Saturday, 15 November 2014

Ways to know a Liar

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Being able to lie, and lie well, is a gift. It takes a special brand of psychopath to be able to look into the eye of someone else and lie about something straight to their face, without even skipping a beat. However, even those people who don’t have the gift to lie well still lie from time to time. In fact, we hear between 10 and 200 lies every single day. But the best part is that once you know what to look for, lies and liars are really easy to spot going forward.
In a recent Ted talk, science communicator and chief executive of Quantified Communications, Noah Zanden, came clean about what exactly one should look for in someone if they think they’re lying. According to him, through the use of “linguistic text analysis,” which focuses on the language structure between lies and truths, noticing a liar is easy peasy. Such things as “minimal self-references, negative language, simple explanations and convoluted phrasing,” are big giveaways when it comes to lying, because it’s all right there, pretty much spelled out.
Their stories are “overly-simplified.”
It’s not easy to come up with a lie, even a bad one, so because of the work it entails, language tends to get disturbed and messy. It takes some effort to come up with a lie, so liars try to keep their untrue stories simple and to the point.  They use a lot irrelevant “facts.”
Although the plot of their fallacy is simple, the way they describe it is over the top. I know when I lie to get a “sick” day, I’m not just “sick,” but “I’ve been throwing up for hours and I’m pretty sure it’s food poisoning or maybe not, and maybe I should go to the hospital, but I really don’t want to, so I’m going to wait until noon and figure it out then.” I’m very babbly, even if it’s in an email to someone, as if I need to convince them of the truth by adding all these absurd details, details that I’m likely to forget a day later, therefore messing up my lie, so I have to tell another lie, of course.
to be continue.......



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