> 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.
Without knowing the experiment details (number of trials, ratio of people laying vs telling the truth) we don't know if 50 is actually significant. What's the curve of success for participants assuming random guessing (in line with the proportion of liars)? Is 50 to be expected?
My first thought is that with 20,000 participants, sheer chance will give you a handful of outliers, and 50 at 80% accuracy doesn't sound very high unless there were a very large number of trials per participant.
By my math, if each participant faced 25 trials, and each participant has a 50% chance of success on each trial, then you'd expect 40 people to get a score of 20+ (80%) just due to chance. To give an idea.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
>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?
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?
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.
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.
Are you sure he was a liar and not just an idiot? I had a boss who had some similar really deep-seated beliefs about the technical aspects of domain registration and hosting that he would stubbornly refuse to be corrected on. Oddly enough he's now running his own web development business...
Edit: Don't get me wrong, he was a pathological liar as well ;)
Perhaps, and I had this in mind when I talked to him. But it was also non-technical stuff. For instance, one time he said he was on vacation for a month, but then I talked to his friend the day after who insisted that he was not on vacation. And he claimed that a support person of the hosting company had said that the domain couldn't be transferred without deleting all his customers' files. When I asked the support directly, they said it was no problem at all. But I don't think he was doing this for the money (it wasn't much), I think it was more like saving his face, like IshKebab suggested.
You should have got what you wanted (domain transfer) before the question of his contract even came up. After clearing it first, I would have said someone higher than you (ideally having recently joined the organization) found out and made it a requirement that all domain names are owned by the organization. That way the freelancer wouldn't feel nearly as personally threatened.
Only then do you end the contract. (Kind of scary that the org didn't have a copy of his contract on file, though. Sounds disorganized.)
"Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go."
Agree almost never the right thing to do. Trapping people makes them dig in their heels typically as opposed to giving them a graceful way to give you what you want. All of this is situation specific of course but as a rule I never call people out on their lies in negotiation.
"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)."
Honestly, best way to handle this type of things is to go the "scary lawyer letter" route. Try nicely (without threatening) and if that fails get an attorney to write the "scary lawyer letter". At that point the idea of actually getting some money (rather than having to hire an attorney to defend a verbal contract) would seem very attractive. There are other methods that can be employed (UDRP, trademark law) however they are more expensive and depend on the specifics.
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'?
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.
"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.
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]
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?
What do you mean nowadays? 20 years ago if you wanted to drive from Poland to Germany, the Policeman would spend no less than 20 minutes interviewing you and everyone in your car about every single detail of your journey. In some cases they would order you out so they could unpack all of your luggage and look around the car for any contraband. Nowadays? Nowadays you get in the car and drive through the border, passing the "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" sign at motorway speeds. For flying - I wave my national issued id at the agent, they don't even bother scanning it. No need to have a passport either. Years before the agent would carefully examine your passport and ask questions like - I see a stamp saying that you visited Russia 5 years ago, why? It really is easier to travel nowadays,but people will keep finding problems and saying how much better it was years ago - it really wasn't.
Certainly your experience of a journey from communist Poland to Germany was full of Brave New World experiences. Now that that regime is gone, your travel is easier. The GP is pointing out that the rest of the world appears to be adopting the tactics that you encountered 20 years ago. Traveling to the US or Israel, for example.
Or traveling to the US, for that matter. I still don't understand why border guards ask incoming US citizens where they are going and what is the purpose of their travel.
I like to take things as I go (at least when planning seems like overkill, e.g. for non-critical things). This caught me by surprise the last time I flew into NYC from Europe. I had intended to get into the city and then call a friend I was staying with to meet up and go to their place from there. Naturally I didn't get the address before hand. They wouldn't let me into the country without an address on my dis-embarkment card. I had no signal so I couldn't call or look one up either. Absolutely ridiculous. Any address as long as it wasn't a fake one that they would notice to be fake once they entered it in the system would do. What an exercise in futility. It's unlikely that someone who intended to do something seriously criminal would give the correct address, therefore it is just a big waste of time and resources.
Flying to UK from where? When flying to the UK from Europe or USA nobody has ever asked me about the address where I would be spending the first night. USA does ask that.
Every time I've flown to the UK from the USA, the entry card has asked for an address in England. The first time (in 2005) I left it blank and they wouldn't let me pass immigration until I filled it out.
I got in to England without listing my friend's address, but the border guard seemed extremely suspicious and really grilled me about my travel plans, etc.
Something similar happened to me when I was about to take the train from Paris to London. I didn't have a reservation because I was planning my trip on the go. The agent was not pleased at all with that, but as the train made the last call to board, he just scolded me, told me that next time I really should make a reservation before visiting England... and then let me pass.
When I flew out of Chile recently they wanted to know the name and address of where I had stayed the previous night. Crazy that I may not have been able to leave if I couldn't remember that.
You're a US citizen? Just asking because the parent comment talked about hassles entering US as a citizen, so I am wondering if they really make it that stringent yet simultaneously pointless, even for citizens.
I said 20 years ago - after the fall of communism. The situation looked like that pretty much until we entered the EU in 2001. Funnily enough, passing the border was easier during communism,because so few people did it that the guards assumed that since you are holding a passport in your hand you must have gone through a very stringent process of obtaining one, and would mostly have a look at your picture, your visa if you had one and let you go quickly(passports also had to be returned to the government upon return to Poland, you had to apply again if you wanted to leave again). Then after 1989 anyone could get a passport whenever they wanted,so border controls became a lot more strict.
My mistake in misunderstanding your original point. However, my point stands in that travel within the EU, which for most countries is like traveling from one state/province to another, does not quite represent the increasing cumbersomeness of international travel to some countries.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I think questions at a border don't really fall under the fifth, as you're submitting to them voluntarily because you want to get in the country. You can refuse to answer any question, of course, but then the border agents can refuse to let you into the country.
I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be traveling under false pretenses for any number of reasons.
>I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be traveling under false pretenses for any number of reasons.
This is what I'm afraid of. Is travel on a plane now squarely reserved for the honest or those with nothing to hide? There are plenty of very legitimate reasons to travel under false pretenses, including it would seem, hiding from one's own government because of some irrational administrator who decides to use air travel restrictions to carry out a grudge. The restriction on travel, especially within the US as applied to US citizens is very disturbing as it represents a fundamental erosion of our freedoms. Take a look at this case as just one example:
It's hard to tell sarcasm over this medium, but are you suggesting that being asking someone questions about their travel plans and retaining notes derived from to the answers is not an appropriate power to give the TSA? Is there any country in the world where airport security doesn't have this power, and is it practically feasible?
I expect that that sort of situation is rare enough that the officers would simply play it safe and treat the person as suspicious. So it would probably be counter-productive if you were actually trying to hide something.
They reduced a woman I know to tears once. I've known her and her husband for decades; they're a perfectly ordinary, fairly devout Jewish couple who would never hurt anyone. I can't imagine why they felt the need to be so cruel.
No plane out of Ben Gurion has been hijacked in decades. For a high-traffic airport of a major city in one of the most hated countries in the world, that's pretty damn amazing.
It really isn't that impressive when you count the number of commercial flights that happen every year and how many planes are hijacked every year. The odds are already mind-bogglingly low per airport. Of course no one knows what the rate of hijackings out of Ben Gurion would be without their security.
Presumably they only care about false negatives, not false positives.
...which doesn't imply that a "just question 100% of the people" strategy would work—they need to question few enough people that the planes still leave on time and the airlines stay in business. But within that limit, it's in their best interest to be as trigger-happy with the detainments as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
151 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadOh 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.
My first thought is that with 20,000 participants, sheer chance will give you a handful of outliers, and 50 at 80% accuracy doesn't sound very high unless there were a very large number of trials per participant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis
Granhag, Pär; Strömwall, Leid (2004). The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts.
The actual paper was linked lower down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180932
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.
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)
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/palestine-...
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-bor...
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-...
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my favorite quips from the internet is:
They're not lying if they believe it themselves!Yet juries in rape trials supposedly do it all the time...or don't they?
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.
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?
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?
I also don't really know, but it sounds plausible :)
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.
Border agents have the law, manpower, firepower, and territory on their side and are ready to use it at a moment's notice.
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.
If you want to get someone to do something then yes you have to use different techniques (allow them to save face etc.).
Edit: Don't get me wrong, he was a pathological liar as well ;)
Only then do you end the contract. (Kind of scary that the org didn't have a copy of his contract on file, though. Sounds disorganized.)
Agree almost never the right thing to do. Trapping people makes them dig in their heels typically as opposed to giving them a graceful way to give you what you want. All of this is situation specific of course but as a rule I never call people out on their lies in negotiation.
"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)."
Honestly, best way to handle this type of things is to go the "scary lawyer letter" route. Try nicely (without threatening) and if that fails get an attorney to write the "scary lawyer letter". At that point the idea of actually getting some money (rather than having to hire an attorney to defend a verbal contract) would seem very attractive. There are other methods that can be employed (UDRP, trademark law) however they are more expensive and depend on the specifics.
Big difference.
That again is a different problem: one of communicating your findings to others.
Still, the 'big lies' are just getting stronger and these techniques are useless on them. How many political identities can be dismantled by 'surprise'?
Maybe it is just me that is sweatier and wilier when stressed.
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.
"[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
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?
People used to laugh at the Iron Curtain countries for asking such questions...
In the 60s you could board a plane without even passing any metal detector...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me
> 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg
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.
I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be traveling under false pretenses for any number of reasons.
This is what I'm afraid of. Is travel on a plane now squarely reserved for the honest or those with nothing to hide? There are plenty of very legitimate reasons to travel under false pretenses, including it would seem, hiding from one's own government because of some irrational administrator who decides to use air travel restrictions to carry out a grudge. The restriction on travel, especially within the US as applied to US citizens is very disturbing as it represents a fundamental erosion of our freedoms. Take a look at this case as just one example:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/united-airlines-stops-...
Not at all. They'll still let you on the plane after grilling you. They just want to know that you're hiding something. For future reference.
Considering several horror stories and uneeded questioning (of students etc) entering the country, not that "good" really.
...which doesn't imply that a "just question 100% of the people" strategy would work—they need to question few enough people that the planes still leave on time and the airlines stay in business. But within that limit, it's in their best interest to be as trigger-happy with the detainments as possible.
How do you know how good they are? That seems like the point of the article.
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.
TL;DR
Use the deviation from the base-line to work out if someone is lying.
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.
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.
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.