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Why Do People Lie?
We all lie. Yes, even you! People lie for numerous reasons. Some people lie for self-preservation, protecting themselves from fear, pain, guilt, shame, and/or embarrassment. Some people lie to protect others’ feelings. People lie to fit in, to evade conflict, or to avoid hurting someone they love. Some people lie because it’s their job; others lie just because they like to feel they are getting away with something or getting one over on someone else. Then there are the charming sociopaths who lie incessantly to get their way with no concern for others; the compulsive liars who lie out of habit and feel awkward when telling the truth; the professional liars, who master the art of lie to get the job done, and then there is everybody else; and the list goes on and on. Because we all lie.
You may be thinking, Who is she to tell me I lie? Think about when your phone rings at home and you know it’s someone you really don’t want to talk to. Have you ever told someone (your spouse or your child) to tell that person you are not available or not at home? Well, guess what? You just lied. Or think about when your best friend came to you and asked, “What do you think of my new skinny jeans?” when said jeans were noticeably two sizes too skinny, and you said, “They look great!” while thinking, How on earth did she get in them? Or the time your mom called and asked, “Did you remember that Dad’s birthday is Friday?” and you say, “Of course I did, Mom!” as you wrote, “Get Dad birthday card” on a sticky note. What about when the doctor asks you how often you exercise and you say, “Three times a week,” knowing darn well that you squeeze in a 20-minute walk once a week if you’re lucky? I don’t even have to say it, because you know you’re lying.
When I was in the military I was considered to be a professional liar. I told detainees responsible for acts of terrorisms that I would do everything in my power to get them out of prison and released back to their country of origin; I told Taliban members I understood why they fought jihad against Westerners and that the United States should have never entered Afghanistan; I even sympathized and empathized with hardcore terrorists about their capture and imprisonment. I lied because it was my job to do so, in order to get information.
Three Ways to Lie
There are three ways to lie: the false statement, embellishment, and lying by omission. You can lie by saying something that is completely untrue, you can embellish the details of a story, or you can leave out a detail or details of a story. Did you know that nine out of 10 people lie on their resumes by embellishing their skills and responsibilities? Wouldn’t you want to know that if you were a hiring manager? I work with a bunch of type-A personalities; heck, I’m one myself. We are very competitive and have to be the best at everything. When our war stories start circulating, the details seem to get more and more exciting and badass each time. Could there be some slight embellishment going on here? Most likely, but the stories are always entertaining!
An example of lying by omission would be when your wife asks you, “Who’s going on the business trip with you tomorrow?” and you know that the young, attractive, single paralegal the firm just hired is going, but you only say, “John and Pete”—that is lying by omission. You’re not saying she isn’t going, but you’re not telling your wife she is, either. Perhaps your sole reason for lying by omission is that you don’t want to cause any concern for your wife, because you have absolutely no interest in the 20-year-old paralegal and are happily married. If that’s the case, then why lie by omitting the fact she’s going? For many of the reasons I have already listed previously. Lying is not always done for personal gratification; it may be done to spare the feelings of others or just to keep the peace.
In relationships the key thing is to know the preferred communication style of the other person. Does he prefer you keep the peace and omit unnecessary facts? Or does he prefer you to be open and forthright about every detail, no matter what the consequence? Whichever way it is, you have to respect and exercise his preferred style, even if it’s not your preference, or at least meet him halfway. Relationships are about trust and communication. You can’t have one without the other, and without both, you have no relationship. My most successful relationships, friendships and intimate, have been when both parties are equally open and honest. Once you know the worst about your friend or spouse, then there’s only the best to come. We are all human and we all make mistakes and misjudgments. Let’s face it: We all have screwed up at least once. I’ve told people some of my worst mistakes, but if they still like and respect me after that, I know I have a solid relationship. So, when it comes to deciding whether you should tell your friend that her jeans are too tight, or tell your wife that the young blond is going on the business trip with you, think about her, not you, and what she would prefer to hear. It may be that your friend says, “Yeah, I guess these can be my goal pants for when I drop 10 more pounds. Thanks for being so honest!” Or maybe your wife says, “I don’t really care; just miss me and come back ready to spend some alone time, with no kids!” I will say for the record that 30 minutes of an uncomfortable conversation beats a lifetime of regret or subterfuge. When you learn to accept your mistakes and foibles, you will begin to more easily accept those of others, and that in turn will create a mutual respect—all from allowing yourselves to be human with each other. My advice? Don’t be afraid to share everything, but first make sure you know whether the person wants to hear it or not!
Two Types of Liars
The imploders
So now that we understand everyone lies or has lied at some point, I am going to tell you about the two types of liars: those who implode—everyday liars, and those who explode—powerful liars. Imploders, or everyday liars feel nervous about lying, so their stress increases when they lie. The stress hormone cortisol is released, and the body goes through some physiological responses to the stress such as dry mouth, flushing, and sweating, just to name a few. The stress caused by lying heightens their senses and they become paranoid. They feel as though everyone can see their lie, so they try to vanish by physically making themselves smaller (imploding) by slouching, turning their shoulders inward, avoiding eye contact, crossing their legs and arms—essentially balling up. Their voice will weaken but become higher pitched. They will use distancing language to remove themselves from the lie. (I’ll discuss more about what happens to the body when it’s under stress in Chapter 5.)
At this point their cognitive thinking starts to deteriorate, and they won’t be able to remember the details of the lie they just told. In Chapter 10 I will teach you techniques on how to catch someone in a lie; many of these techniques exploit the fact that cognition decreases while imploders are lying. J.J. Newberry, retired Senior Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and part of a select group of individuals known as Truth Wizards, who have been tested and rated by Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan as the best of the best at detecting deception) describes studies that have shown how cognitive thinking, which involves the brain’s critical skills of attention, long- and short-term memory, processing speed, visual and auditory processing, and logic and reasoning, actually lowers behavioral animation (see: www.psychologytoday.com/experts/mr-jj-newberry and www.forensicpsychologyunbound.ws/OAJFP/Volume_2__2010_files/Vrij,%20et%20al.%202010.pdf). This means that, as liars are in the midst of spinning a lie, their body languagequiets down while their brain is processing at full capacity, but immediately before and after the lie, they leak deceptive tells (departures from their normal behavior that indicate stress).
Everyday liars like you and me will tend to get nervous and anxious as we lie, and our bodies will reveal that anxiety and stress through visible physiological responses. We will mess up details of a story or forget them completely, we will unknowingly change verb tenses and pronouns, and we will exhibit clusters of nonverbal deceptive tells, which you will learn about in the following pages.
The exploders
Powerful liars, the exploders, will do just the opposite of everyday liars. They actually physically expand by making themselves appear bigger, so that they will look and feel more confident and in control. They may take up more room with arm gestures, by widening their stance, and by becoming louder and more animated. They use the “convince, not convey” technique: Truthful people convey a story, whereas liars try to convince you of a story. Powerful liars often enjoy lying. Instead of cortisol, the stress hormone dopamine is released. Dopamine is a complex chemical in the body that passes information from one neuron to the next via the mesolimbic pathway, which is associated with addictions and sexual arousal. Dopamine is too complex for scientists to define so I am not going to try to do it here. What is important to know is that powerful liars don’t get nervous when they lie; they get off on it; it gives them a high. Hence their cognitive thinking doesn’t decrease; it increases. Some powerful liars even have a kind of a God complex: They think they are better than everyone else and so good at lying that they’ll never be caught by a normal person. They think you would have to be as clever and smart as they are in order for you to catch them. But guess what? Powerful liars still exhibit deceptive tells, and this is where you can catch them!
People often ask me, a former interrogator and “professional” liar, how I broke detainees’ will to resist telling the truth and their determination to keep telling lies. My response is because I attract more bees with honey than vinegar. I am a 5-feet, 4-inch-tall female, I weigh 125 pounds, and I am most certainly not intimidating. Instead of trying to get the detainees to fear me, I got them to like me; some even came to respect what I was doing. In fact, I was invited to Pakistan to dinner to meet one detainee’s family; another sketched a picture of me and transcribed on the back, “Good luck for success in your work.” My work, you realize, was interrogating him. I’m a good salesperson. I sold them the idea of freedom in exchange for information, freedom I knew most wouldn’t get and most certainly didn’t deserve, but I was still able to convince them freedom was attainable if they cooperated and told the truth. (Remember: I’m lying to them about freedom so I have to convince them, not convey to them.) Obviously there is a lot more to how I actually got to the truth, which I’ll explain to you in bits and pieces throughout this book.
Despite the recent release of the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, compiled by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I stand by my words when I say that during my time spent at GTMO as a DoD certified military interrogator from August to December 2002, I never heard of, knew of, or saw any detainee physically or mentally abused, coerced, or “tortured.” Based on the news, unfortunately, it seems that it may have happened at other sites. But just to be clear, I did not, nor did any member of the DoD that I worked with in GTMO during the time I was there, torture detainees. To the contrary, our detainees got tea, trail mix, movies, books, games, candy, and any other incentive item they requested to make their life in prison more tolerable. In fact, we even took extra steps to import delicacies from their countries of origin. Based on our discoveries that respect and rapport got us information, years after I left, special camps were built for cooperative detainees where they could play soccer and grow their own gardens. This to me seems to be a far cry from torture.
I took the stand a few years ago and swore to the same thing I have written here, but apparently there are people in the world who claim for a fact this happened without ever having set foot on the island. Unfortunately, I was a victim of press articles stating I said things I didn’t and did things I had no knowledge of. My favorite is when my mother called me, very upset, and said, “I read that article about you by some columnist in D.C. saying you were a ‘MILF’! I didn’t even know what that was; your brothers had to tell me!” So thank you, uninformed columnist in D.C., who shall remain nameless, for making yourself look stupid by writing about something about which you had not a clue. Because you just proved a statistic.
How did I sell freedom? I had to lie. How did I convince detainees of my lies? Simply put, I know how to lie. But even so, I wasn’t comfortable doing it because I still feared they would see right through me.
In general, though, you feel good and you respect yourself when you are truthful, and therefore others will respect you, too. If you tend to lie, you will not respect yourself or others, and in fact you will become very distrusting of others. Did you know that people who generally distrust others do not make good detectors of deception? This is because they think everything is a lie and that every action is done for a selfish purpose. They see deception everywhere, even in truthful individuals. So if you are one of those people who don’t trust anyone, you are going to have a very difficult time detecting true deception.
If you were to ask me whether there are any good reasons to lie, my answer is no. The older I get, the less I care about hurting someone’s feelings by being fake; in fact, I think being fake to someone is worse than possibly hurting their feelings and telling them the truth. I’d much rather give them the truth so they can see themselves through another set of eyes or perspective. Being (sometimes brutally) honest with people takes getting used to, but I have found I am more respected and have stronger relationships for doing so. I wish I had always been like this, but I lacked the confidence to be truthful when I was younger. That said, I will still lie for a job that requires me to do so for a greater good.
Knowing I prefer to speak the truth, you will learn how and why those people who do not like to speak the truth are good at telling a lie. I am not advocating that you practice becoming a good liar by embracing the following steps; but even if you do, you’ll most likely still leak deceptive tells anyway, because most of you reading this are not professional, sociopathic, or compulsive liars. However, knowing how people get good at lying will help you detect their lies.
The Four Secrets to Being a Good Liar
1. Remain confident.
First, convince yourself of the lie, or convince yourself that you are not lying. This takes a lot of mind-over-matter power. You have to consciously trick your subconscious into thinking that you are not lying. Stay calm and say to yourself, This is the truth. (It’s better to say that instead of This is not a lie, because it’s easier to feel positive about a positive statement than a negative statement.) Second, make sure that part of your lie is actually true. This way you can concentrate on the truthful part to calm yourself. Once you convince yourself that what you are about to say is the truth, you will suppress the release of cortisol that would otherwise make your body respond physiologically to nervousness with an increased pulse rate, sweating, dry mouth, flushing, shaking, voice quivering, and so on. People who lie by omission and embellishment can lie more easily because there is some truth to the story. Telling a flat-out lie is harder. For this reason, many liars try to control the conversation and only talk about the parts that are true. Most people inherently want to be honest. No one likes to lie—unless you are a sociopath; even terrorists don’t like it. They would rather shout to the rooftops, “We’re attacking your compound tonight, you dirty American!”
2. The devil is in the details.
This is a common saying among interrogators. I used to say it to my students all the time to stress the importance of getting detailed information. The reason for this was twofold. First, if details are present in a story it gives the interrogator leverage to catch a lie because remembering details is difficult, especially when those details are made up; and second, the absence of details is a sure sign that those details are either unknown or being covered up. If an interrogator overlooks the details, he or she will never catch the lie or be able to extract the truth from a detainee. You can unravel a lie by questioning the details in the lie because, typically, liars cannot remember the details of a lie when questioned on them later.
In order to avoid this uncomfortable circumstance, good liars avoid giving details. Instead, they offer confusing and vague information that needs further questioning to explain. This in turn often makes the questioner aggravated and frustrated, because he or she knows he or she isn’t getting any pertinent information. If the questioner becomes frustrated, the person telling the lie actually starts to gain the upper hand by remaining calm and taking control of the conversation (often by saying something patronizing such as “I notice you are becoming upset or angry; I’m telling you everything I remember”). Liars create a lie in the present tense because it never happened. When questioned on the lie, they may slip up and start telling the story in the present tense. This is a sure verbal deceptive tell that allows interrogators to discover the lie and get to the truth. So if you’re trying to be a good liar, you should avoid giving up details. Speak in generalities. I will talk in greater depth about this in Chapter 10.
3. Plan and prepare.
Anticipate questions that will be asked of you and come up with your answers. When answering questions, liars try not to be wordy but often are. Liars are easy to catch when they start talking nonsense. Janine Driver calls this “double-talk.” For example, liars tend to provide alibis or character witnesses in their stories, but refuse to answer questions about them with a simple yes or no. Anthony Weiner and Bill Clinton were notorious for this. Look at this transcription of the Fox News clip of Representative Weiner defending his handling of the photo scandal:
Reporter: “This is not that situation. You said, from your Twitter account, a lewd photograph was sent to a college student. Answer the question: was it from you or not? Did you send it or not?”
Wiener: “If I were giving a speech to a 45,000 people and someone in the back threw a pie or yelled out an insult, I would not spend the next two hours of my speech responding to that pie or insult.”
Reporter: “All you have to do is say no.”
(To watch the video online, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=05-_LIOd5nM.)
I agree. All Weiner had to do was say no, but he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) because then he would have lied on television. Didn’t he understand that the fact he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give a direct answer told everyone watching that he was lying? You would think that his public relations assistant would have coached him better. And what is this pie reference? Do people typically throw pies from the back of a room filled with 45,000 people? I don’t think a pie would actually reach the stage—just a thought. The pie reference was Wiener’s nonsense language, a story meant to get us focused on the pie rather than what he had done (or claimed not to have done).
Now look at this transcription of President Bill Clinton giving his testimony regarding Monica Lewinsky:
Reporter: “If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched her breasts, would she be lying?”
Clinton: [pause] “Let me say something about all this—”
Reporter: “All I really need for you, Mr. President, is to [say] I won’t answer under the previous grounds, or, or to answer the question, you see, because we only have four hours and your answers are extremely lengthy.”
Clinton: “I know. But go ahead and ask your questions.”
Reporter: “Question is, if Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched her breasts, would she be lying?”
Clinton: “That is not my recollection. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky and I am staying on my former statement about that.”
(Watch the full video here: www.youtube.comwatch?v=ClfpG2-1Bv4.)
Bill Clinton had the same problem Anthony Wiener had; he just couldn’t say no. This proves my point that people inherently do not like to lie. And they certainly do not want to lie on television, in front of a grand jury and thousands of viewers. So if you want to get away with a lie, answer yes or no to a yes-or-no question. (I will talk more about the liar’s inability to answer this kind of question in Chapter 10.)
4. Be congruent in your body language.
This is probably the most difficult step to master. In fact, most people can’t do it. In order to display behavioral congruency, which is having your body language match up to the words you are saying, you have to know your baseline behavior when you are not being deceptive. Unless someone who reads body language has told you what your body language is saying when you are not being deceptive, you probably don’t know what your baseline behavior is. I will talk in depth about reading and establishing someone’s baseline behavior in Chapter 8, which covers the third step in my five-step program. Your baseline will tell others what you do with your eyes, your body, your voice, your patterns of speech, and your facial expressions. It will also identify the physiological responses you are most likely to exhibit. If you are not an exploder (powerful liar), you will exhibit behavioral incongruences—that is, deceptive tells.
And finally, you need to know that liars will try to convince you with information and truthful people will convey information. If someone is working really hard to convince you they were home last night and not out with friends, or that they didn’t know anything about the robbery that happened next door, and your gut feeling is saying not to trust them, you may want to trust your gut, but don’t make any hasty judgments; read this book and you will learn both how and how not to get to the truth.
Lying is difficult. You may think you’re good at it, but I guarantee you are still leaking deceptive tells that you are not even aware of. It is extremely hard to suppress cortisol when you lie because you will be nervous. Even though we all lie, most of us prefer to be honest; we also like to think that others prefer to be honest with us. We tend to like people who are attractive, who smile, and who speak in a low-pitched voice, because they seem more trustworthy and powerful. What I can say for certain is that people will still try to lie even though the odds of being caught are very high. Although we all lie, no one should be lied to.