People lie out of love, hate, or greed. Self-preservation is a form of self love that ranks at the top of the list of reasons why people lie. Usually, it’s not literal self-preservation, but perceived. For example, you come home after a night of hard partying and your wife, who’s just put infant twins to bed, says, “Where’ve you been?!” You could be honest and reply, “Doing tequila shooters at a strip bar with my brother.” Or you could sidestep the truth by saying, “My brother and I got together after work to have a drink and talk about his job. He’s really unhappy.” On the other hand, a killer on trial for first-degree murder has the challenge of literal self-preservation: He lies to save himself from execution. In a real interrogation, self-preservation takes on a different dimension. A soldier who lies skillfully can protect not only his life, but also the lives of comrades.

Military interrogators don’t care if their target is guilty or innocent, by the way. They want to stop something from happening, so they want information. Genuine expressions of sorrow, grief, or guilt mean only one thing: weakness that makes the desired information more accessible. As an interrogator, therefore, I’m not judgmental. I could talk with Charles Manson as easily as the ice cream man. I’m more interested in how his brain works than in judging him. You may find that one of the side effects of practicing these techniques is that you develop a similar inclination to look for the facts rather than the “right” or “wrong.” To paraphrase a biblical lesson, one result might be that you will be more able to hate the sin but love the sinner. When people observe this trait in you, they will probably be more willing to tell you the truth.

Although it’s easy to understand self-preservation as a motive for lying, it assumes a level of complexity when the liar lies to everyone. Usually, there’s a friend, confidante, priest, or therapist with whom the liar would be honest. But sometimes, the scenario is devoid of honesty.

Lie to wife: “I’m not having an affair.”

Lie to girlfriend: “I plan to marry you.”

Lie to friends: “I would never cheat on my wife.”

Why would an individual such as this, who’s having an affair, lie to everyone? There are three possibilities:

A second reason to lie is to be polite, which again can be a form of love. “Honey, do these pants make my butt look big?” invites a wisecrack such as, “No. But your butt sure makes those pants look small.” Most people would probably agree that it’s more polite to say something farther from the truth: “No.”

Sometimes, it’s just easier to lie than it is to tell the truth. Again, this could be a form of self-love. When people who don’t know my friend Kay very well ask how her husband died, she might say simply, “He was sick for a long time.” She invites pity, confusion, and painful questions if she spills the facts: “He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

Another love-based lie might be to protect someone else. It’s the case of the little boy who takes the blame for breaking a window to protect his friend from getting beaten by a cruel dad.

A lie rooted in hate could involve a country, ideology, person—all the same categories that a lie of love involves. A soldier will lie to help destroy an enemy. A business executive might lie to damage a competitor. I know of a woman who lied about her estranged husband molesting their children. She wanted him out of her and her children’s lives so desperately that she fabricated his abusive behavior.

Finally, people lie for personal gain, or greed. Exaggerations on a resumé, inflated deductions on a tax return, and glossy stories of your days as a college athlete—all are lies that “everybody” tells.

If you have children, I’ll put money on the fact that you taught them to lie. From “tell him I’m not home” when you get a call from someone you want to avoid to “tell Great Aunt Hazel how nice she looks” when she shows up for dinner wearing two different shoes, you condition your children to lie to be polite, for self-preservation, and so on. You don’t want your 6-year-old to blurt out in the grocery store, “But, mom, I couldn’t reach the cereal because that fat woman was standing in front of it.”

There are also times when an untruth is not a lie. Two different people can remember different details of the same event to such a great extent that their stories contradict each other. Eyewitnesses to a crime can be unreliable sources of information because of the combination of stress, point of view, influences from other eyewitnesses, and so on. No one is lying, but no one is telling the truth. And, yes, men and women have slightly different brains so they may have conflicting versions of the same story—with neither one being wrong or deceptive.

Shadowy memories can involve a kind of lie as well. If you aren’t trained to think under stress and, for example, you’re raped or captured, your brain has the capacity to create shadowy memories. The limbic system transfers information into memory—that’s normal—but, if that happens in a highly emotional state, then the way you recall the memory could happen in unpredictable ways. A climate change or odor that reminds a rape victim of the event might elicit a shadowy memory, the details of which could be profoundly affected by feelings. A shadowy memory isn’t necessarily bad, however. The temperature of the air could remind you of your first skydive and lead to a story that isn’t exactly built out of facts, but, to you, that’s the way it was.

Regardless of why you lie, the lie itself causes stress. It doesn’t matter if your motivation is thoroughly decent, such as a lie to protect your family from harm. There is an incompatibility between what you’re doing and what your brain is telling you to do.

People tell lies in four basic ways: They omit, commit, embellish the truth, and transfer.

My friend dated a successful salesman who commonly lied through transference. After a few months, she called him on it and he’d laugh and tell her to lighten up. He viewed his lying as a kind of party trick—pure entertainment. One evening in the company of some people he’d never met before, he described a battle he’d supposedly been part of in Vietnam. People asked questions focused directly on the story, so he got away with his vivid descriptions woven out of the details of someone else’s life. Two types of questions could have easily tripped him up: something that plunged him into another context related to the story, or something involving pure conjecture that was related to the story. For example, “What was your basic training like?” is something the liar would have trouble answering if he’d never been in the military. And a question involving speculation—“What do you think would have happened if the Viet Cong troops had seen you?” for example—could cause him to trail off, change the subject, or make up something ridiculous on the fly. And if you’re studying his face and body for signs of lying, you might notice that, instead of signaling that he’s thinking creatively, he’s actually accessing a memory. That’s a sure sign that whatever he says next is part of a rehearsed story.

Cover stories come apart, which is why trained soldiers rarely use lies of transference or of commission. It is too easy to break the liar by questioning details. Legendary German interrogator Hans Scharff demonstrated this time after time. Scharff developed soft interrogation techniques to earn prisoners’ trust that often succeeded because of his attention to details. For example, he had personally travelled extensively in Europe and knew train schedules, distances, and other details that he ultimately used to shred the stories of captured Allied soldiers. For this reason, I’ve always taught my interrogation students that there are no useless bits of information.

You will simplify your life enormously if you eliminate complete fabrication from your repertoire. It’s relatively easy to spot, as you will soon see, and very tough to defend with credible details. I’m going to teach you to read body language that will help you tear that kind of liar apart. But in Chapter 14, on self-defense, I will also give you steps to turning the details of a lie into “truth” in your head—tricks of the pros, such as field operatives for intelligence agencies and undercover cops.

I would not advocate total elimination of omission and embellishment. These brands of lying are a fact of life that help human beings deal with myriad challenges. It’s better than letting your mouth say whatever your brain thinks. That’s what children do before they learn social skills. They have no filter, no private thoughts. Habitually engaging in a childlike “radical honesty,” a concept described by Brad Blanton in a book of the same name (Dell, 1996), will hurt people—for what reason?—and alienate even close friends.

Do take a hard look at why you want to lie by omission or embellishment, though. Both can strain relationships to the breaking point if they violate expectations, or entitlements. Fidelity is a common entitlement, even if the couple doesn’t have a marriage contract that specifies it. A woman asking her fiancé, “Did you see your ex-girlfriend when you were in San Antonio?” most likely doesn’t want a “yes” or “no.” She expects you to know that the word “see” really means “have sexual contact with,” so your answer better be complete enough to address that question. When you say “yes” and leave it at that, it can be a fact that sounds deceitful! The elephant is in the living room and no one wants to admit it.

In the early 1970s Richard Bandler and John Grinder conducted research at the University of California that led to neurolinguistic programming (NLP). It’s valuable in understanding how people absorb and sort information, and, as a corollary, how they lie. A key concept in NLP is that the ability to establish rapport with others supersedes natural intelligence and formal education in helping a person achieve success. You can define success broadly as in “a successful life” or you can narrow it down to “a successful cold call” or “successfully cheating on your spouse.” But the core concept here is “rapport.” To establish rapport you have to use the most ideal information channel for the individual. Next, you need to adapt to the way a person sorts information.

So how a person lies, or really how well a person lies, depends on these rapport skills. How well a person interrogates also depends on these rapport skills.

The primary information channels, or access senses, are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Most people respond to visual stimuli more keenly than the others, but there are people for whom hearing or feeling something leaves a stronger impression. In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at these channels and how they interplay with the way a person remembers experiences—that is, by sequence, time, or event. To describe how you sort information in real-time, I’m going to use a different set of criteria, but you’ll later see how they come together to define you as a sequence-, time-, or event-driven person.

In Rangers Lead the Way (Adams Media, 2003), former U.S. Army Ranger and leadership consultant Dean Hohl gives a straightforward list of sorting styles (pp. 170-171). These are either-or choices. As you go through them, pick the ones that describe you and think of someone you know—someone you have a hard time communicating with—and pick the ones that you think best describe him or her:

Let’s say our suspected liar is kinesthetic. He is a large-chunk, random sort of guy and he’s trying to impress you by talking about cars he has owned—or says he owned. His Porsche cornered beautifully at 75 miles per hour, it went from zero to 60 in a few seconds, and on and on. You, on the other hand, are a visual person, who tends to be a sequential, small chunker. You ask him what color the car was and to describe the interior and how much trunk space he had—and he fumbles. The lack of rapport didn’t necessarily make you doubt his story but, when you pursued more information based on your access sense and your sorting style, his Porsche didn’t sound so real anymore.

As an interrogator, these differences may help you spot a lie, but to extract information you’ll probably want to build rapport with your source. Your baselining questions need to give you information about his access sense and sorting style, so that you talk to him on his own terms.

As these two tools of analysis suggest, communication isn’t just verbal. Words are just one common system of auditory symbols to transmit an idea from one person to another. A handshake is a kinesthetic symbol. A wink is a visual symbol. Perfume is an olfactory communication. None has an absolute meaning. They can be misconstrued not only because of differences in access and sorting style, but also because people have connotations or idiosyncratic associations for symbols. These may have more weight in their mind than the denotations. For example, I associate perfume with flirting, probably because women in the military didn’t wear perfume unless they were off-duty socializing. The first time I realized the importance of connotations was in the ninth grade when my English teacher, Shepherd Chuites, announced, “It makes me angry as heck when someone offers a home for sale in the newspaper. You can’t sell a home. You can sell a house.” The point stuck with me the rest of my life.

People can mean different things by different symbols, because each of us has filters. Filters are sensory, cultural, religious, ethnic, physical, racial—the litany can go on and on. A person smelling of cigarettes might strike you as careless, repulsive, and nervous because those are traits you associate with smoking. Subliminally, you might value what that person says less than the statements of someone who has no odor. That individual could have the most profound insights of anyone you have ever met, but your filters prevent you from absorbing his wisdom. Many people in the South, people who were my neighbors when I was a small child, could not see Martin Luther King for the man of greatness that he was. To them, he was black, so he couldn’t possibly say anything relevant or inspiring to white people.

Whenever we do something or learn something new, it affects our filters. Whenever we make a decision, it limits another choice. Whenever we assign a meaning to a word, it defines for us how it can be used. In Arabic, the word, approximately spelled “qama,” means four pages of stuff. It’s too broad to move into this language—possibly approaching indefinable—so it serves as an example of a filter that will always come between people who understand Arabic and people who don’t.

To illustrate the idea of filters to classes of interrogators, I’ve used overhead transparencies to reveal one layer of a picture at a time. By the time I removed all of the layers, the picture had changed multiple times.

You have to recognize filters and work with them and through them in applying interrogation skills. If someone is angry, she’ll have a different filter in hearing a piece of information from someone who’s fearful. A Kurd telling the same story about Saddam Hussein that a Suni political leader is telling will have a different take on it. Two lovers from your past, one of whom dumped you and one of whom you dumped, will probably describe you in conflicting terms. To the human mind, perception is reality, and so all of these people at odds with the information are telling what they see as the truth. “Truth,” then, is not necessarily what’s true. You want to learn these techniques because you want to know what’s true.

Choice of a word or phrase can enable a person to lie more comfortably, because that word or phrase distances him from an event. The killer’s filters stop him from saying “murder”; instead, he says “accident.” On a less dramatic level, your son might say, “Someone broke the window,” which doesn’t pin the blame on anyone—even though he did it—but it announces the event in a non-judgmental way. Often, this kind of distancing involves putting a lot of filler words into a sentence and omitting the words that get to the point. Listen to any politician’s denial of wrongdoing to find a vivid illustration. A more common example might be a drawn-out exchange in which one person clearly hopes that delaying a response will take the questions from a steady flow to a slow drip to a stop:

“Did you eat the cookies?”

“What cookies?”

“The Girl Scout cookies in the pantry.”

“Aren’t they there any more?”

“The Thin Mints are still there, but the Do-Si-Dos are gone.”

“Oh, the Thin Mints are still there?”

“Yeah, but the Do-Si-Dos—oh, forget it.”

One other thing to note here is that sometimes people deliberately talk without having any meaning in their words, but that doesn’t mean they’re trying to deceive you. It gives them time to set up an important statement, to delay saying something when it’s clear the time isn’t right, or to reclaim a lost thought. Politicians do it with phrases such as, “The American people need to know that this issue is one of many that we are giving serious consideration to in Congress.” You might have used the device in trying to back-peddle away from a marriage proposal. And many of us have made sentences that meant nothing more than “blah, blah, blah” when we couldn’t remember what we meant to say. It’s a version of “uh” that gives a person time to think. I frequently deal with people in business who can’t deliver a quick retort. My advice to them: If you think it’s important to get in the first word, open your mouth with a rehearsed response, a space filler. You don’t have to have your thought completely formed when you start talking.

The last set of criteria I’ll give you for analyzing a person’s approach to communication is the Myers-Briggs model of personality. The value of this is that it may be very familiar to you because you took the typology test at school or work. I’ll give you an overview of the four sets of either-or categories and then suggest how knowing someone’s profile will help you understand their approach to lying and how you might spot a lie. Here’s an important caveat: I’ve used Myers-Briggs profiles extensively, but I’m not an expert on the theory. That’s why I’ve asked Deborah Singer Dobson, a vice president of human resources, author, and certified Myers-Briggs consultant since 1989, for her insights on what a Myers-Briggs profile tells you about how to spot a liar.

Knowing Myers-Briggs types helps you establish how people think more directly than how they lie. Your ability to assess types becomes invaluable in establishing rapport and running approaches, which I cover later. A grasp of Myers-Briggs also gives you an edge when you decide to use someone’s style of sorting data against him in forcing him out of a practiced lie.

Myers-Briggs takes four pairs of criteria to determine a type. A thorough test is the only true way to determine your type. The paired criteria are: introverts vs. extroverts; sensing vs. intuiting; thinking vs. feeling; and judging vs. perceiving. When determining the letter that is used, each in the pair is exclusive of the other. There are also degrees of each, so the test helps you to understand how deeply ingrained you are in a category. Certain generalities will help you get the basic idea.

Do you get your energy from people or recharge you batteries through privacy? Do you prefer to focus on the world outside or on your own inner world?

This characteristic is all about where people get their energy. Introverts get their energy from being in their own brains and inside themselves, and they must recharge alone with their own interests and hobbies. They absolutely need their own private space and tend to need more privacy overall. High-energy introverts will often be seen mumbling to themselves when alone. They rehearse what they’re going to say before saying it. They would prefer to watch any new activity and have an opportunity to practice on their own before experiencing something new.

Extroverts get their energy from the rest of the world and from being with other people. Strong extroverts will not engage in “alone activities” for long periods of time and find being at home, even when sick, extremely confining. Extroverts are known for “thinking with their mouths” and are known for literally making sentences up as they roll off their tongue. They must experience things and will put themselves easily into new situations and environments and tend to take on more physical risks easily. Their body language is generally easier to read than that of an introvert, because their body orientation is more connected to the rest of the world.

This is the category that describes how you gather data.

Sensing types take the world as it is, look for data, like to build and make things and use their hands, and are generally highly organized and systematic. Sensors are viewed by others as the methodical and realistic, the grounded type who make decisions based on facts. Intuiting types can view this person as unimaginative and caught up in the mundane.

Intuiting types “read between the lines” always and are using their “sixth sense” to try to understand what is not easily seen or supported by data. They are always about creating something new or innovative and generally are more comfortable with breaking rules if it means developing something new. Sensing types can also be very creative but generally try to solve problems that exist already or are attached to current technology.

As an intuiting type, I find my most brilliant observations come when I am talking to someone. I may not notice details of the exchange because they just aren’t as important as the ideas that surface, and that I then internalize. Thanks to the Army and negative re-inforcement I got over relying on intuition, I can see the details of the concrete when I really need to. Not surprisingly, the Army is a sensing organization and, as with sensing individuals, often see intuiting types as flighty.

One time, I had a coaching session with four salesmen, two of whom were sensing individuals and two of whom were intuiting. The simulation centered on a customer who wasn’t particularly happy. I asked the first one, an intuitor, what does this customer want? He said, “He wants us to build on a relationship of the past. He doesn’t like or trust us, but figures we’re the best thing he has going right now.” When I asked how he knew that, he replied, “I don’t know.” So I probed further. He finally answered, “It isn’t what I heard. It’s what I didn’t hear when I asked questions that made me conclude that.” I asked one of the sensing individuals the same question. “He wants the product on time, a particular service schedule, and a budget that doesn’t exceed $100,000.” Again, I asked the question, “How do you know that?” He seemed to think that was a dumb question: “It’s what he said!” The two types make ideal partners, but the sensing individual often can’t stand the insights of an intuitive type, whom he sees as working from voodoo magic. On the other hand, inuitors get fed up with the nitpicking sensors who have to have every piece of hard data to make a decision. Their view is, “I’m smart enough to connect the dots. I know what this means.”

As Deborah Dobson succinctly puts it, “An intuitive type most likely developed the microwave and VCR, while a sensing type most likely developed the heat shields for the space shuttle and better shock absorbers for cars.”

First of all, thinking types obviously feel and feeling types obviously think. This characteristic is all about how people make decisions, and thinkers value the facts. They make decisions with their heads, whereas feeling types make decisions based on morals, values, and norms, and generally how decisions will affect people and how they feel or live. Facts may play a part in their decisions, but not the pivotal role.

Both types can get to the same decision, just by different methods. For instance, a T and an F who are married might choose the same car, but their reasons are different. The T will do the research to determine that a particular car is the right price, good size, gets reasonable gas mileage, and has an acceptable appearance. Those things may also have to be true for the F, but the car also has to make the F feel good. It might be similar to the car the F’s parents had, and therefore represent something comfortable. The F would also want to be sure the car came in a desirable color and maybe even that the company itself could withstand scrutiny as a good corporate citizen.

This characteristic is all about how people want to manage their lives. Judgers—and this should not be construed as a pejorative designation—live their lives under the conception that there is a right way for things to occur. “Right” in this case means “structured” or “ordered.” Judgers like their environment to resemble their mind: clean, orderly, and uncluttered. Judgers think of work first, deadlines with consequences, and committing to a cause, goal, or calendar. With regard to organization skills, these are the filers.

Perceivers, on the other hand, are pilers. Offices and living spaces can be a mess without disrupting perceivers. Schedules and deadlines are suggestions. Perceivers live in a world of possibilities. Making one decision limits others, so perceiving types are always rethinking or redoing things. Ps are procrastinators—not because they’re irresponsible, but because they feel they have to wait until the last possible minute in case a really good idea or new information becomes available to help with their decision. They get energy from many things in their life “staying open.” The proverbial person who believes that the perfect mate is just around the corner is most likely a P.

In Myers-Briggs circles, the joke is that Js make lists and use them, and Ps make lists and lose them. Js like to know many weekends in advance what they’re doing, whereas Ps want to wait until Saturday morning to determine what they’ll do that day, and then again Sunday morning to determine what they’ll do then.

My last Army supervisor, with whom I shared a birthday, was David Hastings, one of the most knowledgeable interrogators I met in my Army career. Dave was a CW5, the highest rank an interrogator in the U.S. Army can reach. He was the scheduler and coordinator for all of our training—a classic J. Dave created all of our transportation grids and support needs. He also handled program coordination. On the other hand, I was the content guy and our front man. In Dave’s words, he was the chartsy graphsy guy and I as the artsy craftsy guy. Together, we worked magic in the interrogation training because of our complementary methods and were able to create programs that brought in all services and foreign armies as well. Dave had a very orderly cube about 12 × 12 with masses of books, charts, and tables all in a neat row. He also had a sign on the wall that read “work until you fall down and then pick weeds.” My cube was next to Dave’s and about 12 × 18. You could rarely see the floor in it. I stacked documents to about 3 feet high, and all surfaces had paper at any given time. Once after a particularly eye-opening (for the students) training session about psychology of capture, the students identified him as the Palpatine and me as Darth Vader—the methodical builder of an empire, and the wielder of the dark side of the Force who was full of tricks and surprises.

We get closer to an understanding of how all this ties in with lying by looking at temperament and intelligence types based on Myers-Briggs sorting. David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates did the original codification in Please Understand Me, and then Kiersey expanded on it in his follow-up work, Please Understand Me II (Prometheus, 1984 and 1998, respectively). With the Kiersey/Bates categories and keywords as a basis, Deborah Dobson looks to the four types—rationals, idealists, guardians, and artisans—for clues about how different people lie. Her insights reflect her direct experience using Myers-Briggs to help companies solve personnel problems.

The rationals are NTs—that is, a type characterized by the combination of intuiting and thinking. Kiersey cites their “high strategic analysis ability.” In military terms, they are the generals. Their keywords are competent, autonomous, and strong-willed.

NTs don’t lie well. They have a clumsy, confessional approach to deceit, first fessing up a little bit, and then spilling the whole truth in response to pressure. Dobson knows how to spot them: “It’s been my experience you can tell when they’re lying because they have fidgety body language, they stumble, they stutter.” Because competency and productivity reign supreme for an NT, if you catch one in a lie, it’s very degrading to him.

NTs are not accustomed to thinking that they have to lie because they are natural leaders; they think mostly about people doing what they say or want or being able to convince them with their sheer intellect or charisma. If they have to lie to move their agenda forward it makes them feel uncomfortable and is not a part of their “leadership persona,” or self-image.

These folks are NFs, or a combination of intuiting and feeling types. According to Kiersey, their keywords are authentic, benevolent, and empathic. This temperament type’s mission and focus is on “becoming” and harmony.

And they make good liars. When they anticipate having to lie in a situation, they use their gifts as visual people to conjure up a mental picture of the deceit—that is, how it would have happened. They have an ability to picture themselves doing whatever it is the lie is about, and that reduces body symptoms of lying. NFs are all about creating solutions, helping people and organizations. They focus on process improvement; therefore, they are always picturing the next step—something new, something that hasn’t happened yet. They’ll lie because it will maintain harmony and good relations.

Less-mature NFs are conflict averse and will lie as a result. NFs are also the “experts” at understanding others and what makes them tick, and, as such, they know what to say or how to frame things to move others to do things.

Don’t take this to mean that NFs actually like to lie or prefer it as a course of action. In fact, they tend to be keenly sensitive to the morality of a lie. They just have a few traits that make them better at it than other classes of people.

These SJs, or sensing-judging types, are concrete communicators who collect data through external channels. They would then use a proven methodology to get people together to solve problems. They want to maintain the status quo and they value hard work. Kiersey cites their keywords as respectable, good, and reliable.

As a rule, SJs won’t lie. They may get legalistic in an attempt to lie, but it’s more likely that they’ll say, “I can’t talk about it.” They are rule-oriented, so they avoid occasions where they might need to lie. They are generally easy to read, almost projecting guilt.

The artisans are SPs—that is, sensing/perceiving types. This temperament type’s mission and focus are on enjoyment and action. They are concrete communicators who collect information from external channels and see the possibilities through their perceiver eyes. According to Kiersey, their keywords are graceful, daring, and adaptable.

SPs get you in the ballpark of truth, and that’s good enough for them. They have occupations related to enjoyment and experiencing; they are pilots, paramedics, professional skydivers, and actors. Their approach to lying is “if I tell a little truth, that’s good enough,” which translates to “if you ask me what happened on the 10-yard line and I tell you what happened on the 50-yard line, I told you the truth. You have to keep digging for specifics with a lying SP. Finally, they’ll probably tell you the truth, but, in the meantime, they won’t get uptight about it. For that reason, they may not leak stress as a clue that they are hiding something. They can actually turn the lie into a game or have some fun with it.

The value of spotting access senses, sorting styles, and personality and temperament types will take shape as you begin looking at the specifics of how to spot a liar. They will help you to understand how someone else thinks and where he or she is coming from to eliminate yet another filter from your mind.