The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [12]
The child telling a lie
The act of covering the mouth can alert a parent to the lie and this Mouth-Covering gesture will likely continue throughout the person's lifetime, usually only varying in the speed at which it's done. When a teenager tells a lie, the hand is brought to the mouth in a similar way to the five-year-old, but instead of the obvious hand-slapping gesture over the mouth, the fingers rub lightly around it.
The teenager telling a lie
The original Mouth-Covering gesture becomes even faster in adulthood. When an adult tells a lie, it's as if his brain instructs his hand to cover his mouth in an attempt to block the deceitful words, just as it did for the five-year-old and the teenager. But, at the last moment, the hand is pulled away from the face and a Nose-Touch gesture results. This is simply an adult's version of the Mouth-Covering gesture that was used in childhood.
Bill Clinton answering questions about Monica Lewinsky in front of the grand jury
This shows how, as people get older, their gestures become more subtle and less obvious and is why it's often more difficult to read the gestures of a fifty-year-old than those of a five-year-old.
Can You Fake It?
We are regularly asked, “Can you fake body language?” The general answer to this question is no, because of the lack of congruence that is likely to occur between the main gestures, the body's microsignals, and the spoken words. For example, open palms are associated with honesty, but when the faker holds his palms out and smiles at you as he tells a lie, his micro-gestures give him away. His pupils may contract, one eyebrow may lift, or the corner of his mouth may twitch, and these signals contradict the Open-Palm gesture and the sincere smile. The result is that the receivers, especially women, tend not to believe what they hear.
Body language is easier to fake with men
than with women because, overall, men
aren't good readers of body language.
True-Life Story: The Lying Job Applicant
We were interviewing a man who was explaining why he had quit his last job. He told us that there had been insufficient future opportunity available to him and that it was a hard decision to leave as he got on well with all the staff there. A female interviewer said she had an “intuitive feeling” that the applicant was lying and that he had negative feelings about his former boss, despite the applicant's continual praising of his boss. During a review of the interview on slow-motion video, we noticed that each time the applicant mentioned his former boss a split-second sneer appeared on the left side of his face. Often these contradictory signals will flash across a person's face in a fraction of a second and are missed by an untrained observer. We telephoned his former boss and discovered the applicant had been fired for dealing drugs to other staff members. As confidently as this applicant had tried to fake his body language, his contradictory microgestures gave the game away to our female interviewer.
The key here is being able to separate the real gestures from fake ones so a genuine person can be distinguished from a liar or impostor. Signals like pupil dilation, sweating, and blushing cannot be consciously faked, but exposing the palms to try to appear honest is easily learned.
Fakers can only pretend for a short period of time.
There are, however, some cases in which body language is deliberately faked to gain certain advantages. Take, for example, the Miss World or Miss Universe contest, in which each contestant uses studiously learned body movements to give the impression of warmth and sincerity. To the extent that each contestant can convey these signals, she will score points from the judges. But even the expert contestants can only fake body language for a short period of time and eventually the body will show contradictory signals that are independent of conscious actions. Many politicians are experts in faking body language in order to get the voters