The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [50]
Fleeting incongruencies in the face
reveal conflicts in the emotions.
When we're going to try to conceal a lie, or a certain thought flashes into our mind, it can be shown for a split second on our face. We usually interpret someone's quick nose touch as an itch, or that when they rest their hand on their face they are deeply interested in us, without ever suspecting that we're boring them to death. For example, we filmed a man discussing how well he got on with his mother-in-law. Each time he mentioned her name the left side of his face rose in a momentary sneer that lasted only a split second but told us volumes about how he really felt.
Women Lie the Best and That's the Truth
In Why Men Lie and Women Cry (Orion) we showed how women are better at reading emotions, and therefore better at manipulating others with an appropriate lie. This trait is seen in baby girls who cry in sympathy with other babies and can then cause other babies to cry by simply bursting into tears at will. Sanjida O'Connell, PhD, author of Mindreading, conducted a five-month study into how we lie and also concluded that women are far better liars than men. She found that women tell more complicated lies than men, whereas men tell simple lies such as “I missed the bus” or “My cell-phone battery was dead—that's why I couldn't call you.” She also found that attractive people are more believed than unattractive ones, explaining why leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton were able to get away with as much as they did.
Why It's Hard to Lie
As we said in Chapter 3, most people believe that when someone is lying they smile more than usual, but research shows the opposite is true—they smile less. The difficulty with lying is that the subconscious mind acts automatically and independently of our verbal lie, so our body language gives us away. This is why people who rarely tell lies are easily caught, regardless of how convincing they may sound. The moment they begin to lie, their body sends out contradictory signals, and these give us a feeling that they're not telling the truth. During the lie, the subconscious mind sends out nervous energy, which appears as a gesture that can contradict what was said. Professional liars, such as politicians, lawyers, actors, and television announcers, have refined their body gestures to the point where it is difficult to “see” the lie, and people fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.
They do it in one of two ways. First, they practice what “feel” like the right gestures when they tell the lie, but this only works when they have practiced telling a lot of lies over long periods of time. Second, they can reduce their gesturing so that they don't use any positive or negative gestures while lying, but that's also hard to do.
With practice, liars can become
convincing, just like actors.
Try this simple test—tell a deliberate lie to someone face-to-face and make a conscious effort to suppress all body gestures. Even when your major body gestures are consciously suppressed, numerous small microgestures will still be transmitted. These include facial muscular twitching, dilation and contraction of pupils, sweating, flushed cheeks, eye-blinking rate increasing from ten blinks per minute to as many as fifty blinks per minute, and many other microsignals that indicate deceit. Research using slow-motion cameras shows that these microgestures can occur within a split second and it's only people such as professional interviewers, salespeople, and the very perceptive who can read them.
It's obvious, then, that to be able to lie successfully, you need to have your body hidden or out of sight. Interrogation involves placing the person on a chair in the open or placing him under lights with his body in full view of the interrogators; his lies are much easier to see under those circumstances. Lying is easier if you're sitting behind a desk where your body is partially hidden, peering over a fence, or from behind a closed door. The best way to lie is