video on how to spot liars: dangerous for AS?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_6vDLq64gE

I enjoyed the first half of this video: it starts with how lying is something we agree to. I saw this a lot growing up in a cult-like religion: people would avoid questioning things because the answers would disrupt their lives too much,. It certainly disrupted mine! So I thought the video would be good. But the second half is where she says how to spot liars, and I find that disturbing. I have seen several threads here about people being accused of lying, and of course it cause distress. I wonder if, using these rules, a truthful aspie would be called a liar, and a lying NT could learn to appear truthful.

Here are my specific problems:
1. All the signs seem to be social based. They indicate that a person is relaxed and comfortable. If you felt uncomfortable in a situation you would probably give the lying signs even if telling the truth.
2. The video is highly judgmental: it divides the world into truth tellers and liars, yet the first half said that everyone is a liar. I hate it when any group is attacked as evil, because next time you or I could be the victim of that witch hunt.
3. The video is naive and complacent. For a real expert on lying read any book by Derren Brown. he has made a very successful career from his ability to both deceive and to spot deception. He dismisses signs like these as over simplistic. A good liar can fake all these things, and a truthful person can do them all. As with point one, they may be more than fifty percent useful in everyday situations with NTs, but that is not sufficient cause to destroy someone's reputation or to assume these thing are scientific laws.

What do you think? Are these rules dangerous for AS people?

I don't know.

What I do know is that I was accused of lying so much when I was growing up that I ended up unable to trust that people would actually believe me. I still have trouble with the idea that being truthful translates into being believed. Because I wasn't accused of lying for telling lies, I was accused of lying because I didn't say what the other person believed was true. I remember in the second or third grade, every time I came home from school, my father would demand that I tell him whether I had done work or not, and I would tell him what I believed to be the truth, that I had tried to do my work, and because I was frequently unable to complete it because school and I did not mix, I was punished for lying. Since I was trying to do the work, I thought that I was supposed to lie, to say I hadn't done any work. Except the time I tried to actually lie, he said that he had been told that I had done my work that day. I don't recall any difference between that day and any other in terms of what I did in school. I just knew that nothing I said mattered, that as far as he was concerned I was always a liar, no matter what I said.

As for that video, I was a bit disturbed at the idea of not showing any emotion or expression is a sign of dishonesty, as I don't really show expressions. I do have some, but not very many, and not very frequently. There have been times when others judged that I should be upset and I was unable to present such an emotion for their perusal. That never gets a good reaction, and I hate it when people say "if you really believed _____ then you would have done _____ instead of _____".

Anyway, I am suspicious of this as I am of anything that looks for dishonesty tells, because some of those tells seem to also be autistic tells.

The only tell that I've ever found to be halfway true at all, and this was only tested by playing around with it, not telling them the tell I was looking for, but that I had one to look for, and to either lie to me at random or tell me the truth at random, was that if you are asked a question that you have to pause and recall the answer to, if you look to either side while recalling you are remembering the truth and if you look up you are thinking of a lie. It worked almost all of the time, but some people look down, so using that one is no luck with them.

Redacted

Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 5:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

She was wrong that you can't fake a Duchenne smile - I do it all the time. She seems not to be offering more than Paul Ekman (whose excellent work Lie To Me was based on) but rather popularising a gap in the market. Bruce Schneier, cryptography guy and security expert, has a new book out called "Liars and Outliers", there's the Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell crowd, Derren Brown and Richard Wiseman in Britain - so there's a general swell of consciousness in this area probably caused by the financial collapse where a lot of trust was shown to be misguided. Ultimately I think this is a good thing, the public knowledge will increase (in a slow, stupid and annoying way, but steadily). Autistics have always been assumed to be liars, we won't lose anything due to the spread of information.

It can be, saying that deceptive people have such characteristics which coincidently match those of being on the autistic spectrum. A lot of coppers in interrogation would look for the obvious signs for deceit and being NTs being aware of this. Not necessarily dangerous for AS people as this video was directed at neurotypicals. and from that point of view whch can make sense to neurotypicals but not for people on the autistic spectrum who do not like eye contact inappropriately and can speak in a monotone voice or may fidget it does not necessarily mean a deceitful person it could in some cases mean that a person has some form of autism including Asperger syndrome. Sounds like training in autism issues is needed here

Sorry, but looking up or to the side generally means I'm either trying to recall the exact answer or am trying to frame it clearly and appropriately. Or, if I'm looking over your shoulder while talking to you, it means that I'm way over-stressed and having trouble dealing with people that day. And I almost always pause before answering a serious question. I can snap off quick one-liners to frivolous questions, but a serious question generally requires that I pause and think for a minute. This is why I hate this kind of body-language reading exercise. I realized a long time ago that my body language differs from the expected norm. My entire family is the same way. We all have odd body language that is pretty unique to our family.

All due respect, I'm in a hurry right now and didn't watch the video yet. But with that confessed, I'll assume it's similar to other material I've seen and read on that subject, including some police training materials.

This is VERY bad when it comes to us Aspies and with HFA. It's the very reason why we're hassled for no reason by police. It's not so much that we're picked on, but we (to use an old analogy), "walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and look like a duck", so they have to wonder if we're ducks.

It's for this reason, that I'm VERY open about my HFA, and I have a MediAlert bracelet and a laminated card which outlines autistic traits and explains the similarities to guilt and lying in facial expressions, and in eye contact.

Charles

There had been times that I was telling the truth and was called a liar, and times I was believed when telling a lie.One time in particular I was telling the truth but I was smiling when my dad didn't believe me. I was smiling because I was disbelieving that he was disbelieving me when I was actually telling the truth for a change; it was just soo incredulous a situation to me. Because I really don't like being called a liar when I'm telling the truth, I learned to put on my "lying" face when I told the truth in order to be believed.