People lie all the time, but depending on how skilled they are, it can be difficult to determine when someone is lying to you. Do you know how to recognize the signs that someone is lying to you? Some of the signs are obvious while others are more subliminal, but there are ways to catch someone in a lie, you just need to know what they are. Here are some easy ways to recognize liars and catch lies:
1. A person who is lying to you won’t make eye contact with you or they make too much eye contact. If a person is lying they may feel you are scrutinizing them and they will look down at the floor or away from your eyes. Some people try to stare you in the face in a deliberate way because they feel like making eye contact will make what they are saying more believable.
2. Liars avoid using contractions…. “I did NOT have sexual intercourse with at woman”. This is an attempt by the liar to be absolutely clear what they mean but it ends up making the story a lot less believable. Stalling tactics are also common. The liar may ask you a question like “where did you get that information?” while they try to back peddle and come up with an explanation for your question.
3. Weird Body Language. Liars often fidget, turn away from the person to whom they are speaking, blink rapidly, smile less and have pitch changes in their tone of voice. They may cross their arms which is a sign of being “closed” or trying not to reveal too much information. Sometimes people fidget excessively when they are lying. They could fidget with a part of their body or touch parts of their face, an ear or a nose or play with keys or another item that they have in their hand.
4. Liars provide additional information without being asked for it. They seem to think that by embellishing their story you will find it more believable. What happens is they tend to make the story more complicated and less believable. The more elaborate the story, the more likely that it is a fabrication and nothing near the truth.
5. A person who is telling a lie will get defensive. They will do everything in their power to deflect your attention away from themselves and will get angry that you are questioning their innocence. People who are telling the truth tend to go the opposite way and go on the offense. This will become obvious to you when you are trying to have a conversation with a person and they try to change the subject or move the conversation in a different direction.
6. If a person is lying they tend to over-embellish insignificant details while avoiding important ones. Exaggerated details make the liar feel better, but the person who is hearing the lie will start to get the feeling that something is definitely amiss. This can make it easier to catch a person in a lie because you can jot down details of the story that you are being told and then ask questions about those details later to see if they are still the same.
