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Reducing Incentives for Lying Rather Than Trying To Spot Lies In Real-Time
From this thread,
Spotting Lies in People - Cues, Facial Expressions, Body Language, Words
Quote from Lucio Buffalmano on January 16, 2021, 7:18 pmTo me, the main skills when it comes to lying aren't centered around cues, but around:
- knowing the areas of (potential) conflict of interest
- knowing the personality
- Knowing about life and people
Only fourth is "catching the cues".
With strangers, when you're unaware of conflicts of interest, the body language alone might as easily mislead you as it can help you.
Rather than trying to spot people's lies in real-time, build trust, and frame win-win collaborative relationships to reduce incentives for lying.
While, at the same time, understand the inherent conflicts of interests and the dynamic nature of individual interests to protect yourself against lies, deception, manipulation, and defection.
Also, from the same thread,
THE MORE YOU LOOK, THE MORE YOU'RE DECEIVED
In my opinion, there's something more to consider:
The harder you stare at someone trying to "glean" their body language, the more you're making the interaction uncollaborative.
You make people feel like they need to be guarded like you're "weighing" them because you don't trust them.
You come across as untrustworthy which, in turn, drives a wedge between you two.
Constantly being on guard and questioning other people's facts & motives would shift your focus from building trust to keeping a distance.
As Lucio says, this will naturally make the interaction uncollaborative.
People will pick up on your vibe subconsciously or consciously.
Someone may lie when you first meet them out of self-protection.
In this sense, it is understandable.
Or in a more subtle sense, they will not hide a lot of things from you.
It would be unhelpful to focus on their lies.
Rather focusing on aligning interests, building rapport & trust would go a much longer way.
Of course blatant lies and manipulation would be red flags when meeting a new person.
Though it is understandable that people will lie whenever there are conflicts of interest.
We also tell many white lies every day for social smoothness.
Because explaining the truth will be challenging.
If you would like people to be direct and truthful him/her, being open to feedback and acknowledging reality will encourage people to be more truthful to you.
Rewarding people on their truthful feedback will encourage the behaviour even further.
For example,
I understand that this is tough feedback to deliver.
Not everyone will take this in a positive stride.
Thank you very much for taking the time and effort to deliver this feedback.
I really appreciate it.
Silver Medal Technique Example
The silver medal technique in this thread is one such example
How to get salespeople to tell you the truth: the silver medal technique
You understand the inherent conflicts of interest between the buyer & salesperson and set up a frame where the salesperson is disincentivised to lie.
When Is It Useful to Spot Lies in Real-Time
Let's say that you are a CIA spy as an extreme example.
You are constantly on the move and in new social environments.
There are so many unknowns including conflicts of interests, personalities, culture, etc.
You may need to discern the truth from lies even from strangers to save your life.
I believe this would be one such example where learning to spot lies in real-time would be a more practical skill.
In less extreme examples,
- Your lifestyle requires you to constantly switch environments and meet different people
- Country-launcher sales: you are in charge of finding new leads in a foreign country
How to prevent yourself from being ripped off when finding new partnerships in the new country with little connections - Venture capitalist: meeting lots of founders within 15-minute meetings.
Spotting truth from lies in real-time would help quite a bit because even being an industry veteran, there is so many sub-areas and technologies to understand everything.
- Country-launcher sales: you are in charge of finding new leads in a foreign country
- Criminal Investigators
- Needing to interview lots of suspects and everyone tells you a different story
- Litigators - prosecutors and criminal defence lawyers
- Quickly discern truth from lies to settle the case as fast as possible, whether in-court or out-of-court
With all that being said, all the above professions including CIA spies do plenty of homework to understand conflicts of interest, personalities, culture, people, etc so that they don't have to rely on being able to discern the truths from lies.
Because, as we discussed on the other thread
Spotting Lies in People - Cues, Facial Expressions, Body Language, Words,
it is incredibly challenging to reliably spot lies all the time.
FBI Example
In this case, they had information from another country saying that there is an American who is actually a mole.
The mole somehow entered the country.
The FBI agent managed to uncover the mole by the way he held a bouquet of flowers as he came out of a flower shop.
I would say that this is one example where cues greatly helped to confirm the mole.
Someone may lie when you first meet them out of self-protection.
In this sense, it is understandable.
Or in a more subtle sense, they will not hide a lot of things from you.
It would be unhelpful to focus on their lies.
Rather focusing on aligning interests, building rapport & trust would go a much longer way.
Exactly, Matthew, you caught the spirit of the idea I was trying to convey.
That's the 80% one should focus on, in my opinion, rather than the 20% (or less) than spotting lies through body language cues.
Silver Medal Technique Example
The silver medal technique in this thread is one such example
How to get salespeople to tell you the truth: the silver medal techniqueYou understand the inherent conflicts of interest between the buyer & salesperson and set up a frame where the salesperson is disincentivized to lie.
Exactly, far more effective than trying to look at his body language -or where his eyes go, for NLP- to guess whether he's lying or not when he still has an incentive to lie.
Better to remove or smooth out that incentive.
Some of the techniques discussed here address the incentives (and frames) for win-win, which also decrease the incentive to lie/cheat.
Let's say that you are a CIA spy as an extreme example.
You are constantly on the move and in new social environments.
Personally, I'm still skeptical of the ability to reliably spot lies from strangers, on first encounters, as well as to how much value it can actually add.
If like Navarro says the best people are just 60% accurate, that's a little more than a coin toss.
And the risk of being 60% accurate (at best) is that our brain is terrible at computing probabilities. So your brain wouldn't go "OK, 60% probability, plus this, plus that, minus that", but it would be more like "probably a liar".
And now you've slapped a label on a coin toss.
Also, the people that you are most likely to spot are the real bad liars.
Which makes that "skill" useless against the people where you'd need that skill the most: the good liars, the natural-born Machiavellians, those who honed their value-taking ways over decades and, of course, those who live and believe their lie and machinations, and who convince themselves of the "rightfulness" of their position.
Go see if you can spot Trump lying about him winning the election, being rich, or being "the best president ever".
He lives and embodies those lies, he is fully congruent.
The example of holding the flower is not really body language to me, that's more about "customs and traditions", more like "intercultural communication / studies".
