

How to tell when your boss is lying - jazzdev
http://www.economist.com/node/16847818?story_id=16847818

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keyle
I've been in such situation. I totally agree with the "as you know..." type.
What they were trying consistently on us was to tell us we're not getting a
raise because "as we know" the business hasn't been doing so well, we're
expensive etc.

By giving you 5 arguments to which you nod positively, they then enforce their
point as to why (bs reasons) there is no money for you.

It takes a few years to read between the lines, hence why so many of those
crooks bosses like to hire you straight out of uni.

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ams6110
This is not really new knowledge. Somewhere around 15 years ago I bought an
audio-cassette tape course on negotiating, and some of the clues to know when
the other party was lying were prefix phrases like "Frankly...."; "To tell the
truth....."; "Honestly....."; "As you know...." etc. along with excessive
hyperbole in general.

~~~
keyle
Well, I wish I had that tape 10 years ago.

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_delirium
A different article on the paper from a week ago, which links to the paper:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599914>

edit: might as well link it directly ->
[https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP2060%2...](https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP2060%20&%2083.pdf)

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jazzdev
The article ends on a bit of a depressing note:

 _The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the
boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive
emotion._

~~~
j_baker
This is the problem with detecting lying based on verbal cues: they're really
easy to fabricate. The most reliable way to detect lying is by picking up on a
person's involuntary nonverbal cues. If you are good enough at picking up on
them, you can easily tell when someone is lying.

~~~
cdr
Assuming they haven't had practice at suppressing nonverbal cues, anyway.

~~~
j_baker
These cues _can_ be suppressed, and most people do so naturally without any
practice. The thing is that these cues happen unconsciously. They usually show
up before the conscious intellect can suppress them.

Let me give you an example. Oliver North was summoned to Congress to testify
about the whole Iran Contra affair. I forget what the question was, but the
important part was North's response. If you watch closely, you can see his
lower lip extend below his upper lip for a split second: he pouted. He was
upset by the question somehow, but didn't want to show it, so he quickly
suppressed it.

Apart from psychopaths, there are very few people (less than 1%) who can
totally suppress these types of cues.

~~~
cdr
Maybe if you're taping someone you might be able to catch something, but it's
very difficult in my experience to catch a tell from a practiced liar live - a
part of one of my hobbies involves catching people lying, so I've had a little
experience.

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CallMeV
Fascinating article.

But how can a company possibly stay alive for very long if, rather than
confining itself to lying to its rivals to keep ahead in the competitive
marketplace, it starts lying to itself and its own?

If your company's internal culture develops the practice of deceit - deceit
between superiors and subordinates, deceit between superiors, deceit between
subordinates and ultimately deceit towards customers - how can you expect the
firm to remain fit for purpose for very long?

Who would want to live in a Stirnerite environment where everybody routinely
bones up on Machiavelli and Nineteen Eighty Four and keeps the knives
sharpened while watching for others attampting to stab you in the back all the
time?

~~~
quanticle
Its a valid question. The answer is that it depends on the industry. Sure, if
you're a small or mid-sized technology start-up, infighting and backbiting
will bring down the firm in months. But if you're in a monopoly position (e.g.
Microsoft), or in a non-competitive market (e.g. banks), your company makes
money by default. As such, there is a much larger threshold before the drag
caused by politics becomes significant enough to affect the performance of the
firm.

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kenjackson
Given this, it would be interesting to have a program that would predictively
tell you if a CFO or CEO was lying. Then you could short companies based on
that info.

~~~
eas
<http://www.biadvisors.com> sells this behavioral analysis of investor calls
as a service.

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kgermino
I think I'm more likely to use these "tells" to know if someone I'm investing
in is lying.

Though to be fair I work in a small company where I know my boss very well so
the point probably don't apply.

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adn37
Tip: his lips are moving.

~~~
nooneelse
Ok, lets turn this from a simple joke to a question... say one asks just how
much one feels it applies to their boss, and one's evaluation of it is
somewhere between "rather true" and "very true". What does that entail, if
anything? Jump ship immediately, or at the next good prospect? Or what?

~~~
nathanb
I guess the answer would depend on how important your boss is to your job. If
you can't trust your boss but he's just some line manager in a ten-deep chain
who doesn't really affect what you do on a day-to-day basis, maybe it doesn't
impact you. On the other hand, maybe it's a sign of a toxic corporate culture,
centered more around backstabbing and individual achievement than a whole-
company team-based approach, and if you left tomorrow it wouldn't be soon
enough. Like most metrics, the perceived truthfulness of one's boss really
discards too much context to be useful, absent other data, for evaluating
something like this.

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stretchwithme
"It's not just that his lips are moving"

You mean he lies even more often?

