I ' m am very relieved to all the subscribers of " The Interview Room. "
I get the best ideas for sections of the e - zine such as " Humor in
the Room " and my calendar articles from questions asked by our
subscribers as well as students in the classroom. One of your
fellow subscribers passed along an article to me last month about
nonverbal behavior and deception. After reading the article I was
confused at the amount of gross misrepresentations and errors
about body language behaviors identified as reliable signs of
deception. I would estimate that roughly about 50 % of what the
article claimed as deception were in truth common stress cues.
Early in my career as an investigator I had bought into these same
discernment. It wasn ' t until I began to search in earnest for
supporting certificate did I learn about the enormous amount
of misguided content in many such courses.
First let ' s make a distinction here between stress and deception
behaviors. Anyone can be under stress, view copious
profound signs of stress and not be mistaken. Would anyone be
surprised if a encounter victim would grandstand play stress during her interview?
What about witnesses to a homicide or perhaps a survivor a
mean vehicle crash? Would any of measure of the military
trot out stress signs when discussing the firefight they have
just survived? Just the presence of stress symptoms alone is NOT
indicative with someone who is lying. Did you interview for your
current job? Position you a little taut out? Was it owing to you
were lying? The most common mistake involving the analysis of
body language is identifying common signs of stress as cues to
distortion.
One of the gross errors I found in the article involved the level or
degree of eye contact a person maintains during an interview as
being a reliable sticker of deception. Eye contact in and of itself
is one of if not the smallest reliable signs of deception. Gobs
empitic studies have supported this conclusion somewhere there are still
many training programs on interview and interrogation that still
cram that poor eye contact is a positive sign of deception. A
decrease in eye contact can happen when people are embarrassed
about a topic, can be a sign of disgust, and can even be culturally
motivated. Research has shown that in general, introverted or
emotional subjects do promote to decrease eye contact when being
illusive.
Conversely, affable or non - emotional
personalities which is frequently found about psychopaths as well
as very individuality governing personalities parade a increase in eye
savoir-faire when being unreal - these subjects literally have more
eye strife with their interviewer when they are lying and less eye
patience while being honest.
Somewhere, does route of the arms or legs penurious a person is
closed to communication or being illusive? The repeat is sure thing
sometimes however arm or leg jaunt also happens when
people are embarrassed, cold, self privy, emotionally
lowly, boredom, or even in depression. The standout defense
spokesman Gerry Spence tells of an go he had involving a juror
who sat in the jury pigpen for the whole go with his arms crossed.
Spence related that he had attended a training seminar on body
language and deception that educated all arm and leg progress
showed deception or closed routine. Spence questioned the
male juror after the trial about his thoughts about the trial and his
thesis about Spence and his occasion. The juror was absolutely unfastened and
sensitive. When Spence asked why he sat with his arms crossed
in the discernible closed rejection posture, the juror purportedly
answered that he was a big man with a fat belly and that was a
well-to-do posture for him.
It ' s about time we started questioning some of the cargo of
some of our interview and interrogation courses and the seen
validity of the claims they make. You should always be
suspicious of such programs which claim that any behavior is an
absolute sign of deception as no such cues exist. There are
also times when a behavior cue that is recurrently associated as sign of
deception can be a common behavior for a truthful person. As a
student in these programs I challenge you to start begging for
experimental proof. Don ' t settle for " it always works. " Ask what
clinical research has been conducted and is their other supporting
research conducted by other behavioral scientists that have
confirmed the same findings. We miss 50 % the lies that happen
right in front of us being of the propagation of " urban legends "
in interview and interrogation training programs.
© 2005 by Stan B. Walters " The Lie Guy® "
