Word choice, like body language, can reveal a liar

Lying often involves telling a story that is false, a story that the liar doesn't believe. If you analyze the text of a liar or a truth teller and look at the linguistic style you can see words and phrases that distinguish between true and false stories. Computer based text analysis programs can correctly classify liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% accuracy. Here is how you can look for words and phrases that liars use. Compared to truth-tellers, liars use fewer self-references such as I or me and prefer to use words like we or us. Liars are more likely to use other-references such as she or her instead of personal reverences such as, "My daughter Sara or my wife Sue". Liars use inclusive generalization such as "awhile ago" instead of "five days ago". They also use more negative emotion words like bad or awful.

Body Language and Content to Read for Lies in Apologies

I am often asked to read the body language of apologizes and media interviews made by politicians like Governor Mark Sanford, Sport Stars like A-Rod, and Celebrities. Most of you know that I discuss the body language, but what you may not know is that I also read the actual words that are spoken. Last week I gave my public seminar on Deception Detection. (by the way I am doing my next public seminar on deception detection, so you can catch a liar on July 22, 2009 in Philadelphia. Call or email for details.) I teach how to analyze the words and the meaning behind them to detect whether or not a person is lying. In the next post I will give you textbook 'tells' for lying.

Photo analysis of Governor Sanford

I was just reading a twitter post about Governor Sanford's odd body language http://twitter.com/bagnewsnotes. The tweeter criticized his body language and in the next post apologized because he found out the photo he was analyzing was a year old. You really need to know your source before analyzing the body language in photos. I imagine the media was using that photo to represent the governor and most of the public assumed that it was a timely photo that represented his body language response to the discovery of his affair with an Argentinian woman.

You can read my photo analysis of people in the news by googling my name or visiting my twitter page. I typically call them body language reads.

Reading The Body Language in Photos, the Power of Torture Photos

John Cusack wrote a blog recently concerning Obama changing his mind on the issue of releasing torture photos of suspected terrorists (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack). My discussion group, The meeting of the minds, has been equally outraged and we have some very conservative members. What is interesting to me is that while we have heard the words describing the torture, the actual visual images that have been carefully guarded from the media. The power of nonverbal communication. I am not sure I would bar the photos for fear terrorists would copy the torture methods as the government has discussed. I can say I don't think we want to see the images and link them with our country's treatment of other human beings. I have been doing body language photo analysis for many years. It is amazing what a frozen photographed moment can communicate. It is astounding the pathos and significance communicated in a photographed person's body language. It seems odd to me that I became known as a body language expert by reading celebrity couples when it was really the disturbing photographs from the Vietnam war that first made me realize that I could "read" people's body language in photos and see things other people couldn't see or explain. Seeing people's pain is a horrible part of reading body language. Being extraordinarily empathetic to people's pain is a gift I would never trade.