How to be a Human Lie Detector and Tell When Someone is Lying

The question of how to tell if someone is lying has been asked for many years now and the most likely people to ask such things are those in a relationship for their own reasons, be it whether they wish to know if a boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating or if they spent all the household money on drink and gambling. Or maybe they have $50,000 on the table in a poker league and want an advantage. In this hub and upcoming ones I am going to give it you.

People always say you should look at the eyes and that will tell you everything but this is only half of the story, if you tell people to look you in the eye when saying something they will, what they will not do is concentrate on the other cues that show they are telling porkies. While the eyes do not tell it all they also should not be discounted, there are ertain eye movements we will be looking at later and I will explain why they are important to us lie detectors.

This hub is in no way complete and can never be classed as such along with all the other books on the subject, body language is an ever evolving dance which varies from person to person but with some probing questions you can start to uncover the truth, or maybe make them simply uncomfortable so you should never base anything on the fact that someone sneezed at a certain point during your interrogations.

The main problem with watching the eyes and being able to tell if someone is lying are that they are relatively small in the face, as such you are really going to have to star at them and if you have ever had someone scrutinizing you then you will know how hard it is to maintain eye contact, as such I will only skirt over this explanation.

Most eye flickers happen in about one 16^th of a second and the typical field of vision is only 2%, which means that unless you are looking at the exact spot you need to be looking at, at exactly the right time you are going to miss it, assuming you know what you are looking for in the first place and you are practiced enough to recognise it.

While the image may be crude I hope it will get the desired result. Basically the eyes are the key to the mind, by watching them and their direction you can start to understand what processes the brain under scrutiny is doing; whether it is imagining something, remembering something, constructing an image and so on.

What you have to remember is that the left controls the right and vice versa when it comes to brain wiring, so while some may have heard that the right side of the brain deals with the emotional and the left deals with the logical in this instance it is reversed.

This is a very important distinction between remembering and constructing and it will never be perfect because so few of us have an eidetic or photographic memory, so we take bits of what we know and remember and fill in the blanks with what we think should go there.

Fig A ~ Up and to the Left is Visual Construction.

This is where the polka dotted goat with a banjo comes into play, if someone is flicking their eyes up and to the left they are making up an image in their head.

Fig D ~ Up and to the Right is Visual Remembrance.

This is the carpet, if someone flicks their eyes up and to the right they are accessing the memory part of the brain. Particularly valuable if you are really needing to know the colour of your childhood carpet.

Fig B ~ To the Left is Audio Construction.

This is where things get interesting, ask someone to think of the worst sound they can possibly imagine to finally kill Simon Cowell and they will flick their eyes in this direction.

Fig E ~ To the Right is Audio Remembrance.

Asking someone what their dog sounds like when it is jumping on your bed wanting to go out will illicit this response from their eyes. It indicates that they are remembering a sound.

Fig C ~ Down and to the Left is Kinesthetic Feeling.

Or in laymans terms tactile learning, if you asked someone how something felt to them like hitting a nail with a hammer this is the direction they would most likely glance.

Fig F ~ Down and to the Right is Internal Dialogue.

Or that little voice in your head that chastises you for forgeting the eggs when you are making a second trip to the butchers that morning. Everyone has this internal commentary and they will generally look down and to the right when listening to it.

Related to the direction of the eyes is when someone keeps rapidly opening and closing the eyes, this happens when the mind is constructing a story fast and needs to use a lot of processing power, figuratively speaking, it is a lot easier to think without visual stimuli distracting you with shiny things. If someone who usually stares at everyone with really penetrating looks and then suddenly starts closing their eyes more than they are open when relating a story you can be fairly sure they are making it up on the spot. This along with the above eye movements flies in the face of the old wifes tale that someone who is telling the truth will look you in the eye.

Just watch the mothers eye while being interviewed in the street, she can barely keep them open.  

Looking someone in the eye is the easiest thing to do, but much harder is regulating your breathing while doing it....which brings us to another deception expert hint in a future hub...

If you do wish to comment on this hub either to share your own knowledge, findings or simply to argue with me then you can sign up here :)

Click this blue link to sign up.