Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

by Philip Houston

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to. —Malcolm Muggeridge

The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished. —Daniel W. Davenport

THE BELIEF THAT PEOPLE WILL NOT LIE TO YOU.

we find ourselves wanting to believe people. The problem is that people do lie, and they lie a lot.

Another factor that causes us to want to believe people is that most of us feel uncomfortable sitting in judgment of anyone else, and rightly so. We don’t want to be casting any stones at anyone because we know that we’re not in any position to do so. What we need to remember, however, is that the process of ascertaining the truth is not in itself a judgmental endeavor. In fact, if we allow any sort of judgment to creep into the process, we handicap ourselves because it distracts us from the systematic approach we need to take in order to find the truth.

RELIANCE ON BEHAVIORAL MYTHS.

OUR INESCAPABLE BIASES.

“bias” is a simple fact of life, and it’s not necessarily negative at all. We all have biases. If we have a favorite sports team, that’s one of our biases. If we’re not completely neutral about something, we’re necessarily biased for or against it. The problem is that our biases have a huge impact on whether or not we believe someone.

One more point to emphasize about bias: Never underestimate the power of its influence. No matter how good we think we are at this, if we don’t manage our biases, we’ll get beaten.

THE “GLOBAL” INFLUENCE. Whether you realize it or not, whenever you’ve tried to read someone to determine whether or not he was being truthful, chances are you were using what’s called “global behavior assessment.” Global behavior assessment has a certain logic to it: You basically tell yourself, “I’m going to become a human vacuum cleaner, and I’m going to suck in as much information as I can so that I have the maximum amount of data possible at my disposal to make the best decision I can.” As reasonable as it may sound, it’s impossible to do. There is simply so much data coming at you, and so many tasks to perform in order to process that data, you just can’t perform them all. It’s like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose. It can’t be done.

Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. —Bernard Haisch

Now, here’s the thing about polygraph examinations. Just as there’s no such thing as a human lie detector, neither is there any such thing as a mechanical lie detector. A polygraph machine doesn’t detect lies. It detects physiological changes that occur in a person’s body in response to a stimulus, the stimulus being a question posed by the polygraph examiner. Whether or not the anxiety associated with those changes is

indicative of deception is an open question that must be answered by the analytical and human interaction skills of the polygraph examiner.

It was in the course of just such a routine analysis that it hit Phil. If he’d ever had an epiphany, this was it. He would analyze these charts, making precise annotations that showed when he started asking a question, when he finished asking it, and when the subject provided his response. The sole reason for that was to establish a correlation between the question and any physiological reaction that followed. Phil asked himself why we aren’t more disciplined when we conduct interviews and ask questions in our everyday encounters. What would be the result if we analyzed our conversations that way?

The answer is what has become our detection of deception methodology, or what we refer to simply as “the model.

beauties of the model lies in its simplicity. It has one strategic principle and two simple guidelines. The strategic principle is that if you want to know i...

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The two guidelines are timing and clusters. Although the concepts of timing and clusters were not new to the world of behavior assessment, no one had thought to meld those concepts into a codified behavior assessment model based upon the science of polygraph chart analysis.

data from stenographers tells us that on average, we speak at a rate of 125 to 150 words per minute. Cognitive research, meanwhile, suggests that we think at least ten times faster than we speak. What that tells us is the further in time we get away from the stimulus, the higher the likelihood that the brain has gone on to thinking about something else. Our experience has shown that if we can identify the first deceptive behavior within that first five seconds, we can reasonably conclude that the behavior is directly associated with the stimulus.

The trick is to train our brains to go into what we call “L-squared mode”—we have to tell it to look and listen simultaneously. We have to say, “Brain, for the next few seconds, you’re going to process in both the visual and auditory channels what’s being communicated to me.” Your brain will not like you for this. In fact, your brain will win the argument. After a period of time, your brain will say, “I’ve had enough,” and it will default you to one or the other. But with practice, in those few moments following the stimulus you’ll be able to condition your brain to go into L-squared mode.

other guideline has to do with clusters of deceptive behavior. A cluster is defined simply as any combination of two or more deceptive indicators, which, you’ll remember, can be either verbal or nonverbal. So a cluster might be one verbal and one nonverbal, or two nonverbals, or two verbals and one nonverbal, and so on. What do you do if there’s just a single deceptive behavior in response to the stimulus? You ignore it.

Second, as you might intuitively expect, we have found that the higher the number of deceptive behaviors a person exhibits, the greater the likelihood of deception.

When a surgeon removes a malignant tumor, he doesn’t mark off a large area around the tumor and proceed to cut out that entire portion of the person’s body in order to ensure that the tumor itself is completely removed. Instead, he makes precise cuts in very distinct areas, recognizing that just because other areas of the body are healthy doesn’t mean there’s no tumor to be cut out. If you think of deception as a malignancy, you need to have a surgical tool that allows you to identify it so you can leave all the other areas alone. You need to be able to isolate the malignancy so you can deal with it.

That failure to understand a simple question is a deceptive behavior

The idea here is that if you want to know if someone is lying, you need to ignore truthful behavior so that it’s not processed. That seems counterintuitive to most people, and downright nonsensical to many. Yet it’s one

of the core principles underlying the model. And for good reason.

Ignoring truthful behavior helps us manage our biases, so we don’t even have to think about them when the task at hand is detecting deception. Beyond that, it reduces—often dramatically—the amount of data we have to process in order to make a decision about a person’s veracity. The more extraneous information that can be filtered out, the easier it is to spot behavior that’s deceptive.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. —Ernest Hemingway

the fact that most people simply aren’t comfortable telling a bald-faced lie.

deceptive verbal behaviors that people use when the facts aren’t their ally.

FAILURE TO ANSWER. If you ask someone a question and he doesn’t give you what you ask for, there’s a reason for that.

DENIAL PROBLEMS. Closely related to the failure to answer is the absence of an explicit denial of something in your question that involves an act of wrongdoing,

Denial problems can take a couple of other forms: • Nonspecific denial. If the “no” statement is delivered in a way that’s more of a general focus than a specific expression of denial of the matter at hand

Isolated delivery of denial. If in response to a question about wrongdoing, a person gives you a “no” response, but buries it in a long-winded answer, that’s important. If the percentage of the answer that relates to the denial is relatively small, that’s a bad thing. Consider it a deceptive indicator.

RELUCTANCE OR REFUSAL TO ANSWER. Sometimes, we’ll ask a person a question and he’ll say something like, “I’m not sure I’m the right person to talk to.”

REPEATING THE QUESTION. Why might a deceptive person repeat a question? We think of it as buying time, and ultimately that’s the goal. But what’s happening, according to behavioral psychologists, is he’s probably trying to fill in what would otherwise appear to be a very awkward moment of silence. Silence in response to a question is almost universally perceived as deceptive.

NONANSWER STATEMENTS. The psychology behind nonanswer statements is much the same as that associated with repeating the question—avoiding that awkward silence and buying time to figure out how to respond. These are things that people say that don’t provide what you ask for: “That’s a good question,” or “I’m glad you asked that.” Sometimes, these can provide you with useful information. We often hear the nonanswer statement, “I knew you were going to ask me that.” Why is that statement made in response to this particular question? Without realizing it, the person may be cluing us in on what he’s thinking or worried about.

INCONSISTENT STATEMENTS. “It is not without good reason said, that he who has not good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.”

OVERLY SPECIFIC ANSWERS. Deceptive people might be overly specific in two ways, and they’re almost polar opposites. One way is they will answer a question too technically, or too narrowly.

INAPPROPRIATE LEVEL OF POLITENESS. We’re certainly not at all suspicious of someone who’s just a nice person.

INAPPROPRIATE LEVEL OF CONCERN. If the facts are not a person’s ally, he’s put into a hole from which he needs to try to extricate himself.

PROCESS OR PROCEDURAL COMPLAINTS. Sometimes, a person won’t necessarily go on the attack, but will still attempt to play offense rather than defense by taking issue with the proceedings. Questions like “Why are you asking me?” or “How long is this going to take?”

FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND A SIMPLE QUESTION.

REFERRAL STATEMENTS. Sometimes in response to a question, a deceptive person will refer to having previously answered the question.

INVOKING RELIGION. When a person brings God into the equation, he’s engaging in an extreme form of what psychologists call “dressing up the lie,” and it can be very effective.

SELECTIVE MEMORY. When a person says, “I don’t remember,” that’s a difficult statement to refute without some definitive, tangible evidence. It’s a psychological alibi, and it’s a hard alibi to crack.

QUALIFIERS. There are two types of qualifiers that are potential deceptive indicators: exclusion qualifiers and perception qualifiers. Exclusion qualifiers enable people who want to withhold certain information to answer your question truthfully without releasing that information. Examples of qualifiers of this type include “basically,” “for the most part,” “fundamentally,” “probably,” and “most often.” Perception qualifiers are used to enhance credibility: “frankly,” “to be perfectly honest,” and “candidly” are examples. Keep in mind that we all have speech habits and patterns that can account for the presence of these qualifiers, so again, remember the cluster rule.

CONVINCING STATEMENTS. Lies of influence, the category of lies that we spoke about in the opening of this chapter as being especially powerful, occur in the form of what we call “convincing statements.”

You may be thinking that this all seems rather obvious—that such behavior would raise a red flag that would be hard to miss. We can assure you, however, that unless you’re in L-squared mode and are employing the model, you’ll be vulnerable to these convincing statements, regardless of your background. The reason is simply that they’re so, well, convincing. They tend to be perfectly reasonable, and they can be very difficult to catch simply because they make so much sense. You’ll hear one, and you might think, “That sounds like something I would say myself if I were asked the same question.” That might well be, but the difference is there would very likely be no more than one such statement, and there would be more to your response,

One of the deceptive behaviors we introduced in chapter 5 was exhibiting an inappropriate level of concern. As we said, when the facts are not a person’s ally, he might resort to a strategy of attempting to diminish the importance of the issue by responding to it in an