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

by Philip Houston

inappropriately lighthearted manner. In some instances, this behavior could be a form of attack or aggression.

Attack behavior can also take the form of a threat, and the threat can even be one that involves self-harm.

So-called body language “experts” tend to analyze nonverbal behaviors globally. Remember what we said about global behavior assessment? You don’t want to go there, because you’d be trying to get that drink from the fire hose, and you’d be putting yourself in the position of having to guess at the meaning and significance of a particular posture or repetitive motion. You need to take the guesswork out of the equation, and filter out all of those global behaviors that do nothing to help you get to where you want to go: identifying deception. So, you need to limit your analysis to only those behaviors that come in direct, timely response to the stimulus, which is your question.

BEHAVIORAL PAUSE OR DELAY. You ask a person a question and you initially get nothing. After a delay, he begins to respond. How long does a delay have to be before it’s meaningful, before you would consider it a deceptive indicator? Well, it depends.

VERBAL/NONVERBAL DISCONNECT. Our brains are wired in a way that causes our verbal and nonverbal behaviors to naturally match up. So when there’s a disconnect, we consider that a potential deceptive indicator.

HIDING THE MOUTH OR EYES. A deceptive person will often hide her mouth or eyes when she’s being untruthful. There is a natural tendency to want to cover over a lie, so if a person’s hand goes in front of her mouth while she’s responding to a question, that’s significant. Similarly, there’s a natural inclination to shield oneself from the reaction of those who are being lied to. If a person shields her eyes while she’s responding to a question, what she might well be indicating, on a subconscious level, is that she can’t bear to see the reaction to the whopper she’s telling. This shielding may be accomplished with a hand, or the person might even close her eyes. We’re not referring to blinking here,

THROAT-CLEARING OR SWALLOWING. If a person clears his throat or performs a significant swallow prior

to answering the question, that’s a potential problem. If he does it after he answers, that doesn’t bother us. But if he does it before he answers, a couple of things might be happening.

HAND-TO-FACE ACTIVITY. While you’re in L-squared mode, be on the lookout for anything a person does with his face or in the head region in response to your question. This often takes the form of biting or licking the lips, or pulling on the lips or ears. The reason goes back to simple high school science. You’ve asked a question, and the question creates a spike in anxiety because a truthful response would be incriminating. That, in turn, triggers the autonomic nervous system to go to work to dissipate the anxiety. One of the ways it does that is by kicking in the fight-or-flight response. The person’s body is rerouting circulation to his vital organs and major muscle groups so he can run faster, jump higher, fight harder in response to the threat. Where does that blood come from? It comes from blood-rich regions of the body that can temporarily do with a diminished supply of blood—typically, the surfaces of the face, the ears, and the extremities. When the blood rushes away from those regions, it irritates the capillaries, which can create a sensation of cold or itchiness. Without the person even realizing it, his hands are drawn to those areas, or there’s a wringing or rubbing of the hands.

ANCHOR-POINT MOVEMENT. Beyond these physiological reactions, the body also dissipates this

anxiety through other forms of physical activity, most notably “anchor-point” movements. A person’s anchor points are those parts of his body that anchor him in a particular spot or position. If a person is standing, his primary anchor points are his feet. His secondary anchor points might be his arms if they’re folded in front of him, or they might be his hands if he’s standing with his hands on his hips or in his pockets. We’re not worried about his posture; we’re only looking at those anchor points.

It’s worth mentioning here that when we interview someone, the last place we would want the interviewee to sit is in a straight-back chair with four legs. We want the person in a chair that has wheels, that rocks and swivels, that might even have moveable arm rests. That type of chair becomes a behavioral amplifier, magnifying those anchor-point movements and making them particularly easy to spot.

GROOMING GESTURES. Another way that some people may dissipate anxiety is through physical activity in the form of grooming oneself or the immediate surroundings.

Tidying up the surroundings is another form of grooming gesture. You ask a question, and suddenly the phone isn’t turned the right way, the glass of water is too close, or the pencil isn’t in the right place. Like anchor-point movements, count all of these grooming gestures that come within the response to a single question as a single deceptive indicator.

If a deceptive person finds himself in a hole because he’s been asked a question about a matter in which the facts are not his ally, he’s obviously not in a position to respond with the facts. In the process of developing a response, then, he makes a conscious decision to take a particular tack. Perhaps he’ll concentrate on convincing the questioner of his morality; maybe he’ll go the evasive route and try to deflect the question; or he might feel compelled to go into attack mode as a means of getting

the questioner to back off. What he’s not aware of, however, is that often in that process, without even realizing it, he’ll say things that reveal what in reality he knows to be the truth.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. —Galileo Galilei

To prevent that, your approach needs to focus on questions that Simpson is less likely to be prepared for, and more likely to compel him to provide information you want—or, failing that, to exhibit behavior that you can read. Take your detective hat off for a moment, and consider what your mind-set would be if you were a guilty Simpson.

It’s important to distinguish a presumptive question from a leading question. A leading question is one that puts words in the person’s mouth and directs him to an answer: “You were at Nicole’s last night, weren’t you?”

This time, your question is what we call a bait question. A bait question is a hypothetical question that operates on a psychological principle called a “mind virus.” You’ve probably experienced how a mind virus works. Imagine that you walk into work on Monday morning, and a coworker comes up to you and says,

“The boss wants to see you in her office right away.” You ask what she wants, and your coworker says, “I don’t know, but she said ‘right away.’” Is your likely reaction one of excitement because you’re thinking today’s the day you’re going to get that long-awaited raise? Probably not. You’re more likely to start thinking about whether something is wrong, and if so, what the problem might be. The virus begins to spread. Your mind is racing as you come up with various scenarios, trying to determine what the likely issues are, and how you should respond to each issue. You begin to consider the consequences of each situation. And before you know it, the virus has enveloped you. People often make decisions on the basis of this viral thinking, and baits take advantage of that fact by posing a hypothetical question. A very effective phrase to use is, “Is there any reason…?” Bear in mind that the more implicit your language, the stronger the mind virus—when you become more explicit, the person has more

of a chance to eva...

PRESENT A CLEAR STIMULUS

Remember, the model is only as good as the questions you ask in the course of employing it. Since the behavior you’re analyzing is the direct result of a stimulus—your question—it follows that your presentation of the stimulus is critical to the accuracy and usefulness of your analysis. Here are four tips to keep in mind when you formulate your question to ensure that it’s as clear as you can make it: Keep it short. When possible, keep your question shorter rather than longer.

Keep it simple. Some people try to convey their level of intellect by means of complex sentence structure and highbrow vocabulary.

Keep it singular in meaning. If your question is ambiguous, you have no way of knowing how the person understood the question.

Keep it straightforward. The more up front you are, the more likely the person will trust you, which might increase the likelihood of cooperation.

A beautiful thing about presumptive and bait questions is that they aren’t in any way contrary to the facts of the situation. They’re fair, because the truthful person can respond without processing them.

Presumptive and bait questions have a couple of things in common, aside from being extremely powerful. First, they both have a limited shelf life in the information collection process. If you overuse them, the person is likely going to figure out what you’re doing. It will trigger his defenses, and he’ll view you as an adversary who’s trying to trick or mislead him in some way. We’ve found that generally, presumptive and bait questions should each be used no more than two or three times in the course of an hour-long interaction.

while all questions should be delivered as neutrally as possible, neutrality is especially important with presumptive and bait questions—the person needs to feel that you have no preconceived notions about how he’s going to answer each question. This neutrality is conveyed by the words you use to frame the question, and the tone or demeanor you use to deliver it. It needs to be delivered in a very matter-of-fact manner, with no additional emphasis whatsoever placed on the question.

another reason that neutrality is especially important. You want to ensure that if there’s a deceptive response to the question, the deceptive behavior is relate...

We’ve found that if deceptive people do express anger or indignation in response to a presumptive question, it’s usually feigned as a strategy to get the questioner to back off. Truthful people typically aren’t offended, either, because they recognize that you’re just doing your job. So you shouldn’t be reluctant to ask those questions, as long as you deliver them in a low-key, neutral way.

We often hear that the best questions to ask are open-ended questions, and the worst are closed-ended questions. The reason, we’re told, is that open-ended questions enable us to collect a steady stream of information, while closed-ended questions limit the flow to a single drop of information. But does that inherently make open-ended questions better?

AVOID ASKING NEGATIVE QUESTIONS. There’s no getting around the fact that we all ask negative questions, and sometimes we ask them instinctively.

USE PROLOGUES FOR KEY QUESTIONS. A prologue is a short, narrative explanation

that precedes a question. It’s designed to prime the information pump, so that if the person is on the fence about whether or not he’s going to give you something, it will help to influence him to come down on your side of the fence.

QUESTION PROLOGUE ELEMENTS • Legitimacy statement • Rationalization • Minimization • Projection of blame

STAY COOL Dealing with deceptive behavior can often be frustrating, and depending on the circumstances, it can be downright infuriating. But you need to stay cool, because taking a non-confrontational approach is always the way to go when you’re confronted

with deception.

Inconsistent statements. If a person’s response to a question is inconsistent with something he said previously, your inclination might be to come back with something like, “Wait a minute! That’s not what you said before!” But if you do that, how cooperative is he likely to be? The person has provided you with information that might be closer to the truth than what he said earlier, and he doesn’t want his nose rubbed in the fact that he didn’t share it with you previously.

OVERCOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ALIBIS. It can be quite frustrating to hear, in response to a question, “I don’t remember,” or “Not that I recall.” As we pointed out in chapter 5, selective memory is a problem, because if it’s an alibi, it’s a tough alibi to crack.

a person appears on the surface to be calm and collected, but we can spot microexpressions that reflect an underlying level of anxiety, that can be very useful information.

The second limitation of microexpressions is their impracticality. Unless you’re very highly trained and are able to develop the uncanny sharpness of focus that would

enable you to spot a facial movement that lasts a fraction of a second, it’s not a pragmatic tool to reach for in a typical, real-time encounter. So the Lightman-esque routine of staring into someone’s face and determining that the person is lying makes for good TV, but that’s where it’s best left.

CLOSED POSTURE. The idea that a closed posture is a deceptive behavior has some merit, because an isolated logical point can be associated with it. If a person doesn’t want to cooperate, that may be equivalent to shutting down, and a closed posture is seen as a sign of a shutdown. But there’s a problem with making a sweeping judgment on the basis of that isolated logical point.

PREEMPTIVE RESPONSES. Responding to a question before the questioner has finished asking it is sometimes considered to be indicative of deceptive behavior. We don’t accept that. Our experience has demonstrated that this is a behavior routinely exhibited by both truthful and deceptive people, but they do so for different reasons.

BLUSHING OR TWITCHING. These involuntary behaviors may be caused by anxiety, but they’re just as likely to be caused by something else—

CLENCHED HANDS. This behavior is typically seen as a deceptive indicator in the law-enforcement community, where it’s commonly referred to as “white knuckles”—

BASELINING. The theory behind baselining is that we can ask a person control questions to which we know the answers, and capture what the person looks and sounds like when he responds truthfully. Then, with that baseline, if there’s an aberration from that behavior in response to the other questions we ask, that’s an indicator that those answers may be untruthful. It’s a reasonable approach because we humans really like to compare things.

First, it’s simple faulty logic to assume that whatever it is a person is doing differently is indicative of deception. It’s not a leap that can reliably be made, because human beings are too complicated, and the ocean of emotions and behaviors that a person can conceivably exhibit is far too vast for such a comparison to tell us anything that’s truly meaningful.