Carol Kinsey Goman: How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them

[Music] all right so here's how this all got started I body language is the management of time space I contact gesture facial expression stance movement and what I study is how body language impacts leadership effectiveness particularly in things like managing change negotiation sales job interviews dealing with multicultural international teams and I also blog for Forbes and that's what I blog on I blog on mostly on body language and leadership but last April I did a blog on 12 ways to spot a liar at work now my blogs do you know you never know some blogs get a couple thousand if it's really popular over time it'll get to twenty thirty maybe eighty thousand this blog and the first ten days got two hundred and sixty three thousand hits and I thought well okay people are interested in that topic as was I and also I thought it would be easy as here I was practically an expert already I mean I had I had done a lot of research on nonverbal cues and and lying I was interested in topic and I thought it'll be easy to write the book and what I found was I knew so little first of all I didn't know what a big liar I was but secondly I found out many many things and that's what I'm gonna talk to you about a few of them today first of all you work with a bunch of liars and they lie for a bunch of reasons one of the things that I did was interview 547 people in the workplace to find out what kind of Lies they were experiencing on a regular basis and I found there was the you know from all levels chief executive officers and senior leaders you know gave sort of a rose-colored version of the truth which by the way isn't looked at as Oh what we understand that's what you have to do it's looked at as those people are lying to us from co-workers who lie about yes I'll work on your team when they really don't want to work on your team and they're really not going to really participate but they just had to say that to all sorts of reasons that are very either self-serving a lot of people lied to get out of things they don't want to do a lot of people told me they lied to get out of meetings no no I have something else I need to do we're really I just don't want to go to your meeting they lie on resumes they lie and they enhance you know their ability they got a degree that they really didn't get a degree they went to the school they really didn't go to that school they had so many years in the workplace that they embellish that we're really working you know for their mom or something I mean if they just embellished that they also lie on exit interviews they particularly lie in exit interviews when think it's better for their career I've had many people say if I told the truth about why I'm leaving this company it would be a career killer so they live in the time they get hired to the time they leave they also people also lie of course to avoid punishment they lie to get out of things like I say that they don't want to do and they you know lie to cover their rear end they didn't do something and they lie about it in order so people don't find out that they didn't do that something they also lie to protect other people and here was the first thing that you find out in gender differences well everybody lies and everybody lies about the same amount females tend to lie a little bit more to protect other people and that's not always a great thing one of my many of mine but one I remember in particular said you know something it's really bad when I'm trying to give feedback because I try not to hurt their feelings so I'm not giving really honest feedback now what does that it even that woman said and I'm working on that I'm trying to get better at that but I know it's really hard for me to so women more than men in my study anyway will lie to kind of protect someone which again may not be a great thing to do and a lot of Liars of course lie because it is the social glue that holds any kind of organization or family or relationship together if you ask me how I am you really don't know or you really don't want to know how my entire day went what you want me to say is oh I'm fine how are you that's what we expect so we know we're set up for some kind of lies some of the lies are wonderful you might say gee Carol that's a nice jacket and I'll say great good thing they didn't notice the five pounds I gained over Mother's Day you know I mean so it's lying by that kind of omission those are the kind of liars you want to thank so we're surrounded by liars some lies are really great for business and really great for relationships and some lies are absolutely damaging and destructive and one of the big tricks is to weed out one kind from the other so here's a question for you how do you decide if someone you work with is trustworthy how do you do it how do you decide somebody go to school with who's trustworthy what do you do how do you know so you you trust initially and then you wait for some action okay in the back the old a trust by starting with something small and they'll build it up so you build trust by you see if they're trustworthy in smaller situations and then you give them more information or more of your trust as they look like they deserve it how else yeah yeah you ask someone else what have you heard about what what don't I know that I should a little bit but the way someone establishes eye contact anything else yes so you break up with them before you date then you see how you put someone in emotional stress to see how they reacted that you know this is what audiences tell me all the time that Trust is something that grows that has to be built that you look for certain things I want to show you how you really decide whom to trust this is research from Princeton what they have done and I'll show you I'm gonna show you the little movie of it as they say if you move three things on a face eyebrows cheeks and chin you can make a person trustworthy or untrustworthy and that we decide if someone's trustworthy in about the first seven seconds of meeting them like we make all these other assumptions about people are they attractive are they someone we want to be with are they likable all of that in the first seven seconds so if the inner corners of your eyebrows are high if your cheekbones are prominent and if your chin is wide you look trustworthy instantly if your inner corners of your eyebrows are low if your cheekbones are recessed and if your chin is narrower we don't trust you they've also done one other thing in this little clip and that is they've taken the corners of the mouth from up to down neutral trustworthy untrustworthy yeah yeah the shading so that's how quick it is that's how fast we make a decision about other people biases prejudices assumptions are also right in our way when we go to find out if someone is trustworthy or if they're telling the truth they interfere amazingly if you are working with someone who is attractive whose eyebrows are in the right place who is powerful who is charismatic or who somehow remind you of yourself you tend to focus so much on those attractive qualities that you don't know you're being duped that's exactly how it works here's some more biases that interfere with deception detection one is that in-group out-group bias this is so strong we create in groups out of everybody that's here is an in-group those people that didn't get to hear this lecture they're in our group of course what they see the tape then maybe they're an in-group but right now there's us and there's them and we us and them all the time we tend to trust people in an in-group much more than we trust people that are dissimilar or in an out group and we do it automatically in fact when you look at cross-cultural lie detection we actually process what's being said by ourselves and what's being said by people from our in-group differently with a different part of the brain then we process things that are being said by people in that out group it's a very strong bias what I call vested interest bias this is why you know we should be the best at knowing if our spouses if our loved ones if the people we're dating if our best friends are liars and many times were the worst because we have a vested interest in their telling us the truth if your boyfriend or girlfriend says I love you we have an interest in having that be true if our child says you know no I didn't do that I wasn't one of those people that got caught doing that I wasn't even there we have a vested interest in having that child because we raised that kid so that kids got to be pretty good anytime you have a vested interest in someone you are biased toward them being truthful appropriate behavior bias is an interesting one and that is I know or I think I do how I'd act if I were telling the truth so when I see someone who is acting differently they got to be lying you see it's just like grief people don't grieve the same some people you know go into a manic kind of high and some people go into an incredible depression and some people are somewhere in between but we're not the same it's the same way with lying it's not totally identical plus we don't really know how we look when we're telling a lie we just assumed we would look a certain way we do this all the time when we're watching people on television he must be lying because look at the way he did something I would never do that and confirmation bias this is the most insidious of all let me show you how your brain works I was raised in Palo Alto when I graduated from poly high my first job was a night job at that time we had been living on Oregon Avenue and in our into you know the wisdom of my entire family and financial deals we sold that house because we made I don't know three thousand dollars or something so obviously that was a great deal so my parents then moved and they were living in and managing this condominium complex now these are the kind of condominiums that are all alike in a row I'm working nights I come home it's like 3:00 in the morning I'm tired and I walk up to the condominium have my key out and I noticed there's a bicycle and I thought well we don't have a bicycle okay my dad also was in the he did a lot of things but he also was uh doing some work with newspapers maybe for some of the news boys or somebody he had you see got a bicycle for a prize I don't know I walk in I go hmm all new furniture now instead of my brain going wrong wrong my brain does what every brain does and that is tries to make sense of something I know it's true I know I'm in my parents house therefore this furniture can be explained okay they went out and bought it tonight I mean I did this entire muscle turn you know it probably only took a few seconds it felt like about five minutes they're trying to rationalize what was going on I looked over and the door to the lower bedroom was open his condominium had three bedrooms two were upstairs one was below and my uncle was staying with us and I said he would never leave the door open it was only then that I realized it's 3:00 in the morning and I'm standing in some stranger's condominium now my parents being the managers had the master key I could have walked into any of them but that's how brains work once you've decided you know the truth once you've seen those eyebrows go down so you know that you don't like that person you don't even know why you don't like that person or he reminds you of somebody you don't like once you've made that decision then you are going to think and look for all the ways that justify that decision aha I knew I couldn't trust him and and you will find and give much more meaning if somebody does this and you like him you know oh that's the way she stands I've seen to do that a lot of times if someone does this you don't like I'm a hawk resistant I knew it see I can't trust person we will read into it once we've made up our mind all right the verbal and nonverbal signs of deception this was the most fun to do well do some verbal first selective wording I want you to ask me if I've ever taken drugs did I answer the question no no ask me did I leave my last workplace under good conditions things that I you know we're more in line with my skills and talents did I answer the question no selective wording quasi denials that's like I could be wrong but this is what I think happened or I'm not absolutely sure but it's probably something like this you've already back out of a statement that you're gonna make so quasi denials many times Liars will use qualifiers to the best of my knowledge I could be wrong again also it could be instead of on that quasi denial instead of asked me if I stole the computer I look like someone who would steal computers did I answer your question no see anytime you deflect and move around by selectively wording quasi denying qualifying you're getting some slippery or you may be getting some slippery answers softeners when someone is being asked about a potential crime or a theft forgery they will use when they answer question they'll use words like steel forge hard words if someone is guilty of that and they're being asked they will typically soften and talk about things like borrow or a mistake overlooked they will soften the language around the the crime or the or the situation overly formal wording I did not have sexual relationship with that woman miss Lewinsky not I didn't have sex with Monica you know I did not have to so the first thing to look for is if they don't use contractions if it's did not instead of didn't that's overly formal and when they tried a distance that woman she's over there somewhere I have no idea where she is that woman miss Lewinsky overly formal the other thing to remember is sometimes people actually do tell you the literal truth but you don't hear it that way so remember if your boss says I'm thinking of putting you up for that new job that's opening in someone else's department that's exactly what she means she's not putting you up she may not put you up but she's thinking about putting you up so don't hear more into words than what people say people will typically tell you the truth but they'll put it in a way that you can read a lot of things into that nonverbal here's the science behind detecting lies non-verbally most people if we're not habitual or pathological or practiced or any of those other things when we lie our brains have to work harder first of all we have to remember the truth then we have to construct the lie we have remember not to tell the truth we have to remember how how we might answer some questions around the lie we have to remember to whom we told the lie I mean it is it's so stressful that for big lies most of us would much rather tell the truth it's just a lot easier you don't have to remember who you said what to it's just simpler so when we lie there's some stress our heart rates go up blood pressure goes up breathing rates get shallow and those are the things that you start to see in body language so much of detection of lies is really stress detection which means by the way that you can't say when you see some of these oh that person's lying what you can say is we've hit a hot spot something in this question something in this line of questioning something that just happened someone who just came into the room triggered something because they are acting stressed so stress signals or anything typically things like playing with your do where you see people that are nervous start to twirl their rings they may rub their hands together remember their hands on their legs they may bounce their feet you also can do all these things for other reasons but when you see this at a certain time it can be very telling feet by the way are incredibly honest so the most honest part of your body cuz of the farthest from your brain and the least rehearsed so when somebody is really nervous you can see them wrap their feet around their you know the back of the chair you can see them do all sorts of very fascinating things with their feet you can also things start to point toward the door they really wish this line of questioning we're over and they're ready to go I mean there's a lot of things that happen that you can see also feet can point towards you you know so if for instance you're really engaged what I'm saying your feet more likely point toward me if you're not so engaged they start pointing other places same way in a group you can tell who really people are interested in because their feet start to point at them they may be still talking though they're folks but their feet are pointed at the leader or the boss or the most charismatic or or whomever so feet are a lot of fun too in stress when you think of stress you think of fight-or-flight but actually the first sign of stress is what physiologically freeze everybody freezes so many times what you're looking for is not the fight-or-flight stuff the bounciness or the trying to get out of the room you're looking for all of a sudden people get very still they start to freeze if they were animated before and their gestures stop or they hide their hands under the table or you can almost see it in their breathing they hold their breath I mean there are lots of things that people do when they freeze that doesn't look like their normal behavior the most important thing of course is to find behaviors that are a deviation from their truth baseline now here's how that works I'm coming in for a job interview so before the interview you offer me a cup of coffee so while you're all you don't care if I drink the coffee or not what you want to see is we're having this chit chat is how you know how I gesture how I talk what my tone of voice is under stress our forces get higher so you want to see if our my you know how are my voice is when I'm just chatting about things then you do something way before the interview starts and that is you ask me questions to which you know the answer so you say because it's down in your notes you arty know this but you say hey do you how did you hear about this job opening you watch me as I answer because it I have no reason to lie about that you can tell you already know the answer to it do you have any friends that work here you already know that cuz it's written down to people in the organization referred me you again you're looking for a baseline but you're looking for a baseline of truthful answers because tapping feet if my feet are tapping I'm saying oh yeah I know a lot of people here then it's not gonna mean anything if you're gonna use it as a cue to deceit but if I'm very calm and I change my behavior when you ask me a question about why I left my last job and it's different from that truth baseline then then you might again you might have a hot spot tell tale for what you want to do is look for clusters now they can be clusters of verbal and nonverbal so let's say you are interviewing me again and you have asked me about why I left my last job and I've been evasive and you're writing notes but all of a sudden you hear that my voice got higher so that got your attention and you and you looked up because you know that when voices get higher that means stress and then you see that I'm touching either my necklace or my neck and because I'm a woman women tend to when they're stressed or surprised or thrilled they tend to to touch right here the notch at their neck or they play with jewelry that's close to it just like you did we we do that so if all of a sudden my voice got your attention because it was higher and then you notice another stress signal and then there was something in that answer that I said you know I've left to pursue other thing I didn't really answer your questions now you have a cluster of behaviors and what you might do with that cluster of behaviors is absolutely nothing you might not say hey I noticed you touched your neck and your voice would you know you might not do that you might just kind of put a little asterisk at that question and go on to some other questions you'd notice that if my hand dropped and my voice got lower and I got I seem to be more animated and and then you might go back to say if I called your last boss what would he tell me about you and then again you'd notice because if you now you're getting those reactions twice there's something about that situation that I haven't been forthcoming so that's how you would would use these the tell-tale four is out of Northeastern University and they they did this study and no one else has replicated it but I'm just throwing it out to you that there are four body language cues that if you see them in the course of say two three four minute conversation this is the telltale cluster this means you're talking to a liar so if they touch their face if they rub their hands together if they pull back and if they cross their arms if you get those four you got a liar according to this research so you'll have to tell me you'll have to be my study group and and see if that's accurate or not I signals the biggest myths around deception is that Liars don't look you in the eye and partly children don't aren't real good at looking in the eye kids are you know a lot like more likely to drop their eye contact but so are people from different cultures you know so are people I mean there's many many reasons why someone would drop their eyes which is good to know by the way when we when we end up with this about how not to look like a liar so I'll go back to that in a minute but right now just know that there's no research that says that Liars don't look you in the eyes in fact good Liars or maybe not so good Liars actually overcompensate because they've heard that too so they look you too much in the eyes and pretty soon you think why didn't he just stop looking at me or she's just staring at me as this is getting creepy and because I'm trying to make sure that you know that I'm telling the truth but there are some eye signals that actually are valid another one that isn't valid by the way is the neuro linguistic programming NLP work about if you look up to the right it means something if you look up to the left it means something there it probably does mean something I'm not saying that it's incorrect with that but there's no correlation to where your eye moves and if you're lying or not I was taught that I was taught that if your eyes moved to a certain direction it meant you were constructing a truth rather than recalling a truth but studies now say not so much what is true though because I've tested this on my sister is if you know where people with eyes go when they are answered in their truth baseline when you say you have you know I know you know a couple people who work here who are they and you see them oh yeah it was Francis and then Jacob and you notice where their eyes go and then you ask them something later and their eyes go to the other side as if they're getting information from another part of their brain that would be telling regardless of which side their go to the other thing that happens in lying is that your eyes dilate now there are lot of places your eyes dilate dilates in darkness dilates when you're in love with someone and you're gazing at each other's eyes your eyes are both dilated check that out everyone yep but also again that effort of lying cells here and this is very confusing because if you're in love with someone in your eyes dilate but if you're lying to them saying I'm in love with you their eyes will also dilate so maybe this isn't a good cue for that use it for something else so eyes do dilate under the strain of having to create the lie and then there's a blink rate when the liar is lying the blink rate goes down the minute the lie is after it's constructed and told the blink rate is low and after the lie is told oftentimes Liars blink rate will increase up to eight times now blink rate makes people look nervous I know when I was doing some of the washings of the presidential campaigns high blink rates they're not good for a presidential candidate because it makes them look like they're lying or unsure but literally if they're blink rate is low and then it goes up to ever they've said something that would be a better indicator than just normal blink rate and emotional in congruence this is where I think a lot of people who are good at detecting lies fine it's kind of that gut feeling you get when something is off and that could be because you don't know it but you're really pretty good at spotting micro-expressions those expressions that hit for a fraction of a second and then get caught immediately and replaced usually with a phony smile which is our favorite replacement sign for anything we don't want people to see any other emotion when something is off when something with their body language is off when someone says like a an executive that I saw speak was asking for questions and he said now I'm open for questions I mean there's something I mean you and I laughed that entire audience not one person caught that but they couldn't come up with any questions it was such a dichotomy between what he was saying and what his body was displaying so those are the things that you catch unconsciously or consciously now more more often and that will make you think somebody's lying so you wanna that's that gut feeling you want to pay attention to it there is something though that emotions won't tell you a liar can look incredibly fearful that he's gonna be caught but so can a truthful person look very fearful that you're not gonna believe him so fear you're not mind-reading what you're doing is picking up any motion and you can be pretty good at that you can say okay I know that's fear but you cannot say what generated that fear liars you when it comes to the chapter that I wrote on how to deal with Liars really interesting stuff because you got a lot of choices you can report a liar you can confront a liar you can ignore a liar or you can thank a liar you know thank the one that tells you how good you look when you really don't feel that good but here are the questions see and unlike other things I can't give you the five things to do but I can give you the few questions to ask so you can build your own strategy because it really depends first of all it depends on your legal obligation when you go into the workplace or the classroom if you're teaching you're gonna have some legal obligations you are going to have to report pornography even your own no I'm kidding I'm kidding you have to report pornography you're going to have to report child abuse you're going to have to report certain sexual abuses I mean those things are mandated and there's no getting out of that those things you have to report you don't have you can't ignore them you can't ignore them legally you can't ignore them ethically or morally you're also going to be in an organization that has certain policies for reporting and you're gonna have to know what those policies are and follow them because if particularly if you want to report someone and you don't follow procedure and you do something else it's it's gonna come back and hit you in the face not them it'll be why didn't you do it the right way you were you weren't supposed to go to your boss's boss you were supposed to go to HR you were what or whatever so you want to make sure you know how that how that works it also depends on who the liar is if the liar someone you're negotiating with you're gonna respond to that maybe very differently than if the liar is your boss or if the liar is someone who reports to you or if the liar is one of your co-workers a colleague a friend it depends on what the impact of the lie is and if you're going to report Liars by the way this is what you need to document you can't go into HR or your boss or your boss's boss or to whomever and say my feelings were really hurt when this person lied to me I am so upset they don't really care but you could go in and say this lie is damaging team morale you need to give them some impact on the team or the organization or the project something that makes some kind of not only personal you can certainly say how it's affecting you personally but the more you can document the impact of the lie in a bigger arena the better it is and this is very interesting what do you want the liar to do do you want her to resign do you want her to be fired do you just want her to know that you know do you want her simply to go somewhere else because you know she's a big liar and you never want to work with her again but you just don't even want her to even know that you know do you want her to apologize do you want her to retract the lie what is it that you want and depending on those answers it's gonna be different and then when you figure that out you need to think what are the possible consequences of doing all of these things when you report a liar you may or may not get the reaction you were hoping for that liar may not be fired that liar you may be moved to another division I've seen this happen you know I mean you just don't know what what the outcome is you need to really think that through if the liar is someone who is well respected in the organization and you're new to the company you're gonna have to really have a lot of evidence before anything you say is going to outweigh that person's reputation directly confronting has some impact that you might not want if you have to work with that person on an ongoing basis you might want to have not have a direct confrontation you might want to do something a little more indirect there are a lot of ways to do that as well and of course doing nothing has its own implications doing nothing by the way does not mean that you forgive the liar it simply means you've chosen not to deal with it at this time and many times someone says I did nothing but I will never ever ever trust that person again okay and the last piece I want to talk about just briefly is how not to look like a liar when you're telling the truth two things number one is if most people realize and are picking up on stress cues you need to manage your stress if you go into a job interview and you're just nervous you're gonna look nervous but you also may look that you're like you're not forthcoming or you're not entirely candid so what you want to do is decrease your cortisol level your stress hormone level and increase your testosterone which is your power hormone and you can do that in two ways one is that two-minute exercise called power poses and obviously do this in the men's or ladies room before the interview by the way you do not walk in and do this at the interview but where you take up as much room as you possibly can and you hold that pose for two minutes doing that literally increases the amount of testosterone you are more likely to take risks you walk in you keep more of that in your posture as you walk in and you are perceived as more powerful and more comfortable because you have also lowered that cortisol level simply by holding your body and a high power pose for two minutes so power posing is one way power thinking is another way and what they found is it doesn't take much but right before that interview be very careful about what you're thinking because if you will I always tell people keep a success log let's say you just bombed in another interview and now you got to go to this one you better have a way to drop this fast and remind yourself of how to riff 'ok you are so just by reading or mentally reviewing times when you just aced it when you were brilliant and clever and wonderful you will go in there and you will actually behave differently and they can quantify that it doesn't take much time at all in fact that's what method actors do they go back into time to find a place where they were emotionally valid frightened if they're gonna do a scary scene so they can take that emotion of fear authentic emotion of fear into that new scene so it's something actors do all the time but it's amazing now the research they've done and it's particularly good for job interviews so remember those two things power pose and that power thinking kind of thing and by the way when you are in the waiting room what you don't want to do is bring your smartphone because what does your body do it hunches over it does this what you have done now is you've decreased your testosterone and increased your stress hormones cortisol level bring a newspaper you know stretch so your hands can actually stretch out I mean it there is something to this so make it work in your favor and of course the other thing is since most people believe that eye contact is important even if it's not in your cultural heritage to have that kind of eye extended eye contact I don't not stalker stare we're not going there we're simply talking about you know looking at someone maybe 60% of the time particularly when they're talking so that you make that connection you will simply look more candid now I want to tell you one quick story and I won't probably have time for questions so what do you want a story your questions I can do either because we have five minutes alright I was asked this last year I was asked to go to North Dakota and work with the Department of Commerce work with the leadership team at the Department of Commerce so I went back there and I met Tracy and Tracy said you know I attended another speech that you gave and only because of that can I tell you this story she said I am very truthful I pride myself on my truthfulness and my candor and my ability to build trust in a team so when my organization my leadership team said we're going to do a trust survey I was I was the first to sign up and then I got the results and two of the people I report to said the same thing you look like you have a hidden agenda you look like you're not totally forthcoming it seems as if you're holding things back well you can imagine I mean Tracy was devastated so she thought as most people will okay I'll meet with those leaders and I'll find out what I can do differently so she had a meeting and they said all right here's what we suggest before you present an idea maybe you need to give us more the backstory so it doesn't look like there's something so self-serving here's what I've been thinking about here's why I decided this idea would be good for the organization months and months Tracy worked on this backstory did the whole thing present her ideas next year trust survey same results you don't look candid you're not telling us the whole thing that looks like I have a hidden agenda and she said then I heard you speak and I thought could it be something I'm doing with my body so she thought she said you know we're in North Dakota it's pretty cold here in the winter you know I called but because I'm going back there in the fall to do another thing for the Governor's Conference but I I called them they tell me the high today is 12 below I mean you know that's cold to me so anyway she said it's pretty cold here and she said and I'm naturally cold anyway so I would sit in the meetings and I would I would kind of huddle up cross my arms and and it pulled my body in and she said so I wondered if if I didn't do that if I would come across differently so she said so I layered you know I was born like five sweaters and but I was comfortable and she said so I uncross my arms I would gesture with my hands showing more sweeping gestures more inclusive warmer kind of looks and that was it the next trust survey highly trustworthy very candid I mean it was amazing when people talk to me about impression management and they say well Carol if you're telling us in an interview you know you stand like this before you go in and you you know you you you have to layer in a cold room I mean isn't that just kind of lying is that kind of manipulative and I say yeah sure it's just as manipulative as a spell checking your resume before you send it in or dressing for success before you go on that or minding your manners you know if you're going out for a business lunch all of those very manipulative and highly recommended by the way body language is when you're working on impression management it's not to fool people that you're something you're not cuz you really are smart you really are good you really are talented and you really are candid so why don't you just look that way all right that's it thank you so much really great [Music]

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Id: oywoZQ5_zd8

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2013