Name: How to tell if someone is lying to you | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T09:33:04.000Z
Duration: 5 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm a reader in cognitive psychology and the University of Huddersfield.

I've always had an interest in how people deceive others -

for example, if I were lying to you right now, how would you know?

Would you look at my eyes? At my body language?

I'm a reader in psychology at the University of Huddersfield.

If we want to detect deception we need to stop looking for

those visual behaviours that we think relate to deception,

the pieces of information we can find in the world

that match or mismatch with the statement being offered.

If you want to be able to accurately detect

what you need to do is, you need to listen to what they're saying

and the way that they say it, not how they're acting.

Think about when you are talking to somebody,

you meet them for the first time, now any good poker player will tell you

that it is very easy to control your face.

Therefore facial cues really aren't good cues

of whether or not somebody is lying or telling the truth.

you should be listening to what people say -

the verbal cues and the way in which they say it -

A lie teller, because they are trying to think very hard,

they will use probably the same word over and over again

There's some general research that suggests

we are about 54% accurate when it comes to detecting lies and truths

and as I always say, "If that's the case, you might as well flip a coin -

There are some people who think they are lie detection wizards.

That they can read subtle clues that we give off.

The research suggests that this isn't the case,

Liars just don't give themselves away in any obvious fashion.

There aren't good clues to deception, we don't avoid eye contact,

we don't scratch our face when we're lying or telling the truth.

These just aren't reliable indicators and so, expert or not,

we have no good information on which to make that decision.

We have this idea that if somebody is lying to us

and what they will do is they will keep your eye contact

just enough to make you feel uncomfortable.

In fact the opposite is true. When we lie, we have to think really hard.

So imagine you've got a limited amount of energy,

you will channel all of that energy into telling a lie

and as a consequence, you will become ever so slightly stiller

if we look up to the right or we look up to the left,

it determines the type of lie or truth that we're telling.

A recent piece of research has in fact debunked the idea

that looking up that way or looking up that way

is a good way to detect deception, it's not.

whether somebody is lying or telling the truth

is using something that we call the honest baseline

when they're not stressed and when they're being truthful.

So when we ask them a question, now if we find a pretty even match

between the way they normally act and the way that they're acting now,

we will be fairly happy that they're probably telling us a truth.

it might indicate that there is something going on here

that we need to follow up with in a bit more detail.

what we're doing is actually quite functional

and with the information available in the world.

For instance if I claim to have gone to France last week

that's a great piece of information that I was actually there.

But often we don't have that sort of information, so what do we do?

ALIED theory claims that we, rather than simply guess,

rely on our past experience of the world to make an informed judgement.

they tend to believe people are telling the truth,

and that may be something we want to get rid of.

The best thing to do is just try to keep an open mind

and engage with the situation in a sceptical manner.

Do I have to say it exactly how you've done it

I'm a reader in cognitive psychology at the University of Huddersfield.

I'm like, moving my hands here, you can't see.

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