
Better and worse ways to spot a liar - williamhpark
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150906-the-best-and-worst-ways-to-spot-a-liar?ocid=fbfut
======
pelario
_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.

------
piokoch
"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
Have border guards not always asked those questions? I'm pretty sure it's been
like that since before the 20th century.

~~~
splat
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
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?

------
justzisguyuknow
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.

~~~
patcheudor
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.

~~~
andreyf
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.

~~~
patcheudor
>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-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/united-airlines-stops-
researcher-who-tweeted-about-airplane-network-security)

~~~
derefr
> Is travel on a plane now squarely reserved for the honest or those with
> nothing to hide?

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.

~~~
andreyf
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?

------
samuellb
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.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
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 ;)

~~~
samuellb
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.

------
zamalek
> 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.

~~~
B-Con
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.

~~~
bo1024
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.

------
adekok
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.

~~~
hackuser
Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your
parents how much they really knew.

~~~
adekok
What makes you think I'm not already a parent?

------
korginator
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.

~~~
paganel
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
> 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
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.

------
tomchristie
The paper itself:
[http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf](http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf)

------
vidarh
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
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
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
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.

------
dovereconomics
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
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.

------
thom
"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)

------
watsonc73
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.

~~~
mratzloff
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
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.

------
rayiner
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.

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

~~~
tomchristie
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)

------
yakult
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.

------
j_s
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?

------
joe_the_user
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".

------
jqm
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.

------
btilly
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-i...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star-
interview_b_3310122.html)

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

------
j_s
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)

~~~
dalore
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
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.

------
smegel
> 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
Why single out rape trials specifically?

~~~
netrus
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.

~~~
seren
Most white collar crimes also fall in that category. Was it pure negligence or
was it engineered ?

------
jeffdavis
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
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.

~~~
wpietri
Yeah, I used to struggle with social anxiety a fair bit, so this is familiar
to me. It's true that many liars are anxious, because they're afraid of
getting caught. But I became afraid of getting falsely accused, which tended
to make me anxious at exactly the same times liars would be. Which in turn
would trigger a wave of anxiety about the pattern, making me excruciatingly
aware of the whole mess, making me yet more awkward.

I'm sorry to hear how much trouble it causes you. It's a miserable experience.

~~~
casion
Yeah, I have this feedback loop as well. When put in a position of thinking
that someone is evaluating whether I'm telling the truth or not, I become
fearful that they will falsely think I'm lying... then the loop begins.

I think that the irony is that if I wanted to lie, I could probably get away
with it since I give off such mixed signals when saying _anything_. True or
false, I just fall apart.

~~~
wpietri
Totally familiar, and totally awful. I don't miss it.

If you want to correspond further about this, feel free to drop me an email.

------
veb
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.

~~~
schoen
> 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 asked someone who was studying ASL about the differences between sign
languages. She pointed out that they _do_ commonly have different signs which
might be very abstract and non-literal, often because they arose in different
schools for deaf people (or different regions with a very high incidence of
deafness) in earlier eras.

However, some of the sign languages have some etymological relationship with
one another, especially French Sign Language (LSF)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Classification)

Those relationships might be something that reinforces the impression that all
sign languages are inherently related, but there are also sign language
isolates that don't have an etymological relationship to other sign languages
(although if they've had later contact with other sign languages, they could
have loan vocabulary or other contact influences).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sign_language_isolate...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sign_language_isolates)

Edit: I don't mean to suggest that people who know different sign languages
couldn't communicate at all, but I expect that someone who knows one wouldn't
be able to understand a signed conversation between native signers of an
unrelated one.

~~~
veb
Join a Facebook group called "Deaf World Love Sign Language V.I.P" (signers
from all over the world. can't even comment in the same language)

If you know sign language, you can pretty much understand what they're saying.
The first time I noticed I understood someone in Brazil, talking about work, I
didn't notice that... I was understanding them. I didn't understand certain
stuff -- slang --.

Yes, abstract and non-literal. It's because of the PC brigade. Growing up...
things were a whole lot different. It's still pretty much literal.

~~~
schoen
It would be really interesting to see someone sign the whole Swadesh list in
different sign languages and try to see the level of similarity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list)

Edit: oh, there's already a special Swadesh list for comparing sign languages
because of "overestimation of the relationships between sign languages, due to
indexical signs such as pronouns and parts of the body". (Those signs are the
ones that are most likely to be shared because they're likely to arise
independently or have an inherently obvious meaning.)

------
beachstartup
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.

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

------
pm24601
Can an informed liar counter this technique?

It would be really cool if the liars were rehearsed in the technique.

------
dsfyu404ed
Good lies are mostly truths...

------
ionised
I consider myself one of history's finest liars.

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

------
benihana
> _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
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?

~~~
kaoD
The difference: lies pretend to sound honest, while honesty doesn't pretend to
sound like lies.

------
linkydinkandyou
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.

~~~
Asbostos
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.

