dishonest people
This is how you spot liars!
On average, each of us tells an untruth every five minutes – out of politeness or to gain an advantage. Here’s how to spot lies and what strategies to use to corner liars.
Published: 29 minutes ago
|
Updated: 7 minutes ago
The body and facial expressions cannot lie.
Christian Maurer and Dirk Ruschmann
Lying, says Paul Ekman, is always accompanied by a feeling. Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, is best known for his research into non-verbal communication. So he developed a classification of the “seven basic emotions”: joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise and contempt. He assigns facial expressions to them that are characteristic of the respective feeling.
Pay attention to body language
In field research, Ekman and his colleagues have found evidence that the expressions for these emotions are “universal”: independent of cultures or social circumstances in which a person grew up, i.e. universally “human”. They cannot be discarded. And not faked either, if the respective feeling is not actually felt – that is why a polite smile always looks different, i.e. less warm-hearted, than a real smile: with a real smile the eyes obey the will, with politeness the eye muscles do not. The body and facial expressions, so the significant conclusion, cannot lie! Anyone who understands this language can literally read the other person like a book. Ekman has developed a complete system for this, which is referred to as the «Facial Action Coding System».
In 40 years of research, Ekman has also discovered that three main emotions accompany a lie: first, joy in deceiving and cheating, second, fear of being exposed and exposed, and third, guilt for deceiving others.
Here are the main identifying features of the three emotions that accompany a lie:
- suppressed joyethe power to know more than the other person, can be recognized by conspicuous, fidgety movements (the so-called «happy feet») and often also by a delighted, short grin for which there is no apparent reason.
- The fearBeing pilloried is expressed in physical tension, jerky movements, often the facial muscles become rigid, the eyes blink a lot and the lips become dry because the flow of saliva has dried up, some even bite their lips.
- Die guilt look similar to sadness: crooked body language, tense eyebrows, wrinkles form on the forehead, the so-called “grief muscle” is visible. The closer the deceived person is to the liar, the greater the feeling of guilt and the clearer the signs, then liars also withdraw from the closeness, avoiding words like you and me. The smile becomes fake.
Other signs of lying are: frequent touching of the mouth, or the hand wiping something from the eyes, the facial expressions become asymmetrical, there are skipping actions (such as wiping crumbs off the table or picking from the shirt), outbreaks of sweat or drumming of the fingers the table.