Guest blog by Craig James Baxter of Understanding Body Language. Liars, Cheats and Happy Feet
With so much written about body language, it’s easy to get distracted and overwhelmed with content, especially when you’re keen to learn more and enhance your understanding. With the study of human body language being so popular, it’s easy to absorb and believe everything you read. And when this happens, there can be a tendency to hold onto certain beliefs; often because they’re so well presented you have no reason to discredit them.
So here is where this article comes in handy. You could write an entire book about all the body language myths, however for the purposes of this article, I’ve selected just a few which are commonplace and will hopefully make you realize how confusing & dangerous the world of observing body language can be.
So with this in mind, one body language myth which has entered popular culture in recent times is belief that a smirk (as seen depicted in the article photograph) is an iron-clad sign of deception. This expression is known in the non-verbal world as ‘contempt’ and is seen in both the innocent and the guilty.
Many people wrongly label this expression solely as a sign of duping delight, where it is proposed that a liar is so overwhelmed with smugness that their lie has yet to be exposed and subsequently find it hard to contain their delight, resulting in this self satisfying expression. You may perceive (incorrectly) that lying only evokes a negative reaction in someone, such as being afraid of getting caught and a feeling of remorse in what you’ve done, however a positive emotion can be experienced when a liar witnesses somebody else being punished for what they did wrong. A self satisfying smirk can indicate that they are reveling in their ability to act without suspicion.
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The myth is exposed because this facial action is also prevalent in a truth teller, especially when they’re dealing with someone they perceive to be incompetent in their actions or when they’re engaging with someone they deem to be of a lower social status than themselves. Imagine this scenario within your workplace; you’re innocent of an allegation made against you and those investigating the incident are focusing on completely the wrong areas and being thoroughly unprofessional in how they’re dealing with the incident and yourself.
You’d probably flash a smirk of disdain (alongside a brief head shake of disbelief) whilst perhaps experiencing an undercurrent of fear that maybe they’ll find a way to pin the allegation on you, despite your innocence. An important aspect to bear in mind whenever you’re assessing the credibility of a story is that the panic a truth-teller may feel when they see their story is not being believed can arouse a strong sensation of fear (briefly mentioned above).
When this happens, there is an physiological change within the body, such as a pronounced elevation in the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in nervous looking behaviors (such a fidgeting, posture shifts, hand to face gestures) and such behaviors can look suspicious to an unskilled lie catcher. This type of scenario is called the ‘Othello Error’ and is often why genuine truth-tellers aren’t believed because their nervousness (at the fear of not being believed) is often mistaken for the fear of getting caught.
Another body language myth which has entered popular culture is the eyes and their relationship with deception. There appears to be a very popular belief that liars look away from you (avert their gaze) when they are being deceptive. This is in fact a myth which can be backed up with 40 years of research. What you will often find is that a deceiver will often consciously engage in greater amounts of eye contact, because it is commonly (but mistakenly) believed that direct eye contact is a sign of truthfulness.
Some eye gaze behaviors are well rehearsed, such as silently using your eyes to persuade someone into taking a course of action they might not otherwise have taken. Some people also make less eye contact when they are embarrassed and make more eye contact when dealing with people of a higher status than themselves (such as your boss).
Additionally, people often avoid eye contact with others who sit too close to us. (Vrij, 2008) however I suspect this instance might change due to COVID19, where now, people might be inclined to actually increase their eye contact with those who are getting to close and remind them verbally of the need to socially distance. For these reasons (and I’m sure there will be others), no relationship exists between eye gaze and deception.
However it’s also worth remembering that when someone is motivated to lie, the art of lying becomes cognitively complex. Modern day research has suggested that people who are engaged in cognitively complex tasks (such as lying about something serious) will often wait longer before giving their answers to your questions, speak with a slower speech rate and make more speech disturbances and errors. However a liar who has adeptly rehearsed their story may be able to perform their statements with such energy and accuracy that the clues to where their deceit occurs maybe so faint that it becomes a coin toss as to whether they’re lying or telling the truth.
The final myth I will cover also features the eyes, however in this case, it’s in relation to the direction in which they move and the information it’s alleged they reveal. Focusing on eye movements can seriously impair your ability to detect deceit and again, modern research (Wiseman, Mann,Vrij, Watt, Porter, DePaulo) have all concluded that the eyes (specifically their movements) themselves do not provide reliable information regarding deception.
Examining the wrong cues to deception could have serious ramifications, such as labelling a truth teller as a liar because they habitually looked ‘up and right’ when they were asked if they saw anything in relation to a theft from a locker. The following article was published via BBC News on 12th July 2012 and provides a great insight into the research conducted in to this popular (yet incorrect) belief. “Research by academics at two universities have concluded that the common belief of lying eyes is a myth. Many psychologists think when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be telling a lie and glancing up to the left is said to indicate honesty. Experts from Edinburgh University and Hertfordshire University carried out tests in 2012 and the research appeared in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE. The claimed link between eye movements and truth telling is a key element of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a method of enhancing people’s lives using psychological techniques. One aspect of NLP involves teaching people about the relationship between eye movements and thought.
According to the theory, when right-handed people look up to their right they are likely to be visualizing a “constructed” or imagined event. In contrast when they look to their left they are likely to be visualizing a “remembered” memory. For this reason, when liars are constructing their own version of the truth, they tend to look to the right. The idea was tested by filming volunteers and recording their eye movements as they told the truth or lied. A second group of volunteers was then asked to watch the films and try to detect the lies by watching the eye movements. Co-author Dr Caroline Watt, from Edinburgh University, said: “A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organizational training courses. “Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit.” Psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, from Hertfordshire University, said: “The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills.” A follow-up study involved analyzing videos of high-profile press conferences in which people appealed for help in finding missing relatives, or claimed to have been victims of crime. While some were telling the truth, others turned out to be lying. Again, there was no evidence of a correlation between lying and eye movements.” (Credit: BBC NEWS)
Focusing on these myths will massively hinder your ability to observe the more revealing behaviors (verbal and visual) in your conversation partner, especially if you think they’re being deceptive; such as listening for words than span time (‘ then, the next thing I remember, soon after’) which can reveal a concealed issue and watching for foot and leg behavior, such as the revealing ‘standing leg cross’ and the ‘feet angling away from yours display.’ (otherwise known as an intention display) where your conversation partner makes small preparatory movements that signal their desire to leave your company. The more you focus on the wrong clues (as mentioned in this article), the more you’ll miss these revealing actions.
There are many other myths which I haven’t covered in this article, such as folding your arms always means you’re defensive, microexpressions are solely signs of deception and playing with your hair is an ironclad sign of flirting. I will cover these topics in a future article, but always worth remembering that not everything you read, despite how enthusiastically it may be portrayed, is the truth!
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The great body language myths have been exposed.
Best wishes
CJB
www.all-about-body-language.com