Liar, liar, pants on fire! Eye contact, or lack of it, doesn’t expose a liar, says Michael Wheeler, a professor at Harvard Business School and an expert on negotiation tactics. A far more reliable measure is tone of voice. Most people sound tense when lying, and their voices take a slightly higher pitch. Finally, studies show that liars tell less compelling accounts with fewer gestures than truth tellers.
Archive for the ‘Friendship’ Category
How to Tell if Someone is Lying
June 20th, 2011
Give Folks a Second Chance
February 7th, 2011
You may not be as good of a judge of character as you think. David Siegel (no relation), UCLA psychiatrist and author of The Mindful Brain, calls it “mindsight.” Many psychologists call it “empathic accuracy,” and I call it our “built-in BS meters.” Whatever you call it, it’s your ability to judge another person’s internal state; if you have this ability, you can determine if you’re being manipulated or seduced.
Composed of observation, memories, power of reason, and emotion, this facility allows us to constantly make educated guesses about what someone is feeling or thinking. “Mind reading is perhaps the most urgent element of social intelligence,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in her article “Mind Reading” in Psychology Today (Oct., 2007)..
Unfortunately, most of us aren’t particularly good at it, reading each other with an average accuracy of 20 percent. Close friends and married couples can inch up to 35 percent, but almost no one scores more than 60 percent, according to psychologist William Ickes, the father of empathetic accuracy.
Maybe the next time your BS meter sounds off, it’s worth considering giving the person a second chance.