The Ultimate Body Language Book

to traumatic or discomforting events. Lies though always involved a deliberate and conscious aim to
deliver information that is contrary to the truth, but as we know the truth is only sometimes easy to
interpret. Lies can be constructed willy-nilly and can flow just as fast as the mind can imagine things,
which, as we know, can happen instantly. This is what makes it only sometimes true that making up lies
is more challenging than telling the truth.
Depending on how one puts information together, will depend on how others will interpret it as well.
We can’t conceivable relay all events, as necessarily our information is censored for brevity. For
example, one might describe a particularly uneventful day by saying that it was “fine” and then listing
all the main events. However, what constitutes a main event anyway? Someone else might find
something important in your day that you failed to mention, however, this doesn’t mean that the person
is lying per se. Our minds are complex and quick, when we come up with simple lies, we can create
them as fast as we can spite them out. Only when lies get very complicated do we see effects such as
stuttering, pauses, speech errors or corrections. Keep in mind that only sometimes are truths
prepackaged, but lies are always prepackaged. The length of time to construct them is just one factor.
Quick and dirty lies might be shorter and contain only the main details, but so too might the truth.
Thus, prompting for more information can sometimes lead to the method of the lie. It’s much easier to
catch broad lies too and ones that fall outside the expertise of the teller precisely because they won’t be
able to add relevant information from their experiences. Due to the skills we all naturally posses, we
should only expect the telling of lies to be slightly more challenging to tell than the truth.
Chapter 16 - Deception and Lie Detection
Police As Lie Detectors
In a 2004 study out of the University of Portsmouth by Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij and Ray Bull it
was found that police officers were sixty-five percent accurate in detecting lies when they watched the
proceedings of an interrogation. This success rate is significantly higher than that which could arise by
chance alone and also shows that familiarity with the subjects can have a role in increasing accuracy.
Most research thus far has used college students, but this shows that police who frequently deal with
suspects might have an advantage reading them over reading others. By a similarly notion, this
advantage would theoretically be non-existent for police officers in a business meeting or with regard
to a salesperson on a car lot, unless they had particular experience with such matters. This study does
tell us that familiarity with the subject and the context can help us in detecting lies.
Police manuals give the impression that officers who interview suspects often, are good lie detectors,
despite of course the vast research that says otherwise. When the researchers qualified their
observations however, they found some surprising findings. Officers who named visual cues such as
those mentioned in Inbau’s research, mentioned previously, which forms part of the manual on lie
detection for police, such as gaze aversion, unnatural changes in posture, self touching, mouth and eye
covering were less likely to be accurate in reading others. In fact, these cues proved counterproductive.
Specifically, female participants who claimed to use Inbau’s cues most often where poorer at detecting
truths, than the males who did not. In particular, gaze aversion was unhelpful and in fact distracting
when analyzing for truth. So despite the moderate success of officers at detecting lies, there still
remains severe shortcomings because it was not necessarily due to observations of body language or
other anything else that could be described, catalogued, and hence put to use. If an inherent skill
amounts to a sixty-five percent success, but one can’t describe that skill in a way that makes it useful to
other people, then it simply appears like a hunch. Hunches are not reliable, nor do they meet the
scientific principle of reproducibility or have predictive (useful) qualities.