Lying is a relatively universal action. Every single person will, at some point in their lives, stretch or bend the truth, to other people, to family members, to loved ones, and to themselves.
Many lies are told for fairly innocuous or even altruistic reasons. A lot of people in business might stretch their experience or “fake it” until they make it. Often people lie to save other people’s feelings or to make them feel better.
Sometimes we even lie to ourselves unintentionally through subconscious defence mechanisms like denial. This can create warped or even false memories, causing people to lie whilst genuinely believing something to be true.
The reason why therapy can be a slow process is that it involves breaking through these defence mechanisms, something that most people have set up to protect themselves from trauma.
However, some people have a tendency towards lying deliberately, either habitually or with malicious intent. Whilst all people will tell a lie once in a while as the lesser of two evils and are honest the rest of the time, habitual liars are the opposite.
Because of this prolific level of deception, there are, somewhat ironically, quite a few tells and traits that can give a liar away when they are attempting to hide their intentions.
Here are some examples and why liars do them.
Overcorrecting Expectations
The first set of traits to explore and examine are those that society already associates with deception and mistruth.
People who fidget, try to avoid looking into the eyes of their interlocutor or stumble over their words are treated with immense suspicion if not outright accusations, with these traits the sign of someone trying to make up the truth.
In practice, these can only spot a bad liar or one that is not truly experienced at being deceptive. This is the best-case scenario; in many other cases, the behaviours assumed to be connected to lying have no causal link.
According to a 2003 study by Bella DePaulo, most of the verbal and nonverbal cues associated with lying had either no correlation or a very minimal one in practice.
The reason for this is overcorrection. Many people who lie, particularly in high-stakes situations, are self-conscious about many of the behaviours associated with lying and will often correct them as much as possible.
They will retain eye contact and minimise their involuntary movements, as well as appropriately control their emotions during conversations, interviews and questioning.
Emotional Control
There are two assumptions about the emotions of liars, and both of them are wrong, as habitual liars know that their displays of emotion will be one of the most common telltale signs of potentially deceptive behaviour.
When discussing emotional events, habitual liars will not be cold and distant but often the opposite, crying and feigning powerful emotions that they believe they are expected to feel to manipulate their audience and convince them of their authenticity.
However, this is not always a clear-cut sign of lying either, and whilst some liars can put on a facade, they can also be emotional for genuine reasons. High-stress situations can lead to either much more intense emotions or lesser ones, neither of which entirely correlate with deception.
There are many examples of the families of missing people describing clearly the situation and their emotions but not displaying them overly overtly, partly as a result of trauma response and partly because they were reading a rehearsed statement, something that requires more focus.
This extends from vocal cues into nonverbal ones as well. Whilst people look for suspicious eye movements or expressions consistent with surprise and fear, many liars try to keep a straight face as much as possible.
Maintaining Eye Contact
Eyes are often seen as the window to the soul, which is the reason why averting one’s gaze is so quickly believed to be a trait common to a liar. It’s also why, in arguments, people sometimes demand that a person look them in the eyes and tell them something as a stamp of authenticity.
However, this tendency can also be manipulated by a habitual liar to make their story more believable, and they will, rather than look away when coming up with a lie, focus intently on maintaining that eye contact.
This can often, somewhat ironically, make it easier to spot a liar who fixes their gaze seemingly at all costs, particularly if one focuses on blinking.
People tend to blink less when they’re concentrating and then compensate afterwards, typically most commonly seen when reading, and studies suggest that a disruption to a typical pattern of blinking might be a sign of focused invention.
Minimising Detail Traps
One of the biggest changes in the philosophy behind interrogation and spotting liars is to focus closely less on how a liar describes a situation but more on what they say.
Habitual liars know that the more they say, the harder it is to ensure that their mistruths remain consistent both to reality and to themselves, so they will often consciously keep details as minimal as possible, even if they manage to say a lot.
This means that a lot of the details of a statement will be relatively sparse and correlate with already known information and truths, with fiction and fraud interwoven in the fabric of their lies. That is typically unverifiable.
This means that a common tactic used to catch a liar is to keep them talking and ask about specific details until they contradict either reality or their own statements. The more they say, the more they need to remember to stay consistent.
As many habitual liars prepare their lies, there is sometimes a disconnect between what they have prepared and what they might need to make up in the spur of the moment, and whilst liars are adept at creating a false reality very quickly, it also opens up room for contradictions.
This is also the case when they are asked to repeat their statement. Either the details and the way it is told will remain exactly the same, unlike a more honest account, or the details will shift so significantly that comparing the two will create clear contradictions.
