Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013. The book is described as her new book, which came out in 2013.
Have you ever wondered how you can tell when someone is lying to you?
Anyone can spot a liar if they know which signs to watch for. We need to pay attention to facial expressions, body language and communication patterns (the way a person expresses themselves).
Lillian Glass is a behavioural and body language analyst who has worked with the FBI to catch many liars through the signs of deception. She says it is easy to catch a liar if you know how that person behaves in normal situations. In other words, if someone normally blinks very fast, when they lie they will blink less and even try to blink as little as possible.
In her new book, The Body Language of Liars, Glass describes some of the signs to look for to find out whether someone is lying.
Of course, Glass forgets to mention that if a liar is smart and knows the right techniques, they can fool even the best professional “lie catchers”, except for the part we “generally” can’t control: pulse and hand temperature. Although, if you want to know whether an employee or your boss is lying to you, I don’t think it would be legal to take their pulse and temperature.
When a person is afraid, the temperature of their hands drops. This is due to the survival instincts we explained in a previous article: when someone is frightened, their brain orders blood to be sent to the legs so they can run, so the upper body, and especially the hands, tends to go cold. That is why you turn pale when you get a fright. When you lie, you are afraid of being caught, and so, to a lesser degree, the temperature of your hands falls. This is probably the only sign you cannot control during an interrogation.
How to tell when someone is lying to you
1. Liars don’t usually blink much
Everyone knows that liars don’t look you in the eye (even liars know it), so nowadays a liar doesn’t want to break eye contact and usually makes an extra effort, which leads to blinking much less than usual. If you know the person well, the way they look at you in an attempt to manipulate you is usually enough to tell that something is off and that they are not being honest.
Glass says that Madoff, like most of the greatest con artists in history, used to overcompensate with his gaze, often blinking at regular intervals. According to her, when people tell the truth, most of them glance away from time to time, because they have nothing to hide.
2. They tend to give more information than necessary
When should you fasten your seatbelt on a plane and start praying? When the flight attendant, without anyone asking, says everything is fine and there is nothing to worry about. In the same way, when someone answers a simple question by going on and on with information nobody asked for, in every kind of detail, there is a high probability that they are lying. As Glass puts it, liars think that if they give you every kind of detail, their story will seem more believable.
3. Overacting
A liar may become hostile because you have uncovered their lies, but they may also overact to give the impression of being “extremely indignant”, believing that the best way to show you that you are wrong is to make you feel bad.
See also: Some nonverbal signals to get what you want and win a negotiation
4. Now they tend to stand as still as statues
As with eye contact, everyone knows that someone who is very fidgety is nervous, but Glass says that today’s liar stands out for trying not to move a single muscle, to the point of seeming cold. She points out that when we talk it is perfectly normal to move our hands and even our feet, along with unconscious movements, so if you see someone as rigid as a block, frozen in a catatonic, motionless posture, it is usually a warning sign that something is wrong.
5. They cover vulnerable parts of the body
This is another natural instinct which, according to Glass, she has observed many times in courtrooms and interrogations. She explains that the hands on the chest, neck and abdomen are critical for a liar, and that she always knows they have hit a nerve with a suspect when the suspect brings a hand to the front of their throat.
6. They touch or cover their mouth
Another very common natural instinct when we lie is to bring our hands to our mouth. Our brain literally sends our hands to cut off communication, although this gesture really has more to do with someone not wanting to answer a particular question, or, in other words, not wanting to tell the truth about the matter at hand.
7. Dry mouth
How can we tell that a person has a dry mouth? According to Glass, the liar will tell us himself through certain gestures. In real interrogations of detainees, she says, guilty suspects find it increasingly hard to keep talking, while they moisten their lips more and more often and more intensely as time goes by. This is because the autonomic nervous system reduces the flow of saliva at moments of stress, which of course dries out the mucous membranes of the mouth.
See also: 9 body language mistakes that can cost you the job
Featured image: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
