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

How do you know?

Tell me.

“I trust them until they prove me that I should.”

So you trust initially and then you wait for some action. Okay. In the back.

“So you build 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?

“You ask someone else.”

What have you heard about this person? What’s their reputation? What don’t I know that I should? How else?

“The way someone establishes eye contact.”

We’re going to talk about eye contact a lot in a little bit, but the way someone establishes eye contact. Anything else?

“So you break up with them before you date, then you see how you put someone in emotional stress to see how they react to 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 going to 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 That Interfere with Deception Detection

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 reminds 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-group. Everybody that’s here is an in-group. Those people that didn’t get to hear this lecture they’re an out-group. Of course if 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 than 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 we’re 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 kid’s 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’s acting differently, they gotta 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 assume 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.”

Confirmation Bias: A Personal Story

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 Pally High my first job was a night job. At that time we had been living on Oregon Avenue and in our, you know, the wisdom of my entire family and financial deals we sold that house because we made, I don’t know, $3,000 or something. That was a great deal.

So my parents then moved and they were living in and managing this condominium complex. Now those are the kind of condominiums that are all alike in a row. I’m working nights, I come home, it’s like three in the morning, I’m tired and I walk up to the condominium, have my key out and I notice there’s a bicycle. And I thought, well, we don’t have a bicycle. But okay, my dad also was in the he did a lot of things but he also was doing some work with newspapers maybe it was for some of the newsboys or somebody he had he got a bicycle for a prize I don’t know.

I walk in I go 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 is 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, it must have, you know, probably only took a few seconds.

It felt like about five minutes. I’m trying to rationalize what was going on. I looked over and the door to the lower bedroom was open. This 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 three in the morning and I’m standing in some strangers 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, 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.

“I knew I couldn’t trust him.” And you will find and give much more meaning. If somebody does this and you like them, you know, “oh, that’s the way she stands. I’ve seen her do that a lot of times.” If someone does this and you don’t like them, “resistant, I knew it.”

See you can’t trust that person. We will read into it once we’ve made up our mind.

Verbal Signs of Deception

Alright, the verbal and nonverbal signs of deception. This was the most fun to do. We’ll do some verbal first.

Selective wording. I want you to ask me if I’ve ever taken drugs.

“Have you ever taken drugs?”

I don’t do drugs.

Did I answer the question?

No.

Ask me, did I leave my last workplace under good conditions?

“Did you leave your last workplace under good conditions?”

I have to pursue things that I, you know, were 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 already back out of a statement that you’re going to make. So quasi denials many times liars will use.

Verbal Clues of Deception

Qualifiers. “To the best of my knowledge,” “I could be wrong again.” Also, it could be instead of a direct denial, they say, “Do I look like someone who would steal computers?” Did I answer your question?

No. See, any time you deflect and move around by selective 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 hard words when they answer questions like “steal,” “forge.” If someone is guilty of that and they’re being asked, they will typically soften and talk about things like “borrow,” or “mistake,” “overlook.”

They will soften the language around the crime or situation.

Overly formal wording. “I did not have sexual relationship with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Not, “I didn’t have sex with Monica, you know.”

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 try to distance, “that woman,” she’s over there somewhere, I have no idea where she is, “that woman, Ms. 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 Clues to Deception

Here’s the science behind detecting lies nonverbally. 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 to remember not to tell the truth. We have to remember we might answer some questions around the lie. We have to remember to whom we told the lie. It is 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.

Stress signals are anything typically things like playing with your jewelry. You see people that are nervous start to twirl their rings.

They may rub their hands together. They may rub 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. They’re the most honest part of your body because they’re the farthest from your brain and the least rehearsed. So when somebody is really nervous you can see them wrap their feet around the back of the chair, you can see them do all sorts of very fascinating things with their feet. You can also see them start to point toward the door because they really wish this line of questioning were over and they’re ready to go.

Also feet can point toward you. So if for instance you’re really engaged in 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 people are really interested in because their feet start to point at them. They may be still talking to other folks but their feet are pointed at the leader or the boss or the most charismatic or whomever. So feet are a lot of fun to watch.

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 of 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.

Establishing a Truth Baseline

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 why you don’t care if I drink the coffee or not, what you want to see is we’re having this chitchat is how I gesture, how I talk, what my tone of voice is. Under stress our voices get higher. So you want to see how my voice sounds 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 already know this, but you say, “Hey, how did you hear about this job opening?” You watch me as I answer because 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 because it’s written down. Two people in the organization referred me. 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 while I’m saying, “Oh yeah, I know a lot of people here,” then it’s not going to mean anything if you’re going to 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.

Looking for Clusters of Behaviors

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 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 touch right here the notch at their neck or they play with jewelry that’s close to it. 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 left to pursue other things.” 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 was…” You might not do that. You might just kind of put a little asterisk to 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 more animated 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 use these. The tell tale four is out of Northeastern University and 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 tell tale 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.

Eye Signals and Deception

The biggest myth around deception is that liars don’t look you in the eye. And partly children aren’t real good at looking you in the eye. Kids are a lot more likely to drop their eye contact.

But so are people from different cultures. There’s many, many reasons why someone would drop their eyes. Which is good to know by the way 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 isn’t he just stop looking at me” or “She’s just staring at me as this is getting creepy” 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, the 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’s eyes go when they are answered in their truth baseline. When you say, “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 eyes go to.

The other thing that happens in lying is that your eyes dilate. Now there are a 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! But also, again that effort of lying.

So here, and this is very confusing because if you’re in love with someone and 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 constructed and told, the blink rate is low and after the lie is told often times 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 watching the presidential campaigns high blink rates are not good for a presidential candidate because it makes them look like they’re lying or unsure but literally if their blink rate is low and then it goes up after they’ve said something that would be a better indicator than just normal blink rate.

Emotional Incongruence

And emotional incongruence. This is where I think a lot of people who are good at detecting lies. 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 an executive that I saw speak was asking for questions and he said, “Now I’m open for questions.” I mean there’s something, you and I laughed, that entire audience, not one person caught that. 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 often and that will make you think somebody’s lying. So you want to that’s that gut feeling you want to pay attention to it. There is something though that emotions won’t tell you.

Understanding Emotional Cues

A liar can look incredibly fearful that he’s going to be caught. But so can a truthful person look very fearful that you’re not going to believe him. So fear, you’re not mind reading. What you’re doing is picking up an emotion. 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.

Dealing with Liars

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 to ask so you can build your own strategy because it really depends.

# Consider Your Legal Obligations

First of all it depends on your legal obligation. When you go into the workplace or the classroom if you’re teaching, you’re going to have some legal obligations.

You are going to 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 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 going to have to know what those policies are and follow them. Particularly if you want to report someone and you don’t follow procedure and you do something else, it’s going to come back and hit you in the face, not them. It’ll be “Why didn’t you do it the right way? You weren’t supposed to go to your boss’s boss, you were supposed to go to HR” or whatever.

So you want to make sure you know how that works.

# Consider Who the Liar Is

It also depends on who the liar is. If the liar is someone you’re negotiating with, you’re going to 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.

# Document the Impact

It depends on what the impact of the lie is. And if you’re going to report liars, 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 impact. 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.

# Know What You Want

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 going to be different.

# Consider the Consequences

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, you just don’t know 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 going to 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 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.”

How Not to Look Like a Liar When You’re Telling the Truth

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 going to look nervous but you also may look like you’re not forthcoming or you’re not entirely candid.

# Power Poses and Hormones

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 you 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 and 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 in a high power pose for two minutes.

# Power Thinking

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. 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 terrific 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 going to 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, 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. Stretch so your hands can actually stretch out.

I mean 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 extended eye contact. I don’t mean stalk or stare, we’re not going there.

We’re simply talking about 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.

Tracy’s Story: Body Language and Trust

I was asked last year 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 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, 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, “Alright, here’s what we suggest. Before you present an idea, maybe you need to give us more of the back story 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. Back story, 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, it looks like you 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?” She said, “You know, we’re in North Dakota. It’s pretty cold here in the winter. I called them because I’m going back there in the fall to do another thing for the governor’s conference but I called them and they tell me the high today is 12 below.”

She said, “It’s pretty cold here and I’m naturally cold anyway so I would sit in the meetings and I would kind of huddle up, cross my arms and pull my body in.” She said, “So I wondered if I didn’t do that if I would come across differently so I layered. I was wearing like five sweaters but I was comfortable. And I uncrossed 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 have to layer in a cold room, isn’t that just kind of lying? Isn’t that kind of manipulative?”

And I say, “Yeah. Sure. It’s just as manipulative as spell checking your resume before you send it in. Or dressing for success before you go on that. Or minding your manners when you’re going out for a business lunch. All of those, very manipulative and highly recommended by the way.”

Body language when you’re working on impression management is not to fool people that you’re something you’re not. Because 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?

Alright, that’s it. Thank you so much.

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