None of the above from liars & thieves.
ABOUT LIES AND LIARS.
Posted by Pointman on October 11, 2019 · 13 Comments
We all tell lies. Let’s leave aside little white lies which like good manners are the harmless lubricant of society, and concentrate on the big ones. Thinking back to my early education, I was taught lies come in two flavours; those of commission and those of omission. With friends you know and have a regard for, the lies tend to be ones of omission, because they’re essentially decent people who are simply uncomfortable with lying directly to a friend.
They talk all around the subject and you know them well enough to not press, but once in a while it’s important to you and your people, so you push on through the obfuscation to get to the truth. Eventually, their backs are up against the wall. The stark choice becomes betray an old friendship or just tell the truth. If they’re true friends, you’ll always get the truth, and you’ll always feel like a piece of shit afterwards for pushing them so hard to get it. A damage to the relationship on both sides has been done. If they’re the person you always thought they were, the saving grace is usually that they were lying to you to protect someone else.
A lie of commission is a beast of a totally different stripe. It’s usually told to escape the consequences of the liar’s actions or to manipulate you in some way. There’s a lot of folk wisdom about how to detect when you’re being lied to, and depending on how accomplished a liar you’re dealing with, many of them hold true. The liar can’t look you in the eye, they’ll tend to lean in towards you as they tell the big lie, unconsciously bracing themselves for getting called out, or they’ll simply fidget a lot. All the habitual liars have also heard those things, so when someone stares unblinkingly into your eyes, sits or stands just that bit too much upright and there’s suddenly an odd stillness about them, the odds are pretty good you’re being lied to.
Competent interrogators tend to concentrate on eye movements. Generally, right handed people tend to look upwards and to their left when retrieving a true memory and up and to their right when doing some creative imagining, a nice way of saying they’re inventing a lie. With left handers, the reverse of that guideline applies. It all stems from a still argued about theory that the visual cortex is at any moment connecting with either a putative logical or creative side of your brain.
There are a lot of “tells”, some of which can be a truthful person in disarray and just feeling stressed, in which case all bets are off. When dealing with a confident and assured liar, my personal favourite is when they deliver the whopper, pretend like you really believe them and you’ll see a tiny smile of triumph – they know they’ve successfully deceived you. |
