How To Tell If Someone Is Lying
Catching a liar is an age-old problem. We're limited by the complex mysteries of the human brain. As a result, our inner thoughts are often inscrutable to others, and vice versa.
So, can we really tell if someone is lying, even if the fibber is someone we love and have known for years? There’s good news and bad news. We can all learn how to read the signs for when even the best liar is telling a huge whopper—but beware; lie detection takes a lot of practice, and it’s not always reliable.
There are, however, things you can learn to improve your lie-detecting abilities. Without further ado (and with no word of a lie) here are the ways some truth experts employ to tell if someone is lying.
No Means Yes When You’re a Liar
How can you catch a liar? Sometimes our body language gives us away when we’re telling a white lie, a small fib, or a big whopper of untruth. One frequent way this happens is when someone accidentally nods their head “Yes” even when they’re saying “No.”
Granted, considering many cultures have opposite head movements for “Yes” and “No,” you’re going to want to make sure you know who you’re talking to with this tip before you accuse them of lying.
Hiding and Lying
Another way to tell if someone is lying is to see if they cover their mouth and their eyes while they’re telling the fib. This may be an unconscious reaction to “cover” the lie up, and to keep any potential listeners from “unearthing” the truth.
Sometimes, liars might even close their eyes while telling a lie, or else look away—after all, the eyes are the windows to the (liar’s) soul.
I’ve Got a Lie in My Throat
Liars get choked up too—and that’s actually another way to tell if someone is lying. We all get a tickle in our throats from time to time, but when a liar is in the middle of telling a fib, they will sometimes loudly clear their throats, or even swallow hard. That’s a sign that a lie is in the making.
This might be yet another subconscious tick, or perhaps lying just gives some guilty parties a dry throat.
The Fibber Caught Red-Handed
A further way to tell if someone is lying is to watch if they consistently put their hand to their face. Just as liars will sometimes cover up their mouth or eyes, they might also use their hands to touch their face excessively, like pulling at their ears or touching their lips. Sometimes, liars might also bite or lick their lips, or otherwise perform anxious lying gestures.
This excessive fidgeting happens because lying creates a spike in our anxiety, even if we happen to be a seasoned liar. This rise in anxiety often drains the blood from our extremities, causing itching or a need to fidget. The liar might even start fidgeting with their hands, which is yet another sign of a lie.
A Well-Groomed Deception
One more for the lie detection bank: This anxiety might also cause the liar to perform grooming gestures on themselves, whether it be to sort out their clothes, wipe the (lying) sweat off of their foreheads, or re-straighten some of their surroundings, like an errant pencil lying on a table.
Lying experts consider all of this a potential indication of a lie, and you should be on the lookout for it when you confront your own liar.
Has This All Been a Lie?
So, now you’ve got a great body language toolkit to expose the liars in your life—but it’s time for a bit of a reality check. Although expert researchers can use these signs to sniff out a liar and their lies, a lot of these body languages are notoriously difficult to notice and then diagnose—and a lot of times, even the experts are wrong.
One alternative—but still unpredictable—way to tell if someone is lying has less to do with the liar’s body language and more to do with the form and content of their lie, since body cues can be weak, or so fleeting as to be unnoticeable.
The Deceiver’s Pause
One other good way to tell if someone is lying, for example, is to wait and see if they pause before answering your question. While you might think that pausing means someone is lying, it’s actually the opposite: a pause might mean they’re telling the truth, and a fluid response indicates they could be lying.
Think about it: how well do you remember every detail of what you did yesterday? If someone asked you to tell the truth about it, you’d probably have to take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Liars, on the other hand, often don’t need pauses in their speech when answering questions because they’ve already got their fib locked and loaded. So if your loved one doesn’t pause when you ask, “Where were you last night?” they might very well be lying.
The Contempt Is a Lie
There are also clues in what the liar is saying. If the person is vague about the details of their story or speaks only in incoherent fragments, you may have a lie on your hands. Other content clues that a lie is afoot: The liar uses “qualifying language” like “I swear to God,” or “in all honesty” to try to get you to believe the lie by overemphasizing “truth.” In the same vein, liars also like to use superlatives such as “totally” and “absolutely” when telling their lies.
The liar might also refuse to give you any material to work with, shutting down the conversation and keeping himself or herself from being caught in a lie. Otherwise, even if they do keep talking, they might do so with disdain, making you feel as if you are the one in the wrong for thinking they are lying.
But don’t lose hope if the liar gets upset, there is also one last, great trick most experts use to tell if someone is lying…
Tell That Lie to Me Again
To tell if someone is lying, many researchers ask them to tell their lie backward. This forces the liar to work harder to remember their narrative. If someone is telling the truth, they will have very little difficulty doing this. After all, it actually happened, so the memory is cemented in our brains.
But if it’s all a lie and it didn’t actually take place, it’s also more difficult to “remember”—and this extra degree of difficulty can open up the liar to making mistakes or even confessing their lies.
So with this last genius trick, now you know what to do the next time you meet a really good liar.
Caught In The Act
In the end, catching a liar red-handed in their lie is difficult to do. Even when examining both body language and content recall, we can still fail to really nail the liar. In fact, sometimes the sign of a skilled liar is their lack of tells. They may act super disinterested and still, offer up no body language cues, or else they may have rehearsed their story so that they know it backwards and forwards, with very little pauses or confused chronology.
In cases like these, you have one final weapon in your arsenal: your gut. In fact, studies have shown that our gut feelings about lying and liars are actually often right. So take a good, long look at that (possibly) lying loved one and ask yourself: do you believe them?
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