Body Language Expert: How to Detect Lies

Now there’s one other easy tool that you can start to watch for and listen for so you can detect if someone’s lying to you or not.

You want to start to tune in to their tone and their pace and their general mannerisms, and ask yourself:  Are they conveying information, like really calmly, or are they trying to convince you?  If they move, if they cross that line, which is very fine, between conveying and convincing, they go over to the convincing side, they may be lying.  When you add that up with all the little other cues that we’ve talked about, you’ll know pretty quickly.

One of the things I could tell is that, “Hey, I have a red car.”  It’s totally true.  But if I said, “You know what, I have this great big monster truck and you wouldn’t believe we went out mudding last weekend and it was amazing!”  Do you see the difference between conveying and convincing?  It’s small, and again, once you start to normalize people, so you get their baseline, you’ll be able to start to sniff out conveying versus convincing.  If you watch a lot of Lance Armstrong’s videos of him denying drug use, you will see a textbook example of someone who’s convincing.  Go to YouTube, look it up, and you’ll get a picture and a sound to go with the technique.

Want more tools to really get good at detecting lies?  Check out a few videos from my Fraud Spotting online training. They’re free!