How to Spot a Liar, Revised Edition: Why People Don't Tell the Truth...and How You Can Catch Them
288
How to Spot a Liar, Revised Edition: Why People Don't Tell the Truth...and How You Can Catch Them
288Paperback(Second Edition, Revised)
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Overview
How to Spot a Liar was the first book to give you the tools to figure out what's really going on—to gain the upper hand in salary negotiation, move a prospective client toward the outcome you desire, or find out why you need to end a business or personal relationship.
This newly revised edition delves deeper into how and why people lie. In it, the authors respond directly to reader requests for more details on reading and using body language to your advantage.
Who needs How to Spot a Liar? Anyone with a cheating spouse or manipulative boss. Anyone conducting job interviews or cold-calling prospective customers. Anyone who has teenagers at home or works on Capitol Hill. Anyone whose success and happiness depends on clear communication with others. And anyone who wants to become just a bit more inscrutable, in business, in life...even at the poker table!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601632203 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2012 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition, Revised |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 685,399 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Maryann Karinch is the author of 10 books, most of which address human behavior. Her corporate background includes senior communications positions with technology companies. Maryann and Gregory are coauthors of How to Spot a Liar and I Can Read You Like a Book.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Where Do These Techniques Come From?
Why You Should Learn This
In daily life, I use the tools covered in this book when I don't trust someone or when I need to get the upper hand for a purpose. Using them constantly to manipulate loved ones and business associates would make me a sociopath. Using them wisely means that I understand I have entitlements — the right to humane treatment, honesty, and fair play.
In your daily life, you have a range of choices about where you go and what you do; that allows you to operate with certainty. In the past, when I have used the tools of interrogation, I created dilemmas so that prisoners had only two ugly options. They found themselves having to choose between doing something in their nature that they did not want to do, or doing something against their nature that they wanted to do. For example, truthful people divulge secrets even though it means betrayal of comrades, and loyal soldiers defect because they want to stop the bloodshed. In the first case, I forced them to solve a problem by putting their needs before the needs of the group, and in the second, I pushed them to put the needs of the group before that of an individual. All I did was exploit the human tendency to take the path of least resistance. This ability is an integral part of what you will learn.
Being an interrogator is a little similar to being a schoolyard bully: finding somebody's soft spots and pushing on them. That's why you have to be careful practicing the skills of an interrogator. Your life isn't war, so don't go around treating your kids and business associates as though they're enemy combatants you'll never see again. Your goal is to insist on honesty or detect stress so you can use it to get the result you want, not to manipulate those around you for sport.
Very few people know how to use the techniques described in this book — consciously, that is. Most of these skills exist in your repertoire, but you can't necessarily draw on them at will or use them in conjunction with related talents. Even most of the so-called interrogators who handle terrorism suspects are really questioners who do not have the training to influence human motivation, read body language, and orchestrate interrogation techniques. Asking good questions is one of the skills you're about to explore, but it's only one of many.
So, when you learn how to combine tactics of interrogation effectively — baseline, read body language, minimize, question effectively — you will be unique: The set of experiences and traits you bring to the game are different from mine or anyone else's who reads this book. When you understand the mechanics of stress and master the techniques to manipulate someone's fears and dreams, you will be powerful. You may not be adept with these tools as soon as you put the book down, but give yourself time. This skill set grows throughout the years, as does the human mind.
Why I Learned This
I started to develop interrogation skills in 1989 (and I'm still learning) with Army instruction that began with a desire to learn Arabic. Many Army interrogators want to learn a foreign language far more than they wanted to go head-to-head with prisoners. They are genuine romantics, and that's a big reason why most wash out. In fact, the attrition rate has been high throughout the years, with more than half of those in the program not making it to the end. I, on the other hand, got excited when the Army told me I was going into a branch of the intelligence business. I found out that being part of the intelligence world is only a technical designation, though. Interrogators of the Cold War era, as did other Army intelligence officers, handled classified material behind a firewall that shielded them from the rest of the Army. In other words, interrogators did not have to see frontline action.
The U.S. intelligence machine in at-war mode, as it has been since the September 11, 2001 attacks, encompasses a prisoner collection operation with tiered prisoner-handling capacities. Prisoners wind their way from the front to collection sites and eventually to prisoner holding cages in the rear. Young soldiers with nothing more than a desire to use their language skills, with limited training in psychology, and with no capability to read body language populate the process from front to rear. Mostly, these are in-language questioners; a talented few will become what I call an interrogator.
Interrogators need an operational knowledge to be effective; they can't function as other people in the Army intelligence business do. They need to know in a real way, not just a theoretical one, how enemy and friendly soldiers go about doing their jobs in order to ask questions that dig out essential facts.
In short, I needed to be put in harm's way in order to learn how to interrogate enemy soldiers who are forward-deployed. Fortunately, I was deployed with the 5th Special Forces Group to Operation Desert Storm. This taught me a valuable lesson that I'll pass along as you begin your "training": If you don't know what you're talking about, you put limits on what kind of information you'll be able to get. If you have ever been interviewed by a human resources screener who knew almost nothing about your skill set, you understand the limitation.
These techniques are not classified because they are not taught. Approaches (that is the interrogator term for psychological ploys) and questions fit into the curriculum for a military interrogator, but the sophisticated techniques of soft interrogation in the book come from years of practice, teaching, and independent study. Army interrogation school is a 10-level course, meaning it's entry level. There is no follow-on instruction. Think back to the most boring math or history course you ever took. This was just as dreary — day after day of questioning and report writing, practicing approaches in a sterile environment. Repeat ad nauseam. We got just enough skill to get in the face of the enemy and rattle him, hopefully with purpose and direction. And often, the more advanced skills the Army does teach don't become practical tools for the young soldiers who use them. Their emotions and cognitive processes are still evolving rapidly, so how can we expect them to manage their own stress and thought patterns, much less someone else's? This makes the enemy prisoner-of-war cage in the rear all the more important to the way the U.S. Army conducts business: The young interrogator needs a safe place to practice.
From interrogation school, I went to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) school. There, I interrogated for eight hours a day, three days a week, every other week, for three and a half years — a total of hundreds of interrogations — to help our Special Forces learn how to resist interrogation. I was working at SERE when the war broke out and therefore deployed as a Special Forces asset. It was at SERE school that I met one of the most formative forces in my life, Don Landrum, well-known as a founding member of Project Delta and of SERE. Don, aka "the Bearded One," was not an interrogator, but he knew more about the tools and methods than I ever learned from the interrogation community. The particular expertise he taught me is the one I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (how to pare down a prisoner's sense of his options to two: bad or worse).
When the first Gulf War started, I was assigned to the Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg. There were only 55 Arabic-speaking interrogators in the entire U.S. Army, and we had six of them. In my class, just two of us spoke Arabic; everyone else spoke Russian, Czech, Polish — the languages of people who were America's Cold War enemies. This is one reason why I got so much experience and contact with Iraqi soldiers. When I was picked for the 5th Special Forces Group, my initial assignment took me to a team supporting the Saudi Arabian Army. Shortly thereafter, I began working with a team supporting the Kuwaiti brigade. I screened more than 100 enemy prisoners during Operation Desert Storm and interrogated a couple of dozen of them.
During this period is when I really learned how to read body language and first discovered how to teach the techniques of interrogations. I also began to see the analogous relationship between using them in war and applying them in my daily life. By the way, just because I know these things does not mean I'm impervious to emotional outbursts, or that I intimidate my friends by "reading" them and using words to back them into a corner. I do have a greater awareness of my emotions, however, and when my friends have stress in their lives, I'll probably notice it before other people will. I also have substantially more power than other people in most business situations, and arguments with the woman I love tend to be sane and productive instead of crazy and misdirected. Even so, I am still human.
Interrogation History
Where does interrogation come from? As a science, it's relatively new, but people have interrogated prisoners forever. Roman soldiers wanted to know where their comrades were being held by locals during an invasion. Soldiers would pull captured enemies and torture them to get information, but there was no system. Even in the Civil War, we didn't have a method for interrogating prisoners. We thought of them simply as combatants removed from the battlefield. We kept prisoners in massive compounds as if they were cattle in a pen, doing nothing more than keeping troops out of combat. Eight thousand people died of cholera in Andersonville, Georgia, where the national POW monument now stands. The Elmira, New York, compound, known as Hellmira during the Civil War, had comparable tragic deaths resulting from abuse and neglect. Jump ahead to World War II, and the time from a commander's decision to troop movement and weapons deployment accelerated so rapidly that the value of interrogating prisoners could not be overlooked. Prisoners suddenly had value while alive. But the United States was among the many countries that lacked a specially trained interrogation force.
Modern war operations are predictive on a scale unlike anything in history. So, interrogators who grew up in this modern era found themselves trying to be like Superman: to hear conversations that went on far away, to see through walls into strange buildings. Where the analogy melts is in verifying the information. Superman personally hears and sees, whereas interrogators have to rely on what someone else has seen or heard. What they learn can therefore be information or disinformation.
The only way to do this was to understand the psychology of why people talk, when they talk, and how they talk — to know whether they lie or tell the truth, how to tell when they're lying, and how to tell when they're telling the truth. These needs drove the development of the science of interrogation, which must have the aura of "witchcraft." That is, you can't figure out why it works, but it does.
Interrogators had a bad reputation for a while, too, just as the witches at Salem did. That has shifted over the past few decades when the concept of collecting intelligence directly from human sources has gained respect. During the Cold War, people who interpreted radio signals and satellite imagery surpassed interrogators in their value to military operations. These people used equipment worth millions of dollars. It was more cost-effective and covert to use technology to collect strategic and tactical information than it was to nab scientists and political officials, and interrogate them. By the time of the first Gulf War, however, something approaching 85 percent of intelligence came from human sources. One reason: Saddam Hussein relied on couriers more than electronic means. The idea of a Cold War enemy with advanced technology and a sophisticated communications net dissolved when dealing with developing nations. Add to this the complexity of our modern war on terror and clandestine communications, and you can see why an interrogator is in high demand today.
In 2006, the breaking news of the Abu Ghraib images shattered the image of the American soldier. The subsequent investigations determined that the system had veered away from the standards developed in post–World War II by Haans Scharff, whose work I describe a little more in Chapter 2. The tools I discuss here are the non-coercive type that rely on heavy psychology and manipulation as well as simple observation. Leaving all politics out of the discussion, I truly believe these skills work, are legal, and are portable to your world.
You Are a Prisoner
Fundamentally, the tools of interrogation that I've used with prisoners have value in your everyday life because you have a lot in common with a prisoner of war. First and foremost, you both have a box inside you that makes you who you are, and there are many forces at work that could potentially destroy what's inside it. Second, the stress of being captured and then being a captive has corollary in your daily life.
You've no doubt heard at least one story of a hard-charging soldier who died at enemy hands because he refused to talk. For him, the most sacred part of himself, that little box inside that contained his core identity, was the duty to protect others' lives by protecting certain information. Another soldier, just as devoted to duty, might crack under pressure and violate that sacred part of himself. He might still be alive, but he is no longer alive as the same person.
Everyone has a box. You may not even know what it contains, but if you lose it, you face a kind of personal extinction. Essentially, you become a stranger to yourself when you ravage a core belief or value, or when someone else manipulates you toward the same end. On a regular basis — just as a captured soldier does — you face situations and individuals that have the potential to cause that destruction.
Shock of Capture (or, Turning Your Box Upside Down)
When a person is captured, his stress levels go through the roof. If capture comes after a firefight, he knows many of his friends have just died, which adds emotions such as grief and anger to the fear that runs through his entire body. This is the most dangerous moment in that person's life. Adrenaline levels are high; conscious thought is not. I, the enemy, have just killed people he cares about, so his pores ooze hatred for me, my comrades, my commander, and my country. He has just as much terror about what I might do to him.
Another scenario has him on patrol; we abduct him quickly with no one getting killed. Capture never feels good, so his hostility will rise. Suddenly, he becomes truly helpless because his captors are screaming orders — "You #$%^, get on the ground! Put your hands behind your head!" He's like a dog, who only hears, "Blah, blah, blah! Blah blah, blah!" The tone of voice is clear, but the directions aren't. He is so overwhelmed, he has lost his ability to comprehend what is said to him. If he does the wrong thing, will he die? That's possible, and he knows it. Anxiety, a by-product of fear of the unknown, shuts down the thinking brain and turns on the body-protecting, or reacting, brain. Interrogators are brokers of anxiety; it is the product we sell.
In a taping I did for British television, a group of people associated with Team Delta, a school founded by one of my former students, abducted seven volunteers at breakfast — not when they expected it. Our participants included Britain's fittest fireman. Adam is a bright, engaging man who is accustomed to stress. His response to capture is demonstrated on the video when he is told by multiple people to look right, look at me, look left. The orders obviously confuse him. Finally, he hears, "Look down," at which point he gets to his knees. Adam is trying to predict what we want so hard that he projects what we want. This is a man accustomed to high stress with English-speaking captors. Imagine the stress when your captors speak a foreign language and you are an 18-year-old conscript.
What are his psychological defenses in either situation? He brings his wealth of experiences, or dearth of them, and his identities to the situation. He is a soldier, husband, son, and guitarist in a garage band. Nowhere in that spectrum of defining roles is he a captive, so he has to learn to be a captive rather than draw from memory. Human brains function well when they have areas to store information, and they falter when information invades and has no place to go. Every time we experience something new, we create a space in our head for related, future knowledge and experience. This makes it much harder to suffer displaced expectation in the future.
Think of the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. You might have been able to envision a plane crashing into a building, but could you absorb the magnitude of what happened on September 11, 2001? That sight shocked me, as it did millions of people. Our minds did not include a box for that information; it overwhelmed us. The first time you saw a dead body or rear-ended a car you probably had the same reaction, just to a different degree.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How To Spot A Liar"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Gregory Hartley and Maryann Karinch.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Why You Need This Book 9
Section I Context
Chapter 1 Where Do These Techniques Come From? 13
Chapter 2 Why and How Do People Lie? 37
Chapter 3 Are Men and Women (and Children) Different? 73
Section II Tools
Chapter 4 Planning and Preparation 93
Chapter 5 Baselining to Detect and Apply Stress 121
Chapter 6 Extracting Information 143
Chapter 7 Digging Out the Truth 159
Section III Applying the Tools in Love
Chapter 8 Discovery 189
Chapter 9 Change the Way You Fight 197
Chapter 10 Are You in Love or Captivity? 205
Section IV Applying the Tools to Business
Chapter 11 Getting the Upper Hand in a Meeting 213
Chapter 12 Direct the Interview 225
Chapter 13 Close the Deal 239
Section V Self-Defense
Chapter 14 How to Avoid Falling for These Techniques 251
Conclusion 267
Glossary 269
Bibliography 273
Index 275
About the Authors 281
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