liespottingPamela Meyer is a well known and well respected deception detection expert. She is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) and holds an MBA from Harvard. Several years ago, she wrote a bestseller on the subject, Liespotting. For many years she has studied and researched the relationships of speech patterns, body language and normal/abnormal behaviors that relating to lying.  As a result, she has identified certain conditions which encourage lying; some of the most important include:

  1. For a lie to succeed, it must be a cooperative act. Someone must agree to believe the lie for it to be powerful and effective. When there is an unwilling participant, the lie is insignificant. If detected, however, it can still be important in providing personality information about the liar.
  2. Although most people lie daily (estimates are between 10 and 200 times), the greater majority of these events are benign or “White Lies.” Men, for instance, lie many times more about themselves than others, and women lie to protect someone and/or avoid hurting someone.
  3. The most serious lies involve acts of fraud. For instance, recent estimates of all types of corporate and individual financial fraud losses (criminal, civil, employment, insurance, tax, internal/external business, etc.) top $1 Trillion annually. That is roughly 7% of all U.S. annual revenue.
  4. Strangers lie at least three times in the first 10 minutes of contact.
  5. Trained liespotters have the ability to identify up to 90% of lies communicated in their presence vs the untrained who can only spot up to 54%.
  6. Detection has a huge impact on trust, and it is an effective tool in criminal and civil witness evaluation, pre-employment application decision making, insurance claim’s matters, and all types of relationship building.

Research over the past 50 years has identified effective steps that can be taken to become a trained liespotter. It requires study and practice, but you can quickly learn how to identify the most common red flags that increase the potential for lying. Check out next month’s newsletter for some of these tips! 

Research North, Inc. (RNI), is a professional private detective service providing support to the business community, the insurance industry and individuals in Michigan and Wisconsin since 1981. The company also offers pre-employment background checks to small and medium sized businesses through a subsidiary called Backgroundcheckswork.com that is fully staffed by professional investigators who are retired from law enforcement.

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