9 Scientific Ways To Tell When Someone Is Lying

1.But Overall...

The thing is about all of these little cues and clues is that they're just potential indicators rather than proof. So you think someone might be lying to you, but how do you actually catch them out?

Direct confrontation mostly leads to the person shutting down and going on the offensive. It also gives them carte blanche not to give you any more details and is frankly pretty counter productive.

A technique used by professional interrogators is to get their detainee to repeat their story backwards.For a person who is telling the truth, it is actually easier to tell a story backwards than to start from the beginning.Liars, on the other hand, will have most likely only rehearsed their story in chronological order.

This is a pretty effective way of bringing out inconsistencies, as opposed to simply getting them to repeat it, which will give them more opportunity to get the "facts" straight.

However, this is probably a bit of a weird thing to do in most social situations.Here, a better idea might be to ask them an unexpected question about their story, forcing them to make a snap decision and potentially lodging their foot in their mouth.

If you thinksomeonemight be lying aboutwhere they have been, for example, you could asksomething like "Oh right, did you get held up much by those roadworks?". Now they have to make a snap decision whether to go along with your imaginary roadworks (proving that they weren't actually there) or not.

If they dispute the existence of the roadworks, they might just be telling the truth (and now you have to feel bad for doubting them). You can smooth the whole situation over with something like "ah, they must've gone then" and no one need know what a distrustful git you are.

Try not to be too judgemental though, because the probability is that one of the next things out of your mouth will be a fib too.

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