What to Do With the Communications Model

With the understanding how the communication model fundamentally works…let’s explore some of the uses of it. Long the field of interrogators and intelligence agents, the art of lie detection is a relatively simple thing with all but the most trained in telling them. Being a leader means getting the right information, at the right time. The “right information” is often the truth; and when you need the truth, you look for patterns in a person’s behavior to determine whether he or she is telling it to you.

1. Are they sweating? Are they fidgeting? Can they make eye contact? Obvious physical, behavioral cues like this offer the most correlative insight that the teller of the lie might be less than truthful at that moment. Changes in posture, distancing themselves from you, becoming belligerent, overly apologetic, pleasant, or defensive—in such that they deviate from a baseline behavior—are all signs of a liar.

2. The devil is in the details. The idiom aside, real events require real details. When you’re being told something that your instincts tell you might be too vague…be wary. If you are uncertain, try asking the potential liar about details. If the details they can or cannot muster can’t pass the reasonable person test, then you’re probably being swindled.

3. An inconvenient attitude. Liars can be the whiners and complainers that are less cooperative than the reasonable person that is telling the truth might be. Liars will also have a tendency to protest and use such ironic phrases as “to be honest.” This sort of thing cracks me up. Unnatural silences and repetition of questions—either by themselves or asking the person they are confronting to do so—are also things to look for. Verbal-vocal cues, however, have a lower correlation with lying than the other behavioral traits.

4. Human lie detection. Lie detectors essentially work by picking out abnormal fluctuations in metrics that can be read of the human body such as pulse rate and pupil dilation because psychologists have found that both increase when a person is lying. They might also experience an increased pitch in voice or pauses in their monologue to come up with details at a moment’s notice, indicating their untruthful nature. Our own personal biases might enter into the equation, too: How many times have you seen people hear what they want to hear; they are not being honest with themselves about what they really want and instead can be lied to more easily. Don’t be one of them. Vocal cues, again, are less likely to in and of themselves be the sign of a liar: Instead they need to be analyzed alongside behavioral cues to make an accurate determination.

5. The world is full of dumb liars. A police interrogation trick, as we’ve all seen in the movies and on television, is to have the perpetrator repeat their story multiple times. In this case you are looking for the person to have inconsistencies. More intelligent individuals can offer stories that keep their consistencies, but the less intelligent liars have trouble doing so. I find this as an interesting quandary: People who are intelligent enough should understand that lying is a situation that might offer short-term gain, rarely offers solid long-term gains while those who are not intelligent enough will look for the easy way out, rationalize excuses on why they tell lies, but have more difficulty keeping up the appearance of propriety when they are not actually practicing it.

Anyone teaching the art of lie detection will offer a couple caveats: All of these behavioral traits work in patterns and we need to have an understanding of the baseline psychology of the individual in which we’re trying to determine this behavior. Lying is a deviation from the norm for all people short of the psychopathic sort, but that’s an entirely different subject completely. Once you’ve determined these two things we need to refine our theories through observation of the individual until we’re ready to make our decision about their truthful nature—or lack of it.