Lie to me

09 Nov

If you haven’t lived it, you can’t explain it. Seven simple steps to spotting lies and liars in job Interviews

You think you have the perfect candidate for the job. Their resume reads like a dream. How sure are you, though, that their CV and their experience and performance line up with the truth?

I like the TV show “Lie to me”.  It’s about the use of applied psychology to solve crimes by extracting the truth from suspects.

The show rests on the real work of Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System to determine what people are thinking.  Using his system and body language cues, you can determine if a person is lying or telling the truth.

Ekman method for lie detection

In the United States, police departments report 95 percent success in spotting lies using Ekman’s method. The average untrained person has at best 50 percent success.

I have read some of Ekman’s books and found them good, but learning the tools can take time.

What I’ve found most effective in spotting lies is how people respond when I drill down into the detail of something they should know intimately—their job history.

Resumes are often suspect because they can be vague, misleading or plain lies.  And interviews by the untrained are often conducted poorly. They can suffer from an ‘unconscious bias’ that negates real effectiveness, unless you probe the details of the person’s experience, something rarely done.

The devil’s in the detail

The trick is to get the interviewee to relive the events in graphic detail.  The more specifics you ask for, the more likely the lie or lies will be exposed. How does this work?

Simple. If you haven’t lived it you can’t describe it. 

When you live an event you can describe the sights and sounds and smells.  You can recapture the highs and lows, the disappointments and the accomplishments that never appear in a resume. Only the person who has lived them can describe them in all their emotional complexity.

Manufactured stories

When someone fabricates the truth, the real experiences are missing, and the feelings too.  A manufactured story is difficult to recall with any fluidity, and is prone to inconsistencies. 

With genuine life events, you can express the experiences and feelings in many different ways, but remain consistent and sound authentic. Someone who is lying can only say it the same way over and over again—a sure ‘tell’ the person is lying.

Here are my seven quick tips to determine if someone is lying.  I’ve gleaned them from the literature and studies on this issue.  I find them simple, effective and easy to use.

Seven simple steps to spotting  lies

 1.  Inconsistency and contradiction

Their story doesn’t make sense and is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.  They cannot explain these away and continually make corrections to the story, making it even more confusing.

2. Short and vague stories

This is the liar’s antidote to getting into trouble as shown in Tip 1.  The story has little or no detail and none is really offered even with multiple requests.  One way to confirm this is to come back to the story in different ways during the course of the discussions.  If the story remains short and identical in sequence, it’s likely to be a lie.

3. Slow thinking and talking

Many people believe that thinking carefully about the question prior to answering is good.  However, liars can take a long time to reply, and when they speak it’s very measured as though mentally rehearsed.  They are trying to be careful in what they say.  Most people don’t behave this way, so it’s a sign that something is not quite right.  The contrast is more noticeable when you observe the candidate speaking quicker during the small talk prior to the interview.

4. Nervous Nelly

It’s true people can become nervous at interviews. However, most good interviewers make candidates feel comfortable and relaxed. After a while, most interviewees warm up and start to behave normally. Unless they’re lying!

Liars tend to remain nervous and fidgety throughout the interview.  Their levels of agitation increase under more detailed questioning when they find it harder to navigate the answer. Some literally squirm in their seats.

5. Memory loss

Have you watched the news and seen a politician explain away the receipt of a very expensive gift through a complete loss of memory?  In the same way, details of important and significant parts of a resume should be remembered.  If you continually get responses such as: ‘I just don’t remember the details’, then it’s likely it didn’t happen.

6. Living in the third person

This is one of my favourites, though it doesn’t appear in the texts quite like this.

A candidate trying to deceive tells stories in language that is inappropriate to the actual experience.  They frequently use the third person in the narrative: ‘one does’, ‘it should’, ‘the right way to do’, and ‘they normally do’.

There is a lot less of the first person: ‘I did this’, ‘we did that’ in the story. More importantly, there’s very little of the past tense, and much more of the present and future tenses, neither of which are as relevant to their achievements.

You’ll find compelling evidence for this when you ask for details of the past and they answer with a text book response in the present tense.  ‘You don’t know it, or you haven’t done it’ is my immediate conclusion.

7.  Overly positive

This is a little more subtle, but still a good indicator.  In life we have many issues to deal with. When things go well, we’re elated and when things go badly, we’re disappointed.  You hear this in normal stories and they’re expressed with a balanced emotional sense.  When there are no issues, no negatives and all the stories are good, you have to question the extent of their real involvement.  When was the last time you did work without issues or difficulties to overcome? 

These tips are by no means exhaustive, and there is a lot of research on the subject.  But they work and are a practicable means of understanding the true extent of a person’s experience.