[Applause] okay now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar also the person to your left is a liar also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar we're all liars what I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars how you can become a lie Spotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from lies spotting to truth seeking and ultimately to
trust building now speaking of trust ever since I wrote this book Li spotting no one wants to meet me in person anymore no no no no no they say it's okay we'll email you I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks my husband's like honey deception maybe you could have focused on cooking how about French cooking so before we get started what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you which is not to teach a game of gotcha Li spotters aren't those nitpicky kids those kids in the back of
the room that are shouting gotcha gotcha your eyebrow twitched you flared your nostril I watch that TV show lie to me I know you're lying no Li spotters are armed with the scientific knowledge of how to spot deception they use it to get to the truth and they do what mature leaders do every day they have difficult conversations with difficult people sometimes during very difficult times and they start up that path by accepting a core proposition and that proposition is the following lying is a Cooperative act think about it a lie has no power whatsoever
by its mere utterance its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie so I know it may sound like tough love but look if at some point you got lied to it's cuz you agreed to get lied to truth number one about lying lying is a Cooperative act now not all lies are harmful sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret secret we say nice song honey you don't look fat in that no or we say favorite of the digerati
you know I just fished that email out of my spam folder I'm so sorry but there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception and that can have dramatic cost for us last year saw 997 billion dollar in corporate fraud alone in the United States that's an eyelash under a trillion dollars that's 7% of revenues deception can cost billions think Enron madof the mortgage crisis or in the case of double agents and Traders like Robert Hansen or Aldrich aims lies can betray our country they can compromise our security they can undermine democracy they can
cause the deaths of those that defend us deception is actually serious business this con man Henry Oberlander he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the western world and you can't find this guy on Google you can't find him anywhere he was interviewed once and he said the following he said look I've got one rule and this was Henry's rule he said look everyone is willing to give you something they're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for and that's the
Crux of it if you don't want to be deceived you have to know what is it that you're hungry for and we all kind of hate to admit it you know we we kind of wish we were better husbands better wives smarter more powerful taller richer the list goes on lying is an attempt to bridge that Gap to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were how we wish we could be with what we're really like and boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies on
a given day studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times now granted many of those are white lies but in another study it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other now when we first hear this data we recoil we can't believe how prevalent lying is we're essentially against lying but if you look more closely the plot actually thickens we lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers extroverts lie more than introverts men lie eight times more about themselves than they do
other people women lie more to protect other people if you're an average married couple you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions now you may think that's bad if you're unmarried that number drops to three lying's complex it's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives we're deeply ambivalent about the truth we parse it out on an as needed basis sometimes for very very good reasons and other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives that's truth number two about lying we're against lying
but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries it's as old as breathing it's part of our culture it's part of our history think Dante Shakespeare the Bible News of the World lying has evolutionary value to us as a species researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species the larger the neocortex the more likely it is to be deceptive now you might remember Koko does anybody here remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language Koko was taught to communicate via sign language here's Koko
with her kitten it's her cute little fluffy pet kitten Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall we're we're hardwired to become leaders of the pack it starts really really early how early well babies will fake a cry pause wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying one-year-olds learn concealment 2-year-olds Bluff 5-year-olds lie outright they manipulate via flattery 9-year-olds masters of the coverup by the the time you enter College you're going to lie to your mom and one out of every five interactions by the time
we enter this work world and we're Breadwinners we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam fake digital friends partisan media ingenious identity thieves worldclass Ponzi schemers a deception epidemic in short what one author calls a posttruth society it's been very confusing for a long time now what do you do well there's steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass trained lies spotters get to the truth 90% of the time the rest of us we only 54% accurate why is it so easy to learn well they're good liars and they're bad
Liars they're no real original Liars we all make the same mistakes we all use the same techniques so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception and then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves we're going to start with speech I want you to listen to me I'm going to say this again I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Linsky I never told anybody to lie not a single time never these allegations are false and I need
to go back to work for the American people thank you okay what were the telltale signs well first we heard what what known as a non-contracted denial studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language we also heard distancing language that woman we know that Liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language as their tool now if Bill Clinton had said well they tell you the truth or Richard Nixon's favorite in all cander he would have been a dead giveaway for any Li spotter that
knows the qualifying language as it's called qualifying language like that further discredits the subject now if he had repeated the question in its entirety or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail and we're all really glad he didn't do that he would have further discredited himself Freud had it right Freud said look there's much more to it than speech no mortal can keep a secret if his lips are silent he Chatters with his fingertips and we all do it no matter how powerful you are we all chatter with our fingertips
I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss Khan with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips now this brings us to our next pattern which is body language with body language here's what you got to do you really got to just throw your assumptions out the door let the science temper your knowledge a little bit because we think Liars fidget all the time well guess what they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying we think think Liars won't look in the eyes well guess what they look you in the eyes a little too much just
to compensate for that myth we think warmth and smiles convey honesty sincerity but a trained Li spotter can spot a fake smile a mile away can you all spot the fake smile here you can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks but the real Smiles in the eyes the crows feet of the eyes they cannot be consciously contracted especially if you overdid the Botox don't overdo the botox nobody will think you're honest now we're going to look at the hot spots can you tell what's happening in a conversation can you start to find the hotpots
to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions now I know it seems really obvious but when you're having a conversation with someone that you suspect of deception attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators an honest person is going to be cooperative they're going to show they're on your side they're going to be enthusiastic they're going to be willing and helpful in getting you to the truth they're going to be willing to brainstorm name suspects provide details they're going to say hey maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged
those checks they're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview not just in flashes they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview and if you ask someone honest what should happen to whoever did Forge those checks an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment pment now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive that person may be withdrawn looked down lower their voice pause be kind of Herky jerky ask a deceptive person to tell their story
they're going to Pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places and then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order and what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways in over the course of several hours they will ask that person to to tell their story backwards and then they'll watch them squirm and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells why do they do that well we all do the same thing we rehearse our words but we rarely rehearse our gestures
we say yes we shake our heads no we tell very convincing Stories We slightly shrug our shoulders we commit terrible crimes and we smile at the Delight in getting away with it now that smile is known in the trade as duping delight and we're going to see that in several videos moving forward but we're going to start for those of you that don't know him this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock we're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test see now if you can
spot him saying yes while shaking his head no slightly shrugging his shoulders lots of be happy to participate in one uh I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events so I know it's not possible happy to take a fraternity test and would love to see it happen are you going to do that soon is there somebody that you can't I'm only one side I'm only one side of the test but I'm I'm happy to participate in one okay those head shakes are much easier to spot
once you know to look for them now there are going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a Flash murderers are known to leak sadness your new joint venture partner might shake your hand celebrate go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger and we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and that's easy to learn and that's the expression of contempt now with anger you've got two people
in an even playing field it's still somewhat of a healthy relationship but when anger turns to contempt you've been dismissed It's associated with moral superiority and for that reason it's very very hard to recover from here's what it looks like it's marked by one lip Corner pulled up and in it's the only a symmetrical expression and in the presence of contempt whether or not deception follows and it doesn't always follow look the other way go the other direction reconsider the deal say no thank you I'm not coming up for just one more night cap thank
you science has surfaced many many more indicators we know for example we know Liars will shift their blink rate Point their feet towards an exit they will take barrier objects and put them between themsel and the person that that's interviewing them they'll alter their vocal tone often making them making their vocal tone much lower now here's the deal these behaviors are just behaviors they're not proof of deception they're red flags we're human beings we make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long they don't mean anything in and of themselves but when you
see clusters of them that's your signal look listen probe ask some hard questions get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing walk into curiosity mode ask more questions have a little dignity treat the person you're talking to with Rapport don't try to be like those folks on Law and Order and those other TV shows that Pummel their subjects into submission don't be too aggressive it doesn't work now we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie and as I promis we're now going to look
at what the truth looks like and I'm going to show you two videos two mothers one is lying one is telling the truth and these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California and I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like this mother Diane DS shot her kids at close range drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car claimed a Scraggy haired stranger did it and you'll see when you see the video she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother what you want to look for here
is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very very cool demeanor and if you look Clos you'll see duping Delight throughout this video but at night when I close my eyes I can see christe reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving and the blood just keep coming out of her mouth and that maybe it'll fade too with time but I I don't think so that haunts me the most now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother Aaron ran confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in
court here you're going to see no false emotion just the authentic expression of a mother's Agony I wrote the statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby and you hurt her and you crushed her you terrified her until her heart stopped and she fought and I know she fought you but I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes and you still wanted to kill her and I don't know understand it and I never will okay there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions now the technology around what the
truth looks like is progressing on the science of it we know for example that we now have specialized eye trackers infrared brain scans MRIs that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive and these Technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit and they will prove incredibly useful someday but you got to ask yourself in the meantime who do you want on your side in the meeting someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400b
Electro SRAM through the door Li spotters rely on human tools they know as someone once said characters who you are in the dark and what's kind of interesting is that today we have so little Darkness our world is lit up 24 hours a day it's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public it's a much more noisy world so one challenge we have is to remember oversharing that's not honesty our manic tweeting and texting can blind us
to the fact that the subtleties of human decency character integrity that's still what matters that's always what's going to matter so in this much noisier World it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code when you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking listening you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie you start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit because you signal to everyone around you you say hey my world our world it's going to be an honest
one my world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized and when you do that the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit and that's the truth thank [Applause] [Music] you
