My Secret to Breaking Terrorists: Detecting Deception & Rapport | Lena Sisco | TEDxWilmington

after the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 I was deployed to Guantanamo Bay Cuba I'm commonly referred to it to get mom as a military interrogator and before I go any further I'm going to answer the two questions that you all have in your head right now the answer to the first is no we didn't torture detainees at Gitmo the answer to the second is yes I had great successes as a female interrogator and today I'm going to explain to how and why but before I do I'm going to share a secret with you guys do you know that when you're nice to people no matter who they are that it's really really hard for them not to be nice to back I teach people how to build rapport and the easiest way to build rapport with someone is to number one just smile genuinely let me see the crow's feet I smile at you you need to smile back at me come on I used to disarm my detainees with a smile they would come into my interrogation booth for the first time and I greeted them with a smile I said I am your interrogator and they looked at me and say what but do you know that most of them gave me a smile back and they put their guard down and that's why I got them initially to accept me and like me the second easy way to build rapport with someone is to find common ground common interest people would often ask me how on earth did you find common ground with a terrorist especially responsible for the attacks on 9/11 I said well number one we're both stuck in Gitmo although I wanted to be there I don't think they did number two we both had families somewhere number three we both loved mint tea and number four we were both passionate about a cause on the opposite ends of the spectrum but we both had passion about something some of my start that was finding common ground with them a third way to build rapport with someone is to share something personal when you share something personal about yourself it makes that other person want to share something personal about themselves with you and if you get that you guys have trust once you have trust you have respect and respect leads to rapport I got trained and all of these crazy techniques for interrogation but I always fell back on the two critical skills that let me gain cooperation from detainees and collect intelligence information and that was number one building rapport and number two detecting deception when I had to do it one time a detainee asked me he said do you want to know why after all these months of me given you this high-value intelligence information why I gave it to you why even cooperated with you in the first place and I said yes actually I do want to know why I think I know but I want to hear from you and his response was that you treated me so nice the first time I met you I felt guilty line two and all I did was make him comfortable and I gave him a nice chair to sit in that's it that's all it takes it works I'm going to share two more secrets with you we all lie every single one of us yes or even you I see the smile on your face right now yes I do lie I know you do but it's okay we all lie but we all don't lie for malicious intent sometimes we lie to spare other people's hurt feelings sometimes we lie to protect other people sometimes we lie to avoid argument and that's not that bad people call those white lies and I'm here to tell you there's no such thing sorry lies can't have color there's four types of Lies though one is a false statement that's when I just say something that's not true I don't want to be here today yes I do a number of another lie is lying by embellishment how many people have done that on a resume over quite a few don't tell me though number three lying by distortion that's what I'm going to tell you half of the truth but then I'm going to take this a piece and we will lie about it I'm going to distort it so you're getting half of my truth and then a little piece of my lie and the last type of lie lying by omission it's the easiest to do but the hardest to detect because I'm not lying to you at all I'm just leaving out the lie I'm not talking about it so we all lie that's secret number two and a follow-on secret to that is although we all lie most of us don't like doing it inherently people want to be honest even my detainees members of al Qaeda and Taliban there's two types of lives in the world regular liars and powerful liars we all of us are regular liars we don't like it we're so focused on getting caught that we have all this guilt in this shame and we get really really nervous a powerful liar has no nerves or anxiety about lying lying in fact they feel really good when they lie because they're focused on the reward of the lie but the consequences of getting caught how many of you think all of our nation's spies they kept passing polygraph tests as the polygraph test how do they do it polygraph test is supposed to be a lie detector test right wrong a polygraph test is a stress detector test it is not a lie-detector test and we use it as a lie-detector test because we make the assumption everyone stresses out when they lie and they don't which is why Liars pass a polygraph test so two things we all lie but most of us don't like it and my detainees didn't like it either in fact they would tell me it is such a relief to not have to lie to you anymore and like why didn't you just start off tell me the truth we've wasted all this time I had to work so hard we could have just told the truth from the beginning but they had some information they needed to protect and even though I had really good rapport with them and they didn't want to manipulate me they still held on to some information so it was my job to get that information by detecting deception and I'm going to share a couple of those tools with you guys today so first we're going to talk about three nonverbal cues or clues that you guys can look for number one is called facial leakage that sounds pretty disgusting doesn't it alright there's nothing losing out of our faces but what does come across the face is our true emotion when we try to hide our true emotions it still comes out and we can see it there's been a lot of high-profile court cases in the media over the last couple of years I'm not going to name who it was you all can think of who it was watching TV and I noticed a similarity when they were in court there were facial block hi away from the camera and they would cry but the mystery was there was never any tears not only that the corners of their mouth didn't go down into sadness there's no wrinkling of the chin the eyebrows weren't pulled up in fact the corners of the mouth were up and smile so that tells me you're secretly happy because you think you're getting away with a lie you're not sad one facial leakage number two in congruent body language if I tell you I love your haircut probably know so much right sorry it is very pretty my words may be saying yes I love it but my head just said no I don't in congruence my third tell for you guys is shoulder shrugs we all know what this is right what does it mean I don't know uncertainty 100% of the time a shoulder shrug means uncertainty but about what is it about what I just said to you or is it about something that I'm thinking about look for the congruence in a shoulder shrug so if I tell you I have no idea what I want for dinner tonight that's pretty congruent right I'm saying I don't know my shoulders are saying I don't know but if I look at you and say I would love to go to dinner with you tonight I probably don't so please don't get offended those are three nonverbal cues now I'm going to share three verbal cues with you to detect deception if you feel that somebody's lying to you ask them a yes-or-no question because if they can't answer yes and no within three tries they're hiding something there's a reason why bill clinton couldn't answer it Hillary Clinton couldn't answer Lance Armstrong couldn't answer yes or no yes Annie Weiner couldn't answer yes - no all they had to do was say no I didn't send the tweet but we couldn't do it because it goes back to what I told you earlier inherently we don't like to lie so asking yes - no question and see if you get a yes and now the second verbal is if I ask you a question and you hesitate are you stall for any reason so sometimes people will stall and go um-hmm that's a good question yeah that's a good question how about you answer it if you're hesitating there's a reason why if I ask you a question where were you last night and you repeat it back to me where was I last night yeah if I ask you a question where were you last night and you say you want to know where I was last night you're thinking of an answer you're hesitating so then my senses start to say okay I don't know if I'm going to believe it's going to come out of your mouth next and then the third is really clever it's a verb tense change if you are hearing a story from someone and your gut feeling is saying yeah I'm not buying it so much listen to the verbs that people use because a liar when they create a lie creates it in the present tense but they have to tell it in the past tense and they forget that and because if they're a regular liar they're getting stressed out they're going to mix up those verb tense changes I catch so many lies in statement analysis to this day because of a verb tense change there's a three easy verbal tails and I'm going to share something else with you guys it's called the Liars number three for some reason and we don't know why there's no studies nobody can figure out this mystery behind Liars number three there's a reason why today I shared three report techniques with you three nonverbal tales three verbal tales and I also share with you three secrets because when I chunk information in threes it's easy for me to remember Liars know this so when they have to Kwon by something in their lie they automatically migrate to the number three it's very interesting so listen the next time you hear a story to hear if you hear oh is three times I did that three pages of paper took three hours it's a liars number three after I left to get moe I realized I got lie too on a daily basis yes you need a new transmission really you know double your money in a year this is the best price that I can give you I would never hurt you and I thought you know what I need to protect myself I have to use the skills that I used in the interrogation booth in my everyday life no matter who you are or what you do people will try to take advantage of you they're going to try and hurt you and it's your responsibility to protect yourself I use these two skills building rapport with people and detecting deception to do just that when you have rapport with people they are less apt to try to hurt you to try to manipulate you and to try and deceive you and even if they're still holding on to information and you learn detecting deception skills at least you can get to that part of the truth imagine if we lived in a world where we could trust everyone yeah we can't we know this so we have to protect ourselves but if you use these two skills and you build rapport with people and you can detect deception at least you can make that little part of the world that you live in safe for you and for your loved ones I use these skills on members of al Qaeda and Taliban who inherently hated me and everything I stood for because I was an American but the odd thing is they liked me as a person and when they separated the two I was able to get that rapport I detected deception because I had rapport then I could say guess what you just shoulder shrug I don't believe you and I feel like oh no no no no yes let's say the truth I could do that with them and I was able to get truthful information that went into reports to help save lives so my challenge is for you guys to build rapport with people get that trust and respect and use detecting deception to make your lives save so you're not manipulated and you're not taking advantage of again thank you so much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 93,933

Rating: 4.7850618 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Anthropology

Id: Q9j8iJHSCbY

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2015