Former FBI Agent Explains How to Detect Lying & Deception | Tradecraft | WIRED

There are a number of myths about

detect

ing

deception

, people believe that if someone looks away or looks with aversion it is an indicator of

deception

or putting their hand to their mouth or jaw, that could also be an indicator of deception or grooming gestures like fixing your hair or straightening your clothes and so on or fidgeting in your chair, all of those things are potential indicators of deception, but there is no universal indicator of deception. Criminal behavior analysis is the general term that covers all the work we did at the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, which includes profiling, active listening, interviewing and interrogation, and deception

detect

ion.

We also studied teaching, consulting, and conducting investigative interviews. Investigative interviews can be divided into non-confrontational interviews and interrogations, but the goal of both is to obtain accurate and reliable information to arrive at one of the tools we use is deception detection, where we take a holistic approach and analyze many different types of indicators, we analyze the cognitive complexity of fight or flight and perception management as three different ways to detect deception, fight or flight is nothing more. Instead of noticing the physiological changes that occur when someone is under stress, stress can indicate lies, for example, decreased salivation, making someone swallow deeply or increased heart rate or increased adrenaline in the hands and legs because our primitive brain wants to tell us to get up and fight. or running away to provide extra energy to your limbs when you are sitting there in an interrogation and you want to run but you can't, many times you will fiddle with your hands or legs or lift them up and then try to cover them with a grooming gesture when Jodi Arias was brought in to question her after her boyfriend was brutally murdered, she was sitting there and being watched by a police camera.

Now many suspects will experience nervous energy and when they are preparing to lie. It can manifest itself in small gestures of restlessness or grooming, but sometimes there are rude body movements and there is no better example of this than when Jodi Arias got up from her chair, approached the wall and stood on her hand for several seconds to burn that. nervous energy is a perfect example of fight or flight the concept of cognitive complexity is that when people lie they try to keep it as simple as possible they also typically lie only about two senses what they hear and what they see they don't necessarily add how it smelled or relationships or interactions with other people and they usually keep it on a very superficial level, so if you think of it as cutting an onion in half and you look at the rings on that onion, usually liars will lie on the first ring where they were that day and maybe who they were with at those times, but if you dig deeper and ask them questions about what they did during that time, what they were watching on TV, who won the football game, who scored the last touchdown, typically that. she will fall apart and if you talk to one of her co-defendants and they give you different answers, the fact that she is

lying

really stands out.

Perception management is when a suspect attempts to behave in a way that he believes the interviewer would expect of someone. give a truthful statement so that the suspect can believe that the fidgeting would indicate

lying

, so they will be very still when telling lies so as not to give it away, but the fact is that during the other time they may have been fidgeting the whole time. and then stillness is actually the indicator that they are cheating. We then look at verbal, non-verbal and non-linguistic communication. Verbal indicators of deception can include words like "like" when words like that are interspersed in a sentence that follows. is something that the cashier is not even confident in, for example, I did my homework or started going to work, indicating that someone did not finish the task and claimed to have engaged in non-verbal behavior that could indicate deception or changes in the movements and actions of the interviewee's body once you have normalized an individual, look for changes in their behavior, someone who has been sitting up straight and answering questions directly and looking you directly in the eyes and being very attentive may become restless strange movements lake tremors moving arms grooming gestures straightening clothing when under the stress of lying, so watch for changes in those physical behaviors non-linguistic verbal indicators of deception could be an increase in the pace of conversation an increase or decrease in volume a change In tone, sometimes when people lie, stress causes their voice to go up a few octaves and that can be an indicator that you should dig deeper to determine if they are lying about what you are investigating and the objective of searching.

The indicators of deception is then finding the areas that you want to delve deeper into and ask more probing questions, ask them in different orders and ask questions around them that may undermine and contradict the things you were previously told when you questioned Scott Peterson about after the disappearance of his pregnant wife, Lacey, also gave indicators of deception. There is a big difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is what your ear does: receiving sound vibrations, but listening is actually cognitively participating in what you are hearing, so if you are writing something while someone is talking to you, you cannot actively listen and I would like to mention the fact that this officer questioning Scott Peterson and writing down his answers instead of observing his behavior is a big mistake.

What it should be. What he does is let someone else write the answers so he can observe Peterson's behavior. Many of the behaviors we look for when trying to detect deception are very common and can be seen in public statements all the time, for example. when President Nixon made that infamous statement that I'm not a criminal because people have to know if their presidents are criminals or not, well, I'm not a criminal, he said and I think I can say it too and I think I can say it too. to say that in my public life I welcome this type of investigation that in my years of public life in which I welcome this type of examination he was so nervous about having to say that statement that he had to muster up the courage to say I also think that I can tell that it is strange information, the pace of his speech increases radically.

I welcome this type of review. I welcome this type of examination and that is a non-linguistic verbal indicator of deception. It is again a change in behavior. It's a red flag that I would delve into further. to know if he was questioning him about this, so when we evaluate President Nixon's statements, we look at the perceptual management, the verbal, non-verbal, and non-linguistic cues, to determine that he is actually lying during the Whitewater investigation against the President Clinton, with whom he was accused of having a sexual relationship. one of the White House interns, Monica Lewinsky, and emphatically denied it, but there are many indicators of deception in her denial.

I did not have sexual relations with that person in this clip, President Clinton is clearly trying to manage public perceptions he says I want to say something through the American people but I want to say one thing to the American people I want you to listen to me I want you to listen to me I'm going to say this again I'm going to say this again, three statements to establish what you're about to say instead of just saying it when you're telling facts, you just have to state them when you're telling a lie, you have to convince people of what what you are trying saying is the truth and that's what I think you're doing.

President Clinton is a very intelligent man and he is using very carefully chosen words here. What President Clinton is saying here is that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Sexual relations with that woman. That woman. being Monica Lewinsky but he uses the term that woman to distance himself from Monica Lewinsky when in reality now we all know that he did have a sexual relationship with her he also uses the words sexual relations I did not have sexual relations with that woman for sexual reasons relations without him is using those specific words because he wants people to have a very strict interpretation of what he is saying what he is doing is committing a lie by omission he is saying that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky but what he is not saying is the guilty behavior of have sexual activity with her, you are implying that nothing happened when in reality all you are saying is that we did not have sex, so it is misdirection and deception, but carefully wrapped in very specific language that appears to be a denial when it is not. a denial, that's what I would dig deeper to find out what he really did with Monica.

He wins after every confession. The investigator must delve into details with both the person confessing and the outsider to verify or refute the details of that confession when there is inconsistency between the known facts and what someone says in a confession that undermines the credibility of the confession. Many times cases will make or break depending on what happens during the course of an investigative interview, so we use behavioral analysis principles to determine whether a confession is accurate and reliable or a false confession, the question is that each person is an individual and we have to make sure to comprehensively analyze all these things and all the behavior that human beings exhibit when interviewed or interrogated.