Liespotting - could be useful for people here.

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I saw this on TED just now and thought i'd share it here:

http://on.ted.com/Meyer

One thing a professional interrogator (LEO) do is to first ask some none-threatening questions. This is the "baseline" and is used to determine the "status quo" of a person, then provocative questions are asked and the reaction of the subject is analysed for anomalies. Like she says in the movie, one sign isn't proof, a cluster of them is a warning sign.

Another way that i've used all my life is to do a rational analysis of what people say and use logic to spot the B.S.

Do remember that Psychopats and Sociopats work differently , they are natures liars. They may be able to fool an interrogator, but not someone who is paying attention to what is being said.

Anyway, i hope someone finds this useful.

I wonder how ASD people fare under her system. Lots of false positives?

Even when I can spot a lie I still have a problem because I have no idea how or if to confront someone about it.

I think if someone is lying, it does no good to confront them, because you'll just make it worse. They won't admit they're lying, and will probably just get angry with you. (If someone is lying, in their mind, you have no way of knowing, unless you have psychic powers or something. This is true, at least, in a regular conversation. If you are interrogating someone, it's a different matter entirely. Hopefully every conversation isn't an interrogation session for you, otherwise people might not want to have conversations with you. XP)

Well that's what my instinct tells me,but how do you handle it when you need to make a decision based on what you believe to be a lie?

Yeah, I can nearly always tell when my ex-best friend is lying (It's partly the reason we're no longer friends. I don't like lies) but I don't know what to say about it either. My mum is telling me to call her out in front of everyone about it, just say to her "You're a liar!" but I'm not sure if I should.

The next time your mom says to do this, ask her what she does when she's at work and her boss, manager or coworker lies to her. If she says that she confronts them and tells them "you're a liar!", look her in the eyes and say "is that really what you do, Mom?"

LOTS of false positives. It's interesting how opposite the symptoms of 'sociopathy' and 'autism' are when it comes to lying and glibness. It's somewhat ironic that more autistics get casually accused of sociopathy than sociopaths.

Thats because the average joe is a f*****g idiot who cannot be bothered to think for himself and believes everything that is echoed enough in the mainstream media

I prefer to be alone for a reason...

I don't even worry about spotting liars. LIes and the lying liars who tell them, almost always have a way of exposing themselves sooner or later anyway, all by themselves.

Most of the time, I can sense a liar long before it's a problem anyhow. I don't know exactly how I can tell, and it doesn't matter how to me. I guess you can say it's one of the few fairly accurate intuitive abilities I do have.

I can't spot them and from things I've read online a lot of the way I talk and act would be considered "signs of lying" even though I'm not.

I would probably show a lot of the signs of lying even though I am not. I am always nervous when talking to people so I fiddle a lot, sometimes I don't look in people's eyes when talking and other times its perfectly normal and once again sometimes I look too intensely into someones eyes, sometimes I rock back and forth even while standing, sometimes I look distracted, and other so called signs of lying. Also I smile all the time even while describing bad things for some odd reason. All of this causes people to become suspicious of me but its because of my autism and anxiety problems. If the world ended and I described it to someone I would probably be laughing and smiling. The only time when my smile is wiped off my face is when someone is directly accusing me of lying or bullying me. Or if we lost everything I owned. One of our friends just lost everything she owned.

Another thing to remember here - there is no way for people to know the "truth"; all any of us can know is what we perceive.

Thus, if the social consensus is that you are lying, then you're lying, even if everything you said was factual and earnest.

If the social consensus is that you are telling the truth, then you're telling the truth, even if everything you said was false and deliberately deceptive.

Try asking people questions out of sequence, most people when lying will have a perfectly plotted story, and asking them to repeat it starting from the middle or the end will confuse them unto the end of days.

The idea that a liar will not look someone in the eye is a misnomer, generally speaking most liars will keep a very close eye on the one they are trying to deceive, simply because they want to know how their story is being received. I never judge a persons story without considering it for their reason; it is too easy to get the wrong message if you leap to conclusions based on fairy tales masquerading as fact.

I get your point, but the art of spotting liars is based upon specific situations, like LEO's interrogating witnesses in for example murder investigations and not frivolous social image discussions like "I got this shirt when it came out, not on the sale last week. Really, who do you think i am?"

i love this answer! so, so true.

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i am good at spotting lies because i do not try to discern the body language or eye contact (these are inaccurate methods). it has been shown that it is more effective to listen to the person without paying attention to visuals.

i did a blog post on this after reading in Richard Wiseman's Quirkology (best.book.ever.click.me). in his book, he pointed to the transcribed content of a lie vs. the truth, and showed how certain criteria can be used to spot a lie: the specific words chosen, the referral to oneself, the quantity of specific details provided (or even just verbosity on a subject), the attachment of emotions instead of facts, and the self-effacing admission of forgotten details.

as i said on my blog (link to hyperlexian's blog), you can actually hear a lie in a person's voice without even listening to the content, though i imagine that combining the two skills must be much more powerful. it is not 100% reliable to just listen to a person's speech, but these are some of my observations of what liars do:

• micropauses - there will sometimes be a micropause or hesitation just prior to a lie, during which the speaker appears to be making the decision to lie. Also, the person may seem to be composing details for the lie or bolstering courage to proceed. This can even be observed mid-sentence.
  
• tighter vocal chords - the vocal sound becomes slightly strained, almost like the person is highly emotional
  
• volume - the lie is often slightly louder than the rest of the conversation
  
• formality - the speech sounds like higher-level English (formalized), or sometimes even slightly accented, with each word more clearly pronounced
  
• patterns - each person has overall distinctive patterns in their speech, and the pattern will change a little, just so that it somehow doesn't *sound* like the person you know. The listener will often sense something is 'off' and will search the speaker's face as though looking for some kind of confirmation
  
• they also breathe faster and more shallowly (didn't think of that in my original blog post)

i am very skilled at lying (because i can spot the lies, i know how to lie fairly skilfully), but i am wracked with intense guilt. even lying by omission gets me feeling horrible, so i choose not to do it.