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LIAR.

.. LIAR

Wilfredo Fernández

How to spot someone

who’s not telling the truth

In a famous fairy story, Pinocchio’s nose grew longer when he was telling a lie. Surprisingly,

most of us give off signals when we are not being truthful which are just as obvious.

Personnel managers in companies are learning to look for these give-away signs to pick out dishonest

employees. They hope to take credit for weeding out a future Nick Leeson, the man blamed for ruining

Barings Bank, before their Frm suffers a similar fate. Here are seven tell-tale signs:

1. You touch your nose more often. The tissues in your nose become swollen with blood when you lie,

causing it to itch. So you touch your nose frequently to stop it itching.

2. You avoid looking directly at people — or you look at them too much. Partly because telling lies takes

concentration, you tend to look away when you are lying. Or you stare at the person for too long,

checking

to see that they believe you.

3. You lean forwards. Closeness is normally a sign of trust. You try to exaggerate how close you are by

leaning forwards when you lie.

4. You pull your earlobe. No one seems to know why this happens, but most of us do it. Police forces in

Europe are trained to watch for this behaviour when interviewing criminals.

5. You tap your feet. This normally happens when you are sitting down, especially if your legs are crossed.

As the lie is told, a foot starts tapping or waves in the air.

6. You give too much information. You tell stories that are too elaborate, structured, polished and complete.

You try to make absolutely certain that someone will believe you by giving them Ffteen different

reasons.

An honest person would have the conFdence to give one reason.

7. You stumble in your speech. You start to make mistakes in what you are saying, and use ‘um’ and ‘er’ a

lot more, as you try to give yourself time to invent your lie.

But it isn’t always that easy. Skillful liars can learn to suppress these signs. Most of us believe, wrongly,

that we are easily able to spot liars. In fact, research has shown that people do better at spotting

lies when they can’t see the person lying. And strangely people are almost as good at detecting falsehood

when they have just read someone’s words.

The truth is that honesty is over-valued. Scientists at the University of California have shown that

people lie on average 200 times a day. That’s about once every 8 minutes! True, most of them are of

the

‘Great to see you’ and ‘I love your new dress’ sort, but they are still untrue. However, as one of the

University

researchers puts it: ‘Society would be terrible if people started telling the truth. Anyone who

did would be regarded with suspicion’.

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