6

STEP 3: THE STAKEOUT

The face is the index of the mind.

—LATIN SAYING

OOPS, SHE DID IT AGAIN! The summer of 2006 had been a rough one for pop star Britney Spears. She’d been photographed driving her black SUV down Pacific Coast Highway with her four-month-old baby boy on her lap. She’d been filmed in New York City walking with a full drinking glass in one hand and her baby in the other, then stumbling and nearly dropping him on his head on the sidewalk. The tabloids were screaming that her marriage to Kevin Federline was down the tubes, that he was living in the basement. Hounded by paparazzi every time she left her home, Britney felt cornered, nearly imprisoned. To set the record straight, she agreed to have a sit-down interview with Matt Lauer for Dateline.

The two superstars sat across from each other in what appeared to be slightly uncomfortable beige chairs with brown wooden armrests in the Princess of Pop’s multimillion-dollar home. Matt went in for the kill pretty early on when he asked the future mom of two how it felt to think that Kevin had left the mother of his first two kids when she was six months pregnant, and now Britney herself was six months pregnant—and the same kinds of rumors were flying.

“I didn’t know they were together,” she said as her eyebrows momentarily scrunched together and her hands ran halfway down her leg.

“Britney, do you believe in karma?”

“No, no!” she said, leaning back, swaying side to side, her eyes roaming around the room, chewing her gum like a fourteen-year-old girl waiting outside the principal’s office. “I didn’t know that until a couple of months later!” While her face faked surprise, the distressed femme fatale took her right and left hands and rubbed down her whole entire leg, down to her ankle, and all the way back up. The mother lode of all self-touches.

“So,” Matt said. “When the magazine says, on the cover, ‘Pregnant and Divorcing’ …,” and he paused.

Britney’s mouth flipped into a perfect upside-down U of sadness, her lips scrunched together. She almost looked like she was going to cry. “Oh, no,” she whispered, almost inaudibly. “None of that is true,” as she nodded her head faintly, “Yes.”

Britney filed for divorce six months later.

If you had only read a transcript of that Dateline conversation, you might have thought that Britney and Kevin had been deeply misunderstood and really they had a storybook romance. But when you watch the video, the body language, especially Brit’s facial faux pas, make it plain to see that there is much more to the story here. In retrospect, with the benefit of time, we see a vulnerable young woman desperately trying to mask her obvious anxiety and sadness, which sadly sprang a facial leak that revealed a soon-to-be doomed marriage. Spotting emotional leakage in the face can be one of the most powerful ways to sense that the message someone is trying to share is not necessarily the truth.

Now that you have gathered your intel and have your subject’s baseline squared away and you’ve conducted your wiretap, it’s time to focus on the stakeout, where you’ll learn how to decode the facial signs that are likely indicators of deceptive hot spots. Wouldn’t you feel empowered if you knew what the lightning-fast changes to facial expressions and forehead tension were telling you? Although facial findings won’t give you all the information you’re looking for—for example, whether or not the person is actually lying—spotting them gives you potential areas to later probe.

PREPARING FOR THE STAKEOUT

Our expressions affect each other dramatically—we need to continually be aware what effect our nonverbal communication makes on other people, and how their nonverbal messages may be coloring our impressions of them. One Harvard study found that the patients of physical therapists who used more distant nonverbal communication—by not making eye contact and not smiling—took a turn for the worse in the short term (during the hospital stay and at discharge), and this negative effect lasted up to three months afterward. In contrast, the health of patients of physical therapists with more open, caring nonverbal communication—with more smiles, nods, and frowns—improved immediately and over the long haul.¹ Remember: how you approach any situation changes the outcome of that situation. If you approach the stakeout with calm ease, you will keep your target at ease as well.

Scale back on the mirroring. When other people look nervous and uncomfortable, we feel nervous and uncomfortable. When people appear angry, we get angry. Moods are somewhat contagious. And when people try to convince us of something, they often will expend energy trying to change the way we feel about a situation: smiling more, touching more, yelling more.

One way to sidestep these efforts is to consciously stop mirroring. While mirroring is an excellent way to establish rapport, once you get to this stage in the process, you want to stop because it might interfere with your ability to detect deception. One Dutch study asked a group of forty-six students to have a conversation with someone and try to tell whether their conversational partner was fibbing about a charitable donation. The students who were told not to mirror—versus the ones who were told to mirror, or told nothing at all—scored significantly better at detecting the lie.²

When we mirror others’ expressions, the mirror neurons in our brains stimulate the same kinds of emotional responses as the person with whom we’re talking. We are wired to connect! So, if you find you’ve been drawn in by this person’s charm before, you’ll have to consciously force yourself to step back, switch on your BS Barometer, and not get drawn into his or her web of deceit.

Remember that baseline! Remember the golden rule: always start with the baseline. Everyone has his or her own “normal” way of interacting with the world. Her idiosyncrasies could be mentioned within this chapter as “potentially deceptive signs”—but she could have been doing those things every day since she was six months old! You have no idea until you’ve collected her personal intel from the beginning.

Beware of nonverbal wild cards. Before you get started looking for nonverbal hot spots, ask yourself if the person you’re about to do the stakeout on is in one of the following wild card categories. Margo Bennett, captain of the University of California at Berkeley’s police department, identified a few things that might make suspects’ nonverbal behavior an untrustworthy source of information. These factors include:

Trust yourself. Above all, with this process, you have to trust your eyes. Your BS Barometer is helping your brain absorb and process more than you can ever consciously know. One study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people can recall specific faces, even just from blurry photographs, up to two years later. All it took was to look at the image several times over the course of a couple of days—then it was committed to memory.⁵ This “perceptual learning” is a form of pattern recognition, and it sticks with us even though we might see thousands of faces in between. Your brain is like an FBI database, filled up with all the images you took the time to study even years ago.

Okay, now it’s time to act fast and take care of business—let’s break down how to spot nonverbal indicators of deception.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS IN THE STAKEOUT

Remember, pretenders and phonies are all tightrope walkers, and their primary objective is to not fall off the rope while threading their web of deceit. If you concentrate and know what to look for, you’ll see the same three categories of signals in their body language that expose the possibility that there’s something they’re not telling you with their words.

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We humans have long believed that “the body never lies.” In ancient China, people who were suspected of lying were forced to chew rice powder, then to spit it out. If the rice powder was wet, the person was judged as honest; dry, the person was branded a liar and punished.^{6 7} We know now that one of the physical signs of fear is a dry mouth—but lying has no reliably accurate facial or body language signal. That’s why people with the best BS Barometers are the ones who can quickly spot deviations from a person’s baseline.

It’s time for you to rev your engines because you’re about to drive circles around every nervous, teeter-tottering, convincing-not-conveying, and backsliding liar who, without knowing it, has very little control over facial faux pas.

THE TEETER-TOTTERING FACE

We spend our entire lives gathering information from other people’s faces, so we don’t have to work that hard to get the basics down. The special motor neurons in our brains called “mirror neurons” react immediately to subtle signs of true emotion on others’ faces—a flash of a genuine smile or a tiny hint of sorrow can trigger that same emotion within us.

Nearly fifty years ago, nonverbal communication researcher Dr. Paul Ekman discovered that all humans share seven universal emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, anger, and contempt. These can be seen in microexpressions that are universally hard-wired into us primates and have been studied in human populations from the United States to Japan to Papua New Guinea. These automatic expressions are the same whether you are male or female, black or white, young or old. If you are surprised, you make the same expressions.

These microexpressions may only leak out for one-fifteenth of a second—literally a flutter of your lashes. While these micromovements can be a challenge to spot, learning to see these fleeting emotions is incredibly useful because each of these emotions registers with very distinct patterns that are almost impossible to fake. Consciously moving one of the more than forty intricate muscles in our face is hard to do, hard to manipulate, hard to disguise—for everyone. All of these reasons make spotting microexpressions about the closest thing we have to mind reading. Now, mind you—we still can’t know for sure what the catalyst was that sparked the wobbly leakage on the tightrope of those emotions (she says she’s sad, but we spot happiness; he tells us he’s happy, but we decode disgust and surprise). But if we see the microexpression, the person is definitely feeling that emotion—which, for a liar, makes these moments of emotional leakage the face’s version of teeter-tottering.

The good news is that, even before we study them to enhance our BS Barometer, our brains are already innately keyed into these microexpressions. One study found that people could determine the winner of an unfamiliar race for governor simply by watching ten-second silent video clips of a debate. Their predictions got worse when they added in the sound (but, considering how disingenuous and deceptive many politicians’ normal debate language is, that’s hardly surprising!).⁸ Spending time learning the traits of each universal emotion’s microexpression will greatly bolster the diagnostic capability of your BS Barometer. Studies have found that FBI agents trained in spotting microexpressions can increase their detecting deception accuracy to 70 percent, and, in some cases, to more than 90 percent. (Coast Guard investigators—who do a fair bit of intercepting smuggled drugs with non-native English speakers and often have to use more body language to communicate—also score well, at 80 percent.⁹) Now it’s your turn!

Leaked Happiness

(Jordan Strauss/WireImage)

(Janine Driver)

Two of my favorite women: (Left) Comedian, TV host, and actress Ellen DeGeneres splashes a genuine smile when she arrives at COVERGIRL Cosmetics’ Fiftieth Anniversary Party. (Right) My beautiful and loving mom with Vice President Joe Biden at the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure barbecue at the vice president’s house on June 10, 2011 (my forty-first birthday).

A person’s genuine smile is pulled up toward the ears, not back toward the jaw, and you will see crow’s feet around the eyes. A real, honest smile has a powerful and immediate effect on its viewer. For example, even though we know that almost every line that a politician utters is manufactured, the genuineness of their smiles still can have a big impact on us. One study found that politicians got bigger laughs for jokes that were delivered with genuine smiles—involving that “eye crinkle”—than those delivered with less sincere smiles.¹⁰

Leaked Sadness

A flash of sadness is almost impossible to manufacture. When someone is truly feeling sad, his bottom lip will pout, but his inner eyebrows will pull together and curl up. That inner eyebrow is the hardest muscle to move on your face. That’s why you can tell babies are sad even when they have pacifiers in their mouths. You can’t see their mouths, but you can see that inner eyebrow curving up, and you know they’re about to cry.

Tiny expressions of sadness are hard to fake. If you fake a pout, your bottom lip will stay there for a while, but the forehead won’t be touched. See if you can spot the true sadness in the next photos.

(Associated Press)

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda chokes up and leaks genuine sadness and remorse with pulled-together eyebrows, wrinkled forehead, lip pout with corners of lips pulled down, and wrinkled chin, at the National Press Club after testifying on Capitol Hill about the car manufacturer’s massive recalls and numerous safety problems.

(Associated Press)

(Karl Larsen/FilmMagic)

(Left) Susan Smith confessing to the murder of her two sons after insisting nine days earlier that they had been kidnapped. (Right) Paris Hilton rides home after her sentencing for a driving under the influence (DUI) violation in 2007.

Susan Smith was pleading for the safe return of her two sons, who’d been missing for over a week and whose bodies were found strapped into their car seats, in their mom’s car, at the bottom of a lake. Smith confessed to the murders a day after this photo was taken. Look at this classic teeter-totterer’s eyebrows—they betray no sadness at all. Then look at Paris Hilton, who is trying to cover up her true feelings after being sentenced to forty-five days in jail for her DUI conviction in 2007. (She eventually served twenty-two days.) She covers her mouth with her hand and most of her face with her huge sunglasses—but, like a crying baby with a pacifier, she just can’t escape those telltale eyebrows.

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Leaked Disgust

Disgust is a visceral response—eww! Your upper lip pulls up, your nose wrinkles, and your brow pulls down. You might also see this with the upper lip drawn up but without any involvement of the brows or nose.

Oakland Athletics’ outfielder Jose Canseco grimaces in disgust after tasting Japanese sake as his wife looks on during a reception for the U.S. All-Star baseball team at a Tokyo hotel, Friday, October 31, 1986. (Associated Press)

We look at the mouth more than any other place on a person’s face. We tend to think we’re looking people “in the eye,” but we actually look at people’s mouths and tongues more. You may be surprised to learn that when a person is being deceptive, he is more likely to keep his mouth closed: either he is semi-consciously trying to avoid allowing the truth to slip from his lips, or he is simply trying to keep a tight rein on his body language. It’s true! So although disgust is not the most lovable expression, it could be worse. Wait until you see the mouths of some of the most infamous lips-sealed liars!

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Leaked Fear

In fear, the mouth opens and is taut, as are the jaw muscles. Eyebrows may rise and go straight across. The eyes get huge, and you can often see the whites of the eyes all around the iris. Also, when we are terrified or shocked, we may put our hands in front of our mouths, almost as if to say, “I can’t take any more in.” We tend to touch our faces as our mouths hang open—as in this picture. This is genuine fear combined with shock.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, people in front of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral react as they look down Fifth Avenue toward the World Trade Center after two airliners crashed into the twin 110-story buildings. (Associated Press)

Leaked Surprise

When you see surprise, the mouth opens and is relaxed. The eyebrows go up but remain curled like rainbows. Surprise is the only microexpression that is always a catalyst to another emotion. So you have a surprise party—the guest of honor could leak surprise and then burst out crying. Or leak surprise and burst out smiling. But if you’re in a haunted house, that microexpression is likely to start as surprise and then quickly turn into fear, like in the next images.

The man in glasses on the right is startled and demonstrates surprise with his mouth hanging open wide. His jaw is relaxed, not taut, and his bottom lip is loose. His eyebrows are up and curved (in fear they go up and go straight across). However, we clearly witness fear within the whites of his eyes, and his hand pops up to protect his throat. The woman in the middle is also demonstrating surprise, but less dramatically than her friend. (My fave is the guy on the far left, who is scared to death, curled up in a standing fetal position.)

In the other picture, you can’t help but wonder what the heck just shocked and terrified these strong young men? Other than the man on the far left (who shows disgust with his pulled-up upper lip and wrinkled nose), the other three are 110 percent surprised with a splash of fear. Surprise itself only lasts less than three seconds and is always a catalyst to another emotion—in this case, likely pants-wetting terror.

Patrons at the Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls show signs of surprise and fear. (Nightmares Fear Factory)

If you knock on the door to a suspected cheater’s or liar’s house to confront the person and you see pure surprise, chances are you are looking an innocent person in the face. But if you see fear, you might be looking at a liar—because he knew it was a matter of time until you knocked on the door. He knows exactly why you’re there.

Leaked Anger

When angry, our brows come down, our mouth gets tight, and we lose color in our top lip—and that lip becomes one solid line.

In this photo of disgraced teeter-totterer Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was busted sending pictures of his penis to women online and denied it for weeks before finally admitting he did it, you can see his jaw and mouth are extremely tight. He clearly did not like being asked about this subject.

Former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner shows a combination of embarrassment, anger, and arrogance while listening to a reporter’s question at a press conference during his Twitter photo scandal. (Associated Press)

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Leaked Contempt

Democratic Senate nominee, Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, prepares for his debate with Republican Senate candidate Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL) on October 19, 2010, in Chicago, Illinois. (Getty Images)

Contempt is the half-smile, the smirk of superiority. This teeter-tottering expression is one of the most dangerous for relationships—psychologist John Gottman found that this expression is evidence of a doomed marriage. It screams, “I have it all figured out, I’m better than you.” For cops working in violence prevention, this is a dangerous face to see. You should consider contempt a thinly veiled threat: “I am either going to go around you or through you.”

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We’ve seen contempt leaked by a lot of alleged bad guys (and gals), such as Scott Peterson, O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, and Lindsay Lohan when they were in court. They presented themselves as credible but they leaked that contemptuous, unilateral half-smile, because they think they’re better than the people judging them and the people whom they’ve harmed. (For a particularly horrific example, see “A Special Kind of Liar’s Smile: Duping Delight,” above.)

THE CONVINCE-NOT-CONVEY FACE

Convince-not-convey shows up on our faces as extreme versions of natural expressions. If you’ve ever had to grin and bear it through an excruciating violin recital or mask a giggle while you shot a stern look at your child for making an admittedly hilarious joke in church, you’ve been on the convince-not-convey facial tightrope yourself. Liars are no different—and some are pretty good at it.

Fake Emotions

The big gun for the convincer is consciously faking emotions. They try very hard to convince you just how honest they are. But often they miss very key, subtle differences in the movement of the forehead, eyes, cheeks, and eyebrows—all those microexpressions we talked about earlier. So a great way to bust a liar is to really focus on some key differences between genuine and fake emotions.

Fake sadness. When people “buy” fake sadness, they’re often falling for a frown. My son fakes it all the time when he wants to play more of his LEGO Wii game. “Please, Mom! I only have one more level!” And that lip goes upside down and the little bottom lip comes out in a pout—but he doesn’t have a sign of sadness in his eyebrows or on his forehead. (Angus, when you get your forehead involved, we can talk.)

Fake anger. True anger could point to someone being outraged at being falsely accused—but “fake” anger could be an attempt to throw you off the scent (“How dare you accuse me?”). We talked about this in the wiretap as being a big one for convincers—they like to bully you into backing down. And most people do back down! But when you’re confronting someone on an issue and she gets angry, remember the picture of Anthony Weiner. If you don’t see those flat lips or tight jaw, give yourself some credit—it’s just bluster, and it’s clear you’re getting closer and closer to the truth. We talk about this more in chapter 8, “The Interrogation.” For now, know that in deception, anger can be used as a disguise.

(WireImages)

(Getty Images)

(Getty Images)

Fake happiness. Here’s the thing: we’re all suckers for a nice smile. First of all, when we see a genuine smile—a so-called Duchenne smile, characterized by “crow’s feet” wrinkles next to our eyes—our mirror neurons light up and cause us to feel pleasure. We naturally pay more attention to smiling faces, and genuine smiles help people trust each other faster. A naturally occurring genetic mutation also causes some people’s brains to respond even more significantly when they see people smiling—so be aware that you may be one of those people who are more drawn to smiles.¹¹

As the general public becomes more and more savvy about genuine versus faked body language, sometimes celebrities create new tricks to generate those “genuine” smiles. Sometimes stars like Reese Witherspoon use these tricks to make the most of their already happy faces.

If you study the hundreds of red carpet photos Reese Witherspoon has posed for, it’s clear the warm, sweet, and genuinely kind actress has learned that tucking your tongue behind your teeth generates the cheek muscles that most mimic a natural smile. When you tuck your tongue back there, that action forces your cheeks to go up and to get the crinkles on the side of your eyes.

Lightning-Fast Changes in Demeanor

The speed of a switch in emotions is, in itself, a telling sign. I’ll say to my son, “Angus, I’m not buying it. It’s time to stop the Wii. Let’s go read a book.” And his “sadness” is just gone—like turning the channel on the TV. If someone can go from sad to happy or from fear to anger to happiness in the time it takes to switch the station, that’s the big red flag of the convincer.¹⁴

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Changes in Eye Contact

When psychologists at Texas Christian University surveyed more than 2,500 adults in sixty-three countries, they found that more than 70 percent believed liars give less eye contact than truthful people.¹⁵ During each of my keynote presentations, I ask the audience, “Do you think liars are more likely to decrease eye contact or increase eye contact?” What do you think? If you didn’t guess either answer, then you are on the right track!

The whole amazingly complex, tiny muscle system that allows us to raise and lower our eyelids communicates a ton of emotional information. When study subjects are asked to guess how a person is feeling, they’ll be just as likely to get it right whether they see the entire face or they just see their eyes.¹⁶

People are all over the map with eye contact—some people give you the epic long stare; some people never catch your eye. Neither is necessarily a liar. What you’re looking for in the convincer is a change in their level of eye contact. In the United States and Canada, having eye contact about 30 to 60 percent of the time is the norm. But if they’ve been looking at you about 50 percent of the time, and suddenly drop to 20 percent, or shoot up to 80 percent, those are hot spots.

One study from the University of Alabama found that male experts who testify in trials have more credibility with the jury when they make large amounts of eye contact than if they make average or low-level eye contact. Interesting, this didn’t change at all for women—their credibility remained constant, regardless of how much eye contact they made.¹⁷

Changes in Blink Rate

With convincers, look for an increase in blink rate. While newborn babies only blink one to two times a minute, the average blink rate for an adult is between four and fourteen blinks per minute. However, during a recent Body Language Institute certification program, I put my students’ blink rate to the test. On the low end was Cory, with two blinks per minute; on the high end was my mom, Lorraine, with forty-two blinks per minute. The difference between two dramatically different base lines could be due to fatigue, disease, or medication. For instance, my mother, who has breast cancer, had received chemo that week. The severely intense medication could have been drying out her eyes, and the additional blinks provided additional lubrication. When detecting deception, your job is to look for an increase or decrease in a person’s eye blink baseline. While increased eye blinking is a sign of nervousness—another result of the “drying” phenomenon of fight or flight—a decrease is a sign of increased cognitive load. A person is focused so hard on thinking that his eyes stay quite stationary.¹⁸

BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward testifies before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee during a hearing on “The Role of BP in the Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill,” June 17, 2010, in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)

Go ahead, test your blink rate. Ask a friend to time you, or set your timer on your cell phone for one minute, and baseline your blink rate as you share a story about your day today. Are you average, or are you at the extremes like Cory and my mom?

THE BACKSLIDING FACE

The backsliding face just wants to hide. By whatever means necessary, the owner of the backsliding face wants to turn tail and run back on that tightrope to keep his or her true emotions from the rest of the world.

Facial Blocking

Facial blocking happens when the backsliders in our life not only want to disappear, they also literally can’t look at the danger that’s right in front of them. Unconsciously, when you turn up the heat, they’ll deviate from their norm and cover their eyes, mouth, or entire face with their hand, arm, a pair of sunglasses, or maybe even a forward-tilted baseball hat, all in a subconscious attempt to disappear. Sometime during your confrontation, you may see the person peek around, to check if you’re “buying” his story about why he’s been cheating on his wife and how it’s not his fault. However, if he doesn’t like what he sees, facial blocks will pop up again and he’ll revert to backsliding.

Hiding in Their Hair

During the first couple weeks of the infamous Casey Anthony trial, Casey was often seen neurotically pulling her mousy brown chin-length bangs in front of her face. This backsliding behavior was such a screaming red flag that both Nancy Grace and CNN’s Headline News (HLN) invited me on their shows to discuss possible reasons why Casey would be acting so ridiculously odd. Perhaps her lawyers saw the discussion, because for the remainder of the trial, her hair was pulled away from her face.

Yes, liars will often twist, stroke, braid, and play with their hair when they’re nervous, but so do people who are nervous on a date. Be sure to put the behavior in perspective. Not every kindergartner playing with the braids in her hair is a lying, cheating manipulator. But when an adult woman suddenly drapes her hair in front of her face, it screams, “Now, you can’t see me.” (For more of these “pacifiers,” see the table in chapter 7.)

Lip Locking

Backsliders embroiled in scandals in the public eye often leak strong emotions. Many of these emotions can be seen in the lips. I have a favorite saying: “When we don’t like what we see or hear, our lips suddenly disappear.” And we certainly saw that rule of thumb with these cheating scandals:

The Cheater	The Transgression	What the Lips Say
	In this December 11, 2010, file photo, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is seen in Raleigh, North Carolina. Edwards and federal prosecutors are arguing over whether the money used to cover up his extramarital affair was a campaign contribution or just a gift from his old friends. (Associated Press)	The sadness leaked here is totally clear. He did it, he got caught, and now he has to pay the price.
	New York Governor Eliot Spitzer addresses the media at his office in New York, March 10, 2008. In this image, Spitzer had apologized to his family for a “private matter” but made no reference to a New York Times report that he may have been linked to a prostitution ring. (Associated Press)	Governor Spitzer’s massive upside-down U is a perfect example of utter embarrassment tinged with a little sadness. He cannot take any more stress.
	Kobe Bryant, seated next to his wife, Vanessa, pauses during a news conference about his arrest for sexual assault of a nineteen-year-old in July 2003. (Associated Press)	Just imagine the discomfort here–Bryant is denying the assault but “confessing” to consensual sex with another woman. With his wife sitting two inches away.
	Alex Rodriguez holds a press conference at Yankees Spring Training at George M. Steinbrenner Field to address his steroid use. (Getty Images)	These lips are so far gone, I don’t think we see any lip at all here.
	Former New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens testifies on Capitol Hill about the illegal use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. (Getty Images)	This perfect upside-down U shows just how sad Clemens is to be in this situation.
	The sixty-two-year-old Socialist politician and former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, answers questions on September 18, 2011, outside Paris concerning a civil suit from his New York accuser as well as a probe into allegations he tried to rape writer Tristane Banon, an allegation he denies. (Getty Images)	Strauss-Kahn is denying the assault and rape and before he’s had due process, all his dreams of becoming France’s president are sunk.

Involuntary Physiological Reactions

The fight-or-flight response to stress is automatic and can cause a number of real physiological changes that indicate how much stress a liar is undergoing. Next are listed some facial fight-or-flight findings you’ll be able to spot with your new, stronger, more powerful BS Barometer.

Breathing more deeply. People might take deep breaths or flare their nostrils to get more oxygen (again, the fight-or-flight response is in effect here).

Going pale in the face (blanching) indicates fear, which is most typical in people who think they’re about to get caught.¹⁹

Going red in the face (blushing) indicates embarrassment, most typical in people who feel guilty (but are not necessarily lying).

Runny nose (or lack thereof!). Our nose, mouth, throat, and eyes are all connected. So when someone is truly heartbroken or devastated, there should be real tears, her nose should get stuffed up and run, she should do deep swallows.

Nose Rubbing

We all have erectile tissue in our noses (same as in our genitals), and when we’re being deceptive, our fight-or-flight response forces more blood into our outer extremities—which can make the nose tickle. This physiological response has long been suspected as the basis of the Pinocchio story, and any liar worth their salt knows this—but you might be able to spot this tic in a little kid. Tread carefully with this tip, Sherlock, because according to Dr. Oz, all men and women touch, scratch, or pick their noses approximately five times in an hour.

Now that you’ve mastered the art of deciphering people’s facial flubs and faux pas, the truth is within your grasp. You know how to get your target’s baseline; study his words and vocal tone for hot spots; and pinpoint the changes on his face that indicate there’s more to the story. Next stop, the full body surveillance. You’re about to master the art of observing the moving target.

EXERCISING YOUR BS BAROMETER: THE STAKEOUT

Much of the exercises for this step are about training your attention to fine details, a skill that will help you spot microexpressions as they’re happening. Remember: the more practice you have in studying truthful people’s emotional expression, the better you will become at spotting liars!

Download Your Free Instant Replay for This Chapter

Visit www.youcantlietome.com and listen to my dear friend Oscar Rodriguez, a hypnotherapist in the Washington, D.C., area, as he reviews with you all the tools you learned on your stakeout.

Tube In!

Visit www.youtube.com/user/bsbarometer and watch a person’s baseline video first, then two corresponding stories next. Can you spot which one is the lie based on the person’s facial expressions alone? Once you’ve made your guess, click on my video analysis for that person. Good luck!

The Sherlock Holmes Exercise

This exercise helps train your visual-spatial sense and your working memory, both essential brain activities that help you pay attention to small details while still maintaining a big-picture perspective—exactly the skills you need while using your BS Barometer. Set the timer on your phone, watch, or oven. In a second, you’ll hit start on the clock and time yourself to see how quickly you can scan the following patterns and find the letter or symbols that are different. Think like an observant Secret Service agent and look for what doesn’t belong here! During this exercise, you won’t know exactly what you are looking for; the same holds true when you are detecting deception with the liars in your life. Stay focused, be open-minded, and give your eyes permission to find the break in the pattern. Good luck!

Next,

Next,

Next,

More Practice Spotting Microexpressions

Humans often have more than one expression on their faces at any given time—especially when engaged in a possibly intense experience. Check out the flickr stream of images from the Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada. Of the thousands of people that come year after year, a total of 100,000 people have been too scared to go in. From these images, I think you can see why.

Take five minutes and scroll through some of the pictures. See if you can spot the different mixtures of fear, surprise, sadness, and anger. Also notice how, even though we can spot the same few emotions on everyone’s faces, their bodies’ responses to these emotions are all slightly different—some cover their mouths, others make a fist or create a shield with their arms, others bend down in the fetal position—and others even lean toward the danger. A fascinating look at genuine extreme body language! http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightmaresfearfactory/.

A Truth and a Lie

This one is a favorite in all my classes and is a great one to share with a group of friends. You’ll need about an hour or so to get the maximum benefit. This exercise will get participants used to asking questions and watching the nonverbal tells in people’s faces.

JUST REMEMBER …

• Reading microexpressions is not mind reading. Although leaked microexpressions will tell you what emotion someone is feeling, they will not tell you why he or she is feeling it—you have to follow through with the entire BS Barometer sequence to find out whether the person is being honest or not.
• Some people’s body language can’t be trusted. Not everyone’s body language is a true reflection of their feelings. Children, those who are mentally limited, and drunk people all are nonverbal wild cards. Don’t put too much stock into their nonverbal messages.
• The mouth is the window to the soul. When in doubt, look for the lips. Because remember: when we don’t like what we see or hear, our lips disappear.