What strategies do you people who aren’t me have to detect lies? And by ‘people who aren’t me’ I mean verbal people.
In order to understand what people are saying, even to parse sentences, I have to build a bit of a model of personality/motivation. This means I comprehend that one is building oneself up before I can even know what you think I should think highly of one for. The structure of dark arts is visible before the contents of the message: repetition of ‘facts’ in absence of evidence, comparing someone I don’t like and someone one doesn’t want me to like, intimidation for accusing one of wrong (Pavlov).
I tend to notice when people handle me, but I can’t imagine how a verbal person thinks. That is my main defense, and I worry that I’ll meet (have already met?) another like myself and have nothing else. How do you protect yourself from mental hijacking, those of you who have to work to do so?
Ask the person questions you know they will lie about and watch their body language very closely. Compare it with their body language when you know they are telling the truth or relaxed. Then when you see signs of the lying body language in future, probe further and see if you can uncover the lie.
My favourite way of doing this isn’t even with deception. I use a bit of PUA-style material as follows:
“Hey, I’ve known you a while now, I reckon I can guess a few facts about you. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to come up with four facts about yourself, but one of them has to be a LIE. Tell me them in any order and I’ll see if I can spot the lie. It will be fun, and you’ll learn something about yourself!” etc. etc.
People love this kind of thing (because it’s about themselves), and they love thinking that you have special powers or an intimate psychic connection with them. Of course, most people on LW would see it as a challenge to mislead me into choosing the wrong lie, but that’s not usually what happens in my experience.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t spot the lie, because if you’re paying attention to their body language throughout the whole conversation, you should pick up plenty of their ticks and be able to associate them with particular emotions. You can invert the idea with anchoring too, if you know what you’re doing. If you anchor a particular gesture or touch to when they are open and honest with you then you can use it later when you want them to answer truthfully.
It’s never a case of people having a single fixed truth-telling body language and a single fixed lying body language, but that when they’re lying they subconsciously change something in how they appear. It’s “spot the odd one out” which makes the lie easy to spot.
Then there’s stuff like looking into the a top corner when trying to remember something. If you ask someone three difficult memory questions and they look into the top left corner for two of them but then look off to the middle-lower right for the other, you can be pretty confident that the odd one out in this case is because they aren’t even bothering to try to remember, but are immediately fabricating their answer.
I’m not sure if that was the kind of response you were after. I’m fairly new to these techniques, but I’ve already found them remarkably effective for cold reading. It’s fun, you feed the person an input (question, statement, whatever), and watch very closely at the body language. Rinse and repeat, getting a better feel for their subconscious responses each time. Then you use these to your/their advantage. Ha!
I model motivations and personality too, but I use the body language tricks to speed it up.
I originally wasn’t going to reply because I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good idea for other people to adopt my strategy, but my name has been uttered, so I’ll give it a shot.
What strategies do you people who aren’t me have to detect lies?
I have no strategy directly aimed at detecting lies. I notice when someone’s statement seems to contradict something I already believe, and I notice when someone’s statement seems just plain wacky. I tend not to believe those statements, unless the preexisting belief they contradict is equally unsupported (which means I don’t care much about the subject and might as well be agreeable with whoever I’m talking to), or I have an extended friendship with and favorable insight into the ethics and intellect of the speaker (so I think they’d be especially unlikely to lie to me or be mistaken), or I seek additional information and find the statement confirmed by legitimate-looking other sources (which I do when I care about the subject a great deal, regardless of my opinion of the likelihood of lying/mistake). But other than that, I’m a very trusting person.
The lies and errors that slip through this admittedly unsophisticated web of detection are usually caught when I permit myself to become loudly curious, which happens whenever I care about a subject. (It matters very little to me if I have false beliefs on subjects that are of no importance to me). Your average liar cannot tolerate extensive, earnest questioning about the details of the situation about which they have lied, even if there are legitimate-looking sources which back them up. When this inquisition turns up a falsehood, I typically operate under the assumption that it was a mistake rather than a deliberate attempt at deception; this seems to make most people less likely to resent me, and is probably true much of the time anyway.
I originally wasn’t going to reply because I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good idea for other people to adopt my strategy...
I like to think that most people here have their heads screwed on tight enough to make a reasonable evaluation of a given strategy before adopting it. That said, I won’t mind at all if you don’t indulge my curiosity in the future.
I can’t really parse what you said above, nor do I know what you mean by “a verbal person”. What do you mean by “mental hijacking”, and in what context are you asking about detecting lies?
I don’t think I’m usually in a situation where I should expect someone might be lying to me.
I can’t really parse what you said above, nor do I know what you mean by “a verbal person”.
I think in pictures. It is trying for me to turn these into words, or words into pictures.
What do you mean by “mental hijacking”
The tactics used by people with something to sell, or who otherwise want to control you: salespeople, priests, and politicians for example. Marketers and politicians know if you repeat something enough people will believe it. Narcissist know enough Pavlov to make their victim feel bad when accused, so they are less likely to accuse later, regardless of how deserved it is.
in what context are you asking about detecting lies?
I was in an office with a lot of rumors and politics. It only takes one playa’ to turn a programming shop into that, sadly.
I was in an office with a lot of rumors and politics. It only takes one playa’ to turn a programming shop into that, sadly.
Weird. I couldn’t imagine participating in that sort of thing, but then I can’t really imagine specifics about what you’re talking about. I imagine that if anyone at my day job tried to engage in something other than programming (“rumors and politics” presumably don’t involve programming) they’d be asked to stop, and fired if it kept up.
And every code commit is logged, so I don’t see how anyone could be dishonest about that.
Good question. I hope you get a few more answers, and I particularly hope Alicorn comments on this, since she’s also autistic but seems to have a different strategy for dealing with people than I do. Here’s my first approximation, which may not be completely accurate:
For intentional lies, simply keeping track of what they’ve said in the past, and the implications of what they’ve said, works well. Many people don’t have the kind of memory to be able to be completely consistent with their lies even without taking the implications into account, and keeping the implications of any kind of significant lie consistent with both reality and itself over time is practically impossible. Not every instance of that is a lie, of course—people also tend to change their minds or find new information and not explicitly state that—but it’s a good warning sign.
Figuring out that there’s a flaw in what someone truly believes is harder, and a more common issue. My strategy is to find the base assumptions that their view rests on, and evaluate those for truth. (This also sometimes works on intentional lies, though with those it’s often true that there are no underlying assumptions—which is another clue that something’s wrong.) Generally, at least one assumption will be questionable, which is okay—I just have to evaluate that assumption in each situation before I consider taking advice based on it. If one of the underlying assumptions is obviously false, or questionable, I consider the advice suspect.
Both of those strategies feel similar to what you described, so you might be able to figure out how to do them. I can do what you described, but not often; it seems to conflict with being verbal.
What strategies do you people who aren’t me have to detect lies? And by ‘people who aren’t me’ I mean verbal people.
In order to understand what people are saying, even to parse sentences, I have to build a bit of a model of personality/motivation. This means I comprehend that one is building oneself up before I can even know what you think I should think highly of one for. The structure of dark arts is visible before the contents of the message: repetition of ‘facts’ in absence of evidence, comparing someone I don’t like and someone one doesn’t want me to like, intimidation for accusing one of wrong (Pavlov).
I tend to notice when people handle me, but I can’t imagine how a verbal person thinks. That is my main defense, and I worry that I’ll meet (have already met?) another like myself and have nothing else. How do you protect yourself from mental hijacking, those of you who have to work to do so?
Ask the person questions you know they will lie about and watch their body language very closely. Compare it with their body language when you know they are telling the truth or relaxed. Then when you see signs of the lying body language in future, probe further and see if you can uncover the lie.
My favourite way of doing this isn’t even with deception. I use a bit of PUA-style material as follows:
“Hey, I’ve known you a while now, I reckon I can guess a few facts about you. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to come up with four facts about yourself, but one of them has to be a LIE. Tell me them in any order and I’ll see if I can spot the lie. It will be fun, and you’ll learn something about yourself!” etc. etc.
People love this kind of thing (because it’s about themselves), and they love thinking that you have special powers or an intimate psychic connection with them. Of course, most people on LW would see it as a challenge to mislead me into choosing the wrong lie, but that’s not usually what happens in my experience.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t spot the lie, because if you’re paying attention to their body language throughout the whole conversation, you should pick up plenty of their ticks and be able to associate them with particular emotions. You can invert the idea with anchoring too, if you know what you’re doing. If you anchor a particular gesture or touch to when they are open and honest with you then you can use it later when you want them to answer truthfully.
It’s never a case of people having a single fixed truth-telling body language and a single fixed lying body language, but that when they’re lying they subconsciously change something in how they appear. It’s “spot the odd one out” which makes the lie easy to spot.
Then there’s stuff like looking into the a top corner when trying to remember something. If you ask someone three difficult memory questions and they look into the top left corner for two of them but then look off to the middle-lower right for the other, you can be pretty confident that the odd one out in this case is because they aren’t even bothering to try to remember, but are immediately fabricating their answer.
I’m not sure if that was the kind of response you were after. I’m fairly new to these techniques, but I’ve already found them remarkably effective for cold reading. It’s fun, you feed the person an input (question, statement, whatever), and watch very closely at the body language. Rinse and repeat, getting a better feel for their subconscious responses each time. Then you use these to your/their advantage. Ha!
I model motivations and personality too, but I use the body language tricks to speed it up.
I originally wasn’t going to reply because I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good idea for other people to adopt my strategy, but my name has been uttered, so I’ll give it a shot.
I have no strategy directly aimed at detecting lies. I notice when someone’s statement seems to contradict something I already believe, and I notice when someone’s statement seems just plain wacky. I tend not to believe those statements, unless the preexisting belief they contradict is equally unsupported (which means I don’t care much about the subject and might as well be agreeable with whoever I’m talking to), or I have an extended friendship with and favorable insight into the ethics and intellect of the speaker (so I think they’d be especially unlikely to lie to me or be mistaken), or I seek additional information and find the statement confirmed by legitimate-looking other sources (which I do when I care about the subject a great deal, regardless of my opinion of the likelihood of lying/mistake). But other than that, I’m a very trusting person.
The lies and errors that slip through this admittedly unsophisticated web of detection are usually caught when I permit myself to become loudly curious, which happens whenever I care about a subject. (It matters very little to me if I have false beliefs on subjects that are of no importance to me). Your average liar cannot tolerate extensive, earnest questioning about the details of the situation about which they have lied, even if there are legitimate-looking sources which back them up. When this inquisition turns up a falsehood, I typically operate under the assumption that it was a mistake rather than a deliberate attempt at deception; this seems to make most people less likely to resent me, and is probably true much of the time anyway.
I like to think that most people here have their heads screwed on tight enough to make a reasonable evaluation of a given strategy before adopting it. That said, I won’t mind at all if you don’t indulge my curiosity in the future.
I can’t really parse what you said above, nor do I know what you mean by “a verbal person”. What do you mean by “mental hijacking”, and in what context are you asking about detecting lies?
I don’t think I’m usually in a situation where I should expect someone might be lying to me.
I think in pictures. It is trying for me to turn these into words, or words into pictures.
The tactics used by people with something to sell, or who otherwise want to control you: salespeople, priests, and politicians for example. Marketers and politicians know if you repeat something enough people will believe it. Narcissist know enough Pavlov to make their victim feel bad when accused, so they are less likely to accuse later, regardless of how deserved it is.
I was in an office with a lot of rumors and politics. It only takes one playa’ to turn a programming shop into that, sadly.
Weird. I couldn’t imagine participating in that sort of thing, but then I can’t really imagine specifics about what you’re talking about. I imagine that if anyone at my day job tried to engage in something other than programming (“rumors and politics” presumably don’t involve programming) they’d be asked to stop, and fired if it kept up.
And every code commit is logged, so I don’t see how anyone could be dishonest about that.
Good question. I hope you get a few more answers, and I particularly hope Alicorn comments on this, since she’s also autistic but seems to have a different strategy for dealing with people than I do. Here’s my first approximation, which may not be completely accurate:
For intentional lies, simply keeping track of what they’ve said in the past, and the implications of what they’ve said, works well. Many people don’t have the kind of memory to be able to be completely consistent with their lies even without taking the implications into account, and keeping the implications of any kind of significant lie consistent with both reality and itself over time is practically impossible. Not every instance of that is a lie, of course—people also tend to change their minds or find new information and not explicitly state that—but it’s a good warning sign.
Figuring out that there’s a flaw in what someone truly believes is harder, and a more common issue. My strategy is to find the base assumptions that their view rests on, and evaluate those for truth. (This also sometimes works on intentional lies, though with those it’s often true that there are no underlying assumptions—which is another clue that something’s wrong.) Generally, at least one assumption will be questionable, which is okay—I just have to evaluate that assumption in each situation before I consider taking advice based on it. If one of the underlying assumptions is obviously false, or questionable, I consider the advice suspect.
Both of those strategies feel similar to what you described, so you might be able to figure out how to do them. I can do what you described, but not often; it seems to conflict with being verbal.