Spy the Lie: How to spot deception the CIA way

by Mike Floyd

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. As we noted in chapter 3, the individual you’re questioning is likely thinking ten times faster than you’re speaking. So if you ask a long, drawn-out, rambling question, that can be problematic if his agenda is to try to avoid answering your question or to provide a response that’s misleading. Keep it simple. Some people try to convey their level of intellect by means of complex sentence structure and highbrow vocabulary. Make sure you don’t fall into that trap—if the person doesn’t fully understand your question, his response is less likely to be behaviorally significant. Beyond that, you might see behavior that appears deceptive, when the stimulus of that behavior is nothing more than his confusion. Keep it singular in meaning. If your question is ambiguous, you have no way of knowing how the person understood the question. If you observe a deceptive behavior, you don’t know what he’s reacting to. It could be something you care about, or it could be something that’s essentially irrelevant. Keep it ...