Spy the Lie: How to spot deception the CIA way

by Mike Floyd

Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.

In order to determine whether a person is being untruthful, we need to look and listen for the first deceptive behavior to occur within the first five seconds after that stimulus is delivered.

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.