The Keyboard Detective

BYOD: How to Detect Deception, Part I

Fox has a new series with Tim Roth called "Lie to Me" that I've been wanting to check out. From what I've read, it's based loosely on the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, the psychologist who's made a life study of the art of deception detection. The show's going to make people wonder, is it possible to actually tell when someone's lying? The answer is, 'Yes.' Maybe. Sometimes.

According to an article a few years ago in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, research shows that interviewers correctly identify deception/truthfulness about half the time. (Although Ekman has claimed 95 percent.) That makes it an art, not a hard science. But there are clues – both verbal and non-verbal – you can look for to help you decide when a person is not being truthful with you.

Just keep this in mind: These are only indicators of deception. You'll find material online, especially ebooks on how to tell if your spouse is cheating, that will tell you a person definitely is lying if he displays any of the indicators. That's wrong. There could be any number of reasons a person might seem to be untruthful. The idea is to use the indicators to guide you, not to reach a definitive conclusion without corroboration.

Verbal Indicators of Deception

Every person I've ever interviewed who'd committed a crime used distancing language in describing what happened. This includes utilizing passive verbs, dropping possessive pronouns, using pronouns rather than names, and any other language that separates the speaker from a specific action or person.

A person describing an attack he committed on another person might use passive voice to remove himself from the action. That would be saying, "He got hit," instead of the more direct active voice, "I hit him." Or, even if he's trying to say another person did it, he still might say, "He got hit," instead of saying, "Joe hit him." Either way, the person is keeping himself removed from the actual incident.

The way in which a person uses pronouns can be very telling, especially in the case of possessive pronouns. People commonly use possessives when talking about their belongings: My car, my house, my husband. A person trying to lie about an incident wants to distance himself from the object or action. Your teenager comes home without his car because he wrecked it and is trying to hide that fact. You ask him where it is, and he says, "I went to the mall, and when I came out, the car was gone," instead of "my car."

There's also the way a person switches between proper nouns and pronouns. A mother who has harmed her child may try to separate herself by using the child's name, rather than the more possessive "my child." And the opposite can be true, as well. Many people I've interviewed who had hurt another person were completely unable to use that person's name. Instead, they used "he" or "she" when referring to the victim. More than a few actually said, "the victim."

Of course, the most famous example of distancing language was Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman." By using that qualifier before using Monica Lewinsky's name, he automatically created a space between himself and her in the listeners' minds – or he tried to, anyway.

Another indicator is the incomplete action verb, or what FDLE Agent Joe Navarro and FBI Agent John Schafer call "text bridges." These are gaps in the action as a person is narrating a chain of events. These omissions could indicate the person is trying to hide an event that occurred between two points in time.

The person might say, "We went out to the car....when we were at the party, I talked to Steve." The incomplete action is going out to the car. That's the beginning of an action, but the speaker doesn't complete it. The natural progression of this statement would have included what happened after they got to the car, i.e, "We got in and drove to the party." Instead, the speaker skips the event, which might mean something happened at or in the car that he wants to avoid.

The text bridge is, "When we were..." That transition allowed the speaker to move from going toward the car to already being at the party, quickly passing the events that occurred in between.

According to Narro and Schafer:

Some commonly used text bridges include “I don’t remember...,” “the next thing I knew...,” “later on...,” “shortly thereafter...,” “afterwards...,” “after that...,” “while...,” “even though...,” “when...,” “then...,” “besides...,” “consequently...,” “finally...,” “however...,” and “before....”

The point to both distancing language and text bridges is omission. It is easier for someone to leave something out when telling a lie than to invent a new version of the truth. By taking himself out of the action, or skipping entire portions, the person is able to tell a lie by editing, instead of creating.

OK, that's the first part. I'll continue this article in future posts.