
You want to see useless security theater, go to China. Every building has a live-on-site guard who's entirely unable to detect or prevent thefts, won't intervene in a fight, or do anything other than lock the doors at night. Some of them wear military style clothes and have prominently displayed riot gear (shields and sticks), despite being clearly too frail to actually hold back anybody determined. Train stations x-ray your bags, not just for going to the train but also for access to the ticket office. They don't notice/care if you go through with kitchen knives in your bag, despite the recent terrorist attack that was done using knives. You can sometimes bypass the X-ray by just walking past and refusing to put you bag in it too! A Beijing train station has a podium outside with a soldier standing on it holding a stick. Not sure what that's for.

paulhauggis 11y ago

Its funny how no method seems acceptable here on hn. Maybe its better to do nothing and wait to be attacked?

beachstartup 11y ago

i lie every time i go on vacation by myself. after having to explain myself one time for absolutely no reason, now i just don't even bother. apparently traveling alone for pleasure is highly suspicious. i tell them i'm traveling on business, or act vaguely rude to the border agent with very curt responses. apparently they're good at filtering the real liars because i've never been hassled since.

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veb 11y ago

I grew up very deaf. I went to mainstream schools, I did everything everyone else would do... except hear much at all. I wore hearing aids which helped somewhat, but that just makes all that jumbled noise louder, which isn't that helpful. I was deaf since birth. So at a very early age I picked up body-language, micro-expressions and of course lip-reading which were rather an integral way for me to communicate! > "The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of body language" Um. Yes there is. Everyone uses body-language. Everyone uses their mouth, their eyes and their hands. Take in sign language. While it's not the same in every country, someone fluent in any sign language can understand BSL (Brazil Sign Language) or NZSL (New Zealand...), ASL etc. Why? Because sign language is the most literal thing you can think of. If I look at someone and point to them, then point to someone else, what do you suppose that means? The only issue is local dialect/slang which is easy enough to figure out. I'd like this BBC article to try this on deaf people and see what the results would be. It would be extremely different. Even for people who just wear hearing aids: a frown, does not mean anger... it means they're trying to understand you. If that person misheard a previous question, but then didn't mishear it the second time then... are they lying? No. For myself in particular, when I was trying to have conversation with people I had a few difficulties. For this, think of dyslexia, say the brains language processor. For some people with dyslexia an example sentence could look like: "I ___ to ___ shop ___ the ______ ____ ___ car". It's exactly the same for someone who is deaf. However, they need to be working that language processor in their head 300% capacity. Not only are you lip-reading, using sound from your hearing aids, you're factoring in context, location, the person talking to you, body-language and so on. So a deaf person, will then fill in those blanks in my above example and hope they got it right. Except, by that stage, more has been said and you're now trying to remember what was said just a few minutes ago. Then you're defeated. However, if you watched my body language in ann airport you'd probably shoot me or whatever customs does. I'd be the ideal 'liar' that this BBC article refers to. Since I got my cochlear implant, (I jumped from 4% hearing to something like 80% upwards) my world has grown incredibly. Not only do I have my previous skills, but I can now add verbal input into my once stressed language processor. It's incredible what I can pick up on. Now that I have that extra sense/input, I find that I can tell whether someone is not being truthful or honest. Another poster here said that "give them enough rope to hang themselves with" and that's very true. Someone rambling? Watch their hands. Someone straight to the point, confident, and uses no body language -- very confident of themselves. So simply throw them off. Does their attitude change? If it does, what does that mean? Context comes into play here, and customs simply don't have the time. Nor will Police. Someone trying to explain the minute details of their drive to work, watch their eyes and see where they go (looks you in the eye, wall, phone?). Then stop. Who exactly remembers details that they've got no reason to remember? So they'll tell the short version, 'cos they have done it 1,000 times. Then if you're probed such as this article says... you'll end up getting anxious, and contradict yourself. "oh, maybe I did take Stuart Street...". I am a firm believer that body language is really a good way to determine language nuances, even in different languages. It works. I've been friends with people who didn't know English, but I could communicate with them effectively enough. Giving someone a few weeks of body language training, is going to do squat. Getting experts, again I'm not sure -- have they ever had to rely on it? Perhaps they should wear headphones with whitenoise and interrogate people, with someone who is listening -- and compare notes. I kind of feel like writing a blog post to refute this article, with proper examples etc. Would anyone be interested? I apologise if I sound disjointed it's 3am in NZ right now, and I just had the need to go "no this is not quite right". P.S. When I went to Singapore, a customs person glared at me and nodded to the guy with the gun and so I smiled and I said, "Hi! I hope you haven't had a horrible night so far -- hopefully my documentation is in order and you'll not have to deal with boring stuff!" and she went from >:{ to :-) and nodded to the gun guy walking behind me, who turned around back to his spot. I got all that from a split second glance. It's actually even easier for me now with my implant to do this sort of thing in case actual spoken communication is required. EDIT: As per article, it is common sense -- but you need to know someone well enough to take judgement, which these guys have no time for. Speaking for myself, I learned over a long period of time to do that as quick as possible. Otherwise, I'd have been left to fail.

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

Good lies are mostly truths...

pelario 11y ago

Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. It strikes me to the degree that the folklore is mixed with the (so called dubious) science. I was always interested in the topic, and had indeed read a book when I was teenager, with ideas such as the iconic example of Clinton touching his nose. About 5 years ago I went to the topic again; learned that one of the biggest authority in the topic was Paul Ekman and read a couple of his books Surprise surprise, the main takeaways were ideas such as: (...) not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies. Or There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out. Ekman repeated all over the place that there is no body language for lies, only for emotions, and that the emotions can have a variety of causes. And that was already clear the last century! If some security entity has bought something that promised to spot lies, it was probably folklore-based and no science-based.

jeffdavis 11y ago

I would guess that the success of these methods is also dependent on the stakes. Asking how honest someone is might get them to confess a small misdeed, but not a nafarious plot. The general technique is probably effective though.

casion 11y ago

These sort of things really bother me, because they cause me a lot of trouble. I am really uncomfortable in front of people, and no matter how honest I am, I am show my discomfort in interacting with people quite a lot. I look around the room while talking to people, I shuffle around, sometimes I sweat just talking about the weather... I have social anxiety obviously, but it's awkward to start a conversation with anyone by saying, "Oh hey, this interaction is going to be really awkward because I have social anxiety." I tried it for a while and most people seemed to just blow it off. It's caused me quite a few issues with friends who frequently think I'm lying when asked 'truth-seeking questions. More importantly authority figures tend to misinterpret this as me being deceptive or uncooperative. --- The most recent example was a police officer that came to my house to see if I had seen my neighbor's car recently. The car had been stolen and they were trying to determine the last known time it was present. As usual, during the rather normal questions I was rocking back and forth, chewing on my nails and shuffling my feet. I'm painfully aware of these things and consciously try to stop each little tick, one by one. It didn't take long for the officer to ask why I was so nervous, and the he promptly switched the subject and asked if I had any hobbies. I'm fairly obsessive about my hobbies, and I pretty much immediately started rambling about what I was doing. I suspect I stopped most of my 'nervous ticks', because he interrupted my ramble to ask why I was lying about not having seen the car lately. It was extremely offputting, since I wasn't lying. I got really nervous again, and started thinking about how I 'screwed up' the interaction. Instead of responding to his question I simply told him that I had really bad social anxiety and this questioning was really difficult for me. That didn't help at all. I ended up with another officer at my door, with more questions that I had no answers to, and I became more and more nervous. Needless to say this went on for ~30 minutes just standing at my front door until I suppose they realized that I was either telling the truth, or was a completely unreliable witness (I was!). --- Things like that aren't rare for me. It sucks, and early in my life it caused me to simply lie a lot. People almost always thought I was 'up to something' or 'not telling the true', so I would just go with it. I eventually learned the value of consistent honesty, but I am treated the same regardless. It goes without saying that this being in my head during every single personal encounter causes me even more anxiety and unsuredness about my responses to someone. edit: I noticed I actually started rocking back and forth and itching my head randomly while writing this post... bleh.

btilly 11y ago

Reading this article reminds me of how the STAR interviewing technique manages to drag truthful answers out of candidates about what you really want to know about them: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star-interview_b_3310122.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star-i...

j_s 11y ago

Any pointers on how to flip this around and purposely use body language to consciously reinforce what I'm trying to say rather than accidentally undermine it?

yakult 11y ago

Lie detection via facial cues / body language strikes me as the sort of thing best done with a neural network: thousands of tiny noisy cues each with very weak correlations that need to be combined with solid statistics. Humans can't process this many cues at once and bias drowns out the signal, but a smart NN hooked up to a powerful camera is another story. The 'active' method in the article is useful, but has a limitation: you need to be able to ask questions in real-time. Collating the answers and automating truth evaluation would be a pretty interesting AI problem. It should also be possible to have an AI formulate the statistically optimum questions to ask, Akinator style. P.s. That would be the killer app for Google Glass, right there. Would also increase chance of being thrown out of pubs by 1000%, but hey.

pm24601 11y ago

Can an informed liar counter this technique? It would be really cool if the liars were rehearsed in the technique.

joe_the_user 11y ago

The whole procedure seems to hinge on catching some people assigned to engage in a naive effort at deception - people who have constructed a story from whole cloth. It seems likely that anyone attempted a sophisticated act of deception wouldn't invent a story but rather take their true experiences and rearrange them to fill holes where things they wouldn't describe are, giving them an unlimited number of true details to recite. Spending some time on learning the rearrangement would give someone a stronger grasp of their supposed itinerary than the average person has of their actual itinerary. Which is to say this probably catches confused people and people hiding harmless but embarrassing facts but probably isn't useful against "determined evil doers".

ionised 11y ago

I consider myself one of history's finest liars.