Transcripts

Dr. David J. Lieberman, author of the book You Can Read Anyone…

Because at an unconscious level, when we lie we feel a degree of guilt - the person really takes themselves out of the equation. So, instead of my car was stolen, it becomes the car or that car.

No one of these clues by itself is a perfect test. If you see a pattern of clues, that's a dead giveaway. Another example: let's say a man lies to his girlfriend about being at the movies when he really wasn't.

He's already got his alibi down pat. He knows to say what movie he saw, he knows to say what time it started and so on. So what you would do is you would ask him a series of innocuous questions such as: "What movie did you see? What time did you get out? and so on." And then she introduces a fact that only he would know if he was there. Something such as, "Oh you saw the movie on Main Street, there was a big fire there, traffic was backed up for miles. It must have taken you forever to get out." Now he's got a problem, if he wasn't there he doesn't know how to answer and he'll do the one thing that every single liar does and that's hesitate. So you'll see is that you can listen to what people say but you can also - just in terms of engaging them in very brief conversation - find out what they're really up to.

Tomorrow, how card players unknowingly give signals about their cards - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.