How To Tell If Someone Is Lying

Reliable information is crucial to making a good decision. Learn how to separate the truth from the lies, and you will go a long way in protecting yourself from fraud, or being taken for a ride. Wikihow has a great post about how to tell if someone is lying, and here some of the key tips from that article.

• Look at the mouth, and see if you can see the teeth. A forced smile will not reveal teeth.
• A typical right-handed person tends to look towards his right when remembering something that actually happened and towards their left when they’re making something up.
• Liars also tend to blink more often, sweat more, and are not likely to touch their chest or heart with an open hand.
• They become uncomfortable and restless the person becomes when there is a pause.
• Liars speak in a defensive manner (they will be relieved if you change the subject).

Please note that just because a person acts this way, it does not make him a liar. The above actions are generalizations and should just be regarded as rough indicators of how people act.

Hi, before I reply let me say this site no doubt takes a lot of time so good on you for putting it together.

In relation to this post I would like to provide a little more detail on the eye direction point.

This comes from the world of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) which I won’t go into too much detail about here, however I thought I would elaborate a little on what is called “Eye accessing cues”

O.k., we all have our own preferred method of internally representing our thoughts and memories and this will be done using one (or a mixture of) the following 5 ways: Visual (think in pictures) Auditory (in sounds) Kinaesthetic (feeling/emotion i.e. hot, cold, rough) Olfactory (smells) and Gustatory (tastes). So for example a person who accesses their memories visually might recall a day at the beach by seeing a picture in their head of the sandy scene and the faces of other people there, whereas someone who accesses in an auditory way might remember the sounds of the seagulls and the roar of the ocean. As for Kinaesthetic, someone may remember the feel of the sand under their feet or the warmth of the sun shining on their body and so on.

With me so far! Right, depending on how someone is accessing their information they will *tend* to move their eyes to a particular position. Typically people working with visually remembered information (i.e. something that has happened) their eyes will go up and to the right. If they are constructing visual information they will look up to the left. However, some people construct the image (look up and left) and then check it against their recollection (look up and right) to make sure it is accurate and correct. Hence why it is not a definitive test (as you have pointed out) to see if someone is lying, it may just be one of a number of clues that all fit together to give you a better idea.

There’s a lot of information about body language which should be treated very generally i.e. if I have a gland problem and get interviewed by the police what do they make of me sweating profusely? Again, it’s about adding up all the signs or if you’re lucky viewing the CCTV.