Detecting Deception and a New Path to Trust: Pam Meyer at TEDxMidwest

I really don't want to put a damper on the beginning of the day but I think I need to tell you that it's come to my attention that the the person to your right is a liar also the person to your left is a liar also the person sitting in your very seat is a liar so turn to the person next to shake their hand say nice to meet you fellow liar now what I'm gonna do today is show you what the research says about why we're all Liars how you can become allies spotter and why it makes sense to go up that path to go from lies spotting to truth seeking to trust building now speaking of trust ever since I wrote this book live spotting nobody wants to meet me in person anymore I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks my husband comes home II say honey couldn't she have just learned cooking maybe massage so what I'm gonna do first of all I'm going to just clarify for you this is not a game of gotcha lie spotters they're not the nitpicky kids in the back of the class that are saying hey got you got to your eyebrow twitched they're the ones they're armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception and they use it to do what leaders do every day mature leaders have to have difficult conversations with difficult people during difficult times and they start up that path by accepting a core proposition and that's that lying is a cooperative act it turns out that nobody can lie to you without your agreement a lie has no power it has no power at all just by being uttered allies power emerges when someone agrees to believe it so I know this may sound like tough love but if at some point in your life you got lied to on some level it's because you agreed to be lied to truth about lying number one lying is a cooperative act now not all lies are harmful sometimes we're willing participants in a lie really just for the sake of social dignity but there are other times when we're unwilling participants and that can have dramatic costs for us last year Sun 990 four billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States that's an eyelash under a trillion dollars that's seven percent of revenues deception can cost billions think of Enron WorldCom mad off the mortgage crisis in the case of traders like Aldrich Ames Robert Hansen lives can betray our country that can compromise our security they can cause the deaths of those that defend us deception is serious business this guy Henry Oberlander was such an effective lawyer that he British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system with the Western world and you can't find this guy on Google you can't even find him on word Nick he had one rule he had only one rule his rule was that he said look people are hungry they're hungry for something and they're willing to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for and that's really the crux of it you have to ask yourself what are you hungry for and you know we really don't want to admit it but most of us kind of wish we were that her husband's better wives richer taller younger better executives more powerful this kind of goes on and on and on lying is an attempt to bridge that gap to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were how we wish our world should be with what it's really like and boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies research shows us that on an average day you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times strangers in one study they were videotaped and in ten minutes the majority of them lied three times to each other when we first hear this data we kind of recoil we can't believe it we're we're against lying we're essentially instead we can't believe how prevalent it is yet if you look more closely the plot kind of thickens we lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers extroverts lie more than introverts men lie eight times more about themselves too to bolster themselves while women will lie more to protect other people if you're in an average marriage you're going to live your spouse and one out of every 10 interactions and yet if you're unmarried that number rises to three deceptions complex it's woven into the fabric of our business and our social lives we're deeply ambivalent about the truth we kind of parse it out on an as-needed basis sometimes for very good reasons and other times really just to fill in those gaps we don't understand its truth number two about line we're against line but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries it's as old as breathing think dante shakespeare the bible lying as evolutionary value to us as a species researchers have long known that the more deceptive the species the more intelligent it is you all might remember Koko do remember koko the gorilla who was taught signing language who learned how to talk through sign language here's Koko there sees with her pet kitten koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall we're hardwired to become leaders of the pack it starts really really early now you may ask how early well babies will fake a cry they'll pause that wait to see if their caregivers coming and then they're going to go right back to crying one-year-olds learn concealment two-year-olds Bluff five-year-olds they kind of lie all right and they manipulate via flattery nine-year-olds master the cover-up by the time you're off to college if you're female according to as many studies you will lie to your mother and one out of every three interactions that doesn't include like are you going to call you're going to call and by the time we've entered the work world by the time we are breadwinners we've entered a world that is just cluttered with spam fake digital friends partisan media ingenious identity thieves world class Ponzi schemers and short what one author calls a post truth society now we can respond to that we can actually learn the science of how deception works we can learn how to become live spotters we can learn a post-modern skill people who are trained in deception detection they get to the truth 90% of the time the rest of us we get there about 54% of the time we're no better than Koko the ape why is it so easy to learn well you all kind of know this already where there are good liars and they're bad liars but there are no original liars we all use the same techniques we all make the same mistakes so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you three patterns of deception we're going to start with speech I'm going to say this again I did not have sexual relations with that woman miss Lewinsky I never told anybody to lie not a single time never these allegations are false and I need to go back to work for the American people thank you okay what were the tell-tale signs well first of all you saw something called a non contracted denial did not vs. didn't research shows that people who are over determined in their denial will resort to formal rather than relaxed language we also saw distancing language that woman we know that people will sometimes unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language really as their tool now Bill Clinton had said well to tell you the truth or Richard Nixon's favorite in all candor he would have been a dead giveaway for any lie spotter that knows the qualifying language like that really kind of discredits the subject and if he had not been under oath and let's say he had repeated the question to stall for time or he had peppered his account with an unnecessary amount of detail and we're all really glad he didn't do that he would have been batting five for five now what I want to do now is I want to show you what happens we're going to move from the pronouns and we're going to go onto a conversation what happens when you have a conversation with somebody that you suspect of deception it turns out that attitude is by far the most overlooked the telling of indicators if you're having a conversation with someone who's honest they're going to be cooperative they're going to be on your side they're going to show they're on your side they're going to be enthusiastic they're going to say hey maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks they're going to offer you up details they're going to brainstorm with you going to be very angry at being wrongly accused they're going to offer you an appropriate amount of detail when they finish their account their body language is going to be intact and if you ask that person if you see say hey what should happen to whoever it was that stole that money or forged those checks an honest person is going to recommend strict punishment if you have the same conversation the loss I have the emotional most emotional parts of their story will be most prominent they're not going to memorize they're not going to they're not they're not going to kind of memorize different parts they're going to just tell you the most emotional parts most prominently in their story now if you have that same conversation with somebody and they're being deceptive you're going to get a kind of a different response they're going to be combative slightly withdrawn do you say what happened they're gonna say I don't know they might look down say you know how am I supposed to know that mean they might be actually kind of defiant you're going to see a flash of unsustained anger that pounding of the fists on the table that sudden pounding of the fists it's going to feel fabricated if you know to start looking for it especially if the timing of it is off you know one of the things that I think made Oh Jay so unbelievably sort of made him kind of hard to believe on all levels was the fact that he just had no outrage whatsoever being wrongly accused think about if you had been wrongly accused of a murder that you didn't commit would you really have stood by that passively asked a deceptive person what happened they're going to give you a inappropriately verbose account when they finished telling their story you're going to see a slump that shift in breathing rate a shift in posture interrogators call that post-interview relief and what they'll do is they'll signal falsely that an interview is or just to look for that slump a deceptive person might tell their story in a stricter chronological order and a trained interrogator over the course of two hours is going to ask them to tell their story backwards subtly and they're not looking to see if they're going to fidget we all fidget what they're going to look for is they're asked if you're trying to figure out which questions are going to provoke the highest volume of deceptive cues you know we we don't rehearse our words we you know we we don't rehearse our gestures we rehearse our words and people who are interrogating people who are deceptive really know that may watch for that and they provoke them and provoke them in very very subtle ways when you ask a deceptive person which had happened those guys in payroll whoever it was that stole that money they're going to recommend lenient punishment they may very well say hey innocent until proven guilty now there's more to it than words there's more to it than pronouns I actually think Freud had it right Freud said and he said this compassionately said no mortal could keep a secret if his lips are sealed he chatters with his fingertips betrayal oozes from his every pore and that gets us to our final pattern this is body language and this is where you really got it just check your assumptions at the door because the researchers unearthed all kinds of information for us for example we think Liars fidget well it turns out many of them will freeze their upper bodies we think people who are lying won't look you in the eye well many of them look you in the eye way too much just to overcompensate for that myth we think a warm smile convey sincerity well sometimes it does but a trained deception detector can spot a fake smile a mile away let's see if you can do it which of these smiles is fake you can you can fake that smile in your cheeks but the real smiles in the eyes the crow's feet around the eyes cannot be consciously contracted and if you get too much Botox it really messes with the signs of this stuff don't do that now there are loads of body language tells we know for example that someone who's being deceptive is going to raise the pitch of their voice a bit they're going to shift their blink rate they may shake their head no while saying yes and I've given you guys so much information so quickly here we're going to step back we're going to do a little quiz we're going to look at a video and see if you can spot one or two tells here this is John Edwards talking about getting a paternity test verse alleged love child well participating in a paternity test be happy to participate in one I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events so I know it's not possible happy to take a paternity test and would love to say that are you going to do that soon is there somebody that you can't only one side how can we roll there one side of the test but I'm I'm happy to participate that's shaking of the head while saying yes there's lots of material here but that was by far the most prominent one there now they're going to be times when someone's going to make one expression which is masking another that will kind of leak through in a flash we know for example that murderers will flash sadness your new joint venture partner may shake your hand very happily and then flash anger and we can't all become facial expression experts here overnight but what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you one expression which is worth knowing which is the expression of contempt I don't know about you but my my mom used to say hey if you didn't love you so much he wouldn't be so angry at you and that's the deal with anger it's two people on an even playing field there's friction they're engaged with each other but when anger turns to contempt you've been dismissed it's associated with moral superiority it's very hard to recover from one researcher actually tracks it as a predictor of divorce here's what it looks like now it's one it's the only a symmetrical expression you'll see the chin turn up the lip corner turned up its a dismissive sneer and whether or not this is associated with deception it's not always it's advised to go the other direction reconsider your deal say no thanks I don't think I'll come up for just one more nightcap now these what to step back for a minute and take a look because all of these indicators that I've shown you none of them are proof of deception don't go getting dangerous with this information it's when you see clusters that it's time to probe ask more questions get to the truth try to ask a few harder questions try to get a little bit more deeply into it and don't go trying to be like those guys on Law & Order it's not like that you're going to emulate anybody emulate this guy I don't know if anybody in this room really remembers country smart good old senator Sam Ervin who presided over the Watergate hearings Sam unemotionally quietly tripped up all the sophisticated Watergate conspirators all on their own lives just by asking the right questions in the right way Sam got to the truth using human tools and he's no longer with us and I'm sure he would be very surprised to know and probably intrigued as well to know that the technology of lie detection is really progressing we now have infrared brain scanners eye trackers specialized MRIs that could actually decode the signals that you send out the cognitive signals when you're trying to deceive someone or when you're being deceptive and these these technologies are going to get marketed to you they're going to be marketed as panaceas for deceit and someday I think they're going to be incredibly useful to us but in the meantime you've got to ask yourself who would you rather have in your office would you rather have Sam or one of these guys who's going to bring an electro cephalo gram into the next meeting live spotters rely on human tools they build small clothes tight networks of trust networks that are so so much more powerful than their vectors of deceit and they don't do it by email then I'll do it by texting they get up they walk out of their chairs that go down the hall they have that hard conversation they resist the desire to judge they resist the desire to accuse wrongly and when we do that when we combine the science of deception detection with the art of listening we exempt ourselves from collaborating in a lie when we do that we start signaling to everybody around us we signal that our world is going to be an honest world our world is going to be one where truth is strengthened falsehood is recognized and marginalized and that's when the ground starts to shift and that's no lie thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 36,025

Keywords: tedx, ted talks, deception, lie detection, TEDxMidwest, ted, ted talk, tedx talks, Liespotting, ted x, US, English, lying, tedx talk

Id: SMdXPTH5la4

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2012