Everyone on earth must have probably told a lie, just as everyone must have been lied to. We all wish we have the power or ability to detect when someone is lying to us; definitely no one loves to be lied to.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy reveals how to spot a liar in her new book “Presence”. She says that instead of looking for one big “reveal,” the best way to spot deception is to look for discrepancies across multiple channels of communication, including facial expressions, posture, and speech.
According to Cuddy “Lying is hard work,”
“We’re telling one story while suppressing another, and if that’s not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we’re also trying suppress. We just don’t have the brainpower to manage it all without letting something go — without ‘leaking’.”
According to Cuddy, the best way to spot a liar is to look for differences between what people are saying and what they are doing, she says. Conflicting emotions, like a happy tone of voice paired with an agitated facial expression, can be particularly telling.
Cuddy believes that people are generally bad at spotting a lie.
“When we’re consciously looking for signs of deception or truth, we pay too much attention to words and not enough to the nonverbal gestalt of what’s going on,” Cuddy says. “Truth reveals itself more clearly through actions than it does through our words.”
Phil