10 Surefire Ways To Catch A Liar

Worried that your partner is having an affair or that the builder is spinning you a yarn? Paul Seager, asenior lecturer in forensic and social psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, busts some of the most common lie-detection myths and offers research-backedtips for catching liars in the act.

- Dan Roberts

FORGET ABOUT EYE CONTACT…

There are so many misconceptions about what people do when they’re lying – and one of the biggest is that we break eye contact when we’re telling a lie. Research suggests there’s no truth in that whatsoever. Good liars actually hold your eye contact a little bit longer than normal, because they know most people believe this stereotype.

…AND FIDGETING…

Another myth people often believe is that we shift nervously in our chair or fidget more when we lie – actually, the opposite is true. If someone has to make up a lie on the spot, they divert energy away from their bodily movements and into their brain function. So they will actually go more still than normal while they try to come up with a plausible lie.

...AND LOOKING UP AND TO THE RIGHT

The third big myth is that when we fib our gaze fixes on a particular spot. When I give talks, people are always asking me if this is true, but there simply hasn’t been any reliable research done on it, so I think it’s a myth. It comes from the area of NLP [neuro-linguistic programming] and is based on the idea that when we look up or down, to the left or right, we’re accessing a certain kind of memory. When we talk, our sentences are complicated, and involve different kinds of memories and brain functions, so this is unlikely to be true.

MAKE SOMEONE DRAW THEIR STORY