All right, let's think about some practical steps we can use for detecting deception and then figuring out what we can do once we suspect it or detect it. So first, I mentioned cognitive load. Our cognitive load is very high when we're telling lies. And if someone were to increase that further, are more likely to make mistakes. So if we ask somebody we suspect of deception to perform a second task while they're talking to us, that increases cognitive load, and for many people pushes them over the edge. They start making mistakes or leaking out other information. You can think of something like trying to remember another additional information like another phone number, or you hear other things in the background, like TV or talk radio sort of going in the background. Or you ask many questions about different topics. It turns out when we try to remember things out of chronological order, that's very cognitively loading. That is it's easiest for us in our minds, particularly if it's not true, to describe a story in chronological order. If we try to get things out of order, we ask questions about things that go out of sequence, people who are lying are likely to make mistakes. Eye contact is something that also increases cognitive load, as are detailed follow-up questions. So, who else was there? What else happened? What was the weather like outside? For example, that weather question, you're causing people to try to figure out what time of day was it? Was there a window in that room? What was the weather like? And so on. So we can do things that increase cognitive load that can push people to make more mistakes, particularly if they're lying. Now, we can also meet in person. Now meeting in person has a great advantage, not only is more cognitively loading but it allows us to access nonverbal cues more accurately. But it also can be an opportunity for a deceiver to gauge our gullibility more carefully as well. So we want to be careful about just meeting in person as a blanket prescription, but in general, I like the idea of meeting in person. It also makes you less likely to lie. They're more concerned about lying in person. And people become a lot less aggressive or hostile in person. They're keyboard bullies. I spent time with people who were investigating insurance fraud. They talk about these keyboard bullies that become meek as lambs in person. So sometimes when people are texting, or emailing or tweeting, they might say one thing but then in person they behave quite differently because they find the interpersonal dynamics much more anxiety provoking. And they're more likely to be accommodating and trustworthy in person. So in general, when I think about the environment. The environment's really important for thinking about the cognitive load, to know who else is listening, what's happening, who else is there. So, one of my key prescriptions is to meet in person, but also recognize that we're also leaking information as we meet other people in person. Another key idea is to search broadly. So, we want to be sensitive to how people act in other domains. So somebody who boasts to you to about how they cheated on their taxes, or how they were deceptive to somebody else but not you, should be something you should be careful about. We can also do things like pretest with questions that we already know answers to, to see how forthcoming and how honest people are behaving. So what are the key ideas? You want to value and collect information from other sources. So if it's really important information, we don't want to just trust one source, we want to gather other information and recognize that deception's pretty common, and we're not very good in social situations at detecting it. Now, if we can, so suppose you're doing something over Skype or video conference, sometimes recording interviews allow us to go back and watch things. So for example, we can go back and watch a video with the sound turned off. So that now we're just focused on the nonverbal cues, and we can look for things that might seem a little bit off or seem a little bit weird. There's also computer text analysis that people have used to do things like word counts to look at the use of negative statements, or to look at things like a lot of irrelevant information that can give us other cues related to deception. Again, it's very difficult to detect in our natural communication. Now, suppose that we're confronting a liar. How should we do that? Well, the context and a relative status matters a lot. So, police when they're interrogating somebody will say, I know you're lying to me. Or the polygrapher I mentioned before will say, I know you're lying to me. But, we can't always have that kind of dynamic. In fact when, when I was talking to insurance investigators, a lot of them are former police officers who talked about the two things I miss most. So when they were interrogating somebody they suspected of deception, they said the two things I miss most were my gun and my badge. And they said, yeah whenever I was conducting interrogation I had put the two of those things on the table that create anxiety and made people much more forthcoming. There's sometimes other things we could do when we don't have that status, we don't have that power. What do we do then? And there, for example, you're dealing with a customer or potential partner, we have to do things that are a little bit softer than that. And so we might do things like suggest, hey maybe there's more you wanted to say. Or, I felt like there was something you wanted to add to that answer. Or ask a follow up question that allows people to elaborate or ask the same question in a slightly different way that gets people to repeat things in a way that suggests you're not completely comfortable with that answer, but without being as confrontational. And we can offer people or encourage people to exit the situation in a way that allows them to save face, so they're not likely to retaliate. Because that's one risk when we confront somebody and tell them that they're lying to you, you can engage reactants as they come back and they get very angry, particularly if there is a loss of face. One of my former students talked about confronting somebody in Korea who was lying to him. And he said this Korean manager, once he confronted him and said that he was lying, had lost so much face in front of not just him but the entire group that he was talking to, that they cut off relations completely. So, he had just meant to put things back on track, but it turns out he had blown up that relationship. So we need to be very tactful. And we need to ask sometimes softer questions that allow people to come to us with a more forthcoming answer.
