Lie to Me

Hey y'all!
Because of the TV-program called 'Lie to Me' (love it, by the way) I decided to find out how you can see if people are lying or not. The team of this program investigates different murders, suïcides and crimes and try to find out Who did it. Call Lightman is the head of the team, he can see if people are lying by watching there facial expressions and there bodylanguage. So, do you want to find out, if your brother, sister, friend, boyfriend or parents are lying?

Some people have some difficulties with coming up with a lie, while others almost never say the truth, but there aren't many people who can distinguish true from false. Almost everyone finds it hard to come up with and tell a lie. Although some people can lie better than other people (the popular ones are better than not-popular people), everyone shows signals of it. Bodylanguage is a mix of movement, posture and pitch. Nonverbal communication has a greater impact than verbal communication, and when you're body is not correspondating with what the person says, it's possible that he or she's lying. People's posture is the best barometer to see if someone's lying yes or no.

You can recognize a liar by three sorts signals:

1. Nonverbal communication
A lot of people know what they want to say, but do not know how they should move while telling the lie. People stand or sit very tight, and speak less loud, blink less often and stare at the ground. It could be that the person you're talking to, is staring directly into your eyes, because they want to look more credible. The video on top of this page, also let us see that when people look up to the right, they're making something up and are visualising it, but it has never happened before, so it's a lie. Looking up to the left means that you're remembering something, so you're telling the truth. When you shift your eyes, it could also means dishonesty.
Also, when you touch your ear, mouth or nose, you're trying to filter the lie you just told. That shows us that he or she is very uncertain at that moment.

2. Verbal communication
People often talk very formal when they lie to somebody, they tell the story very detached and do not use a lot of 'I', 'me' and 'mine' to create a distance between the story and themselves. Lying verbal is not very difficult, but lying nonverbal, that's a tough one.

3. Chronologic order
Liars tell their story very structured, and always in the perfect chronologic order. So, unlike everyone seems to think and believe, people don't tell a story perfectly when they're not-lying. If the liar gets the order to tell to story again, but from the end to the beginning, it's most likely that they get stuck in their own lies.

By the way, lying is not always bad. Sometimes, it's better than telling the truth.
But, if I may tell you a secret: try to tell the truth more often. ;-)

Lots of Love.