How to Tell If Someone Is Lying

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A pair of flaming trousers (or a growing nose, à la Pinocchio) isn’t the only sign that a person is spewing falsehoods. Here, five experts teach you how to smoke

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out a fibber.

A Person’s Demeanor or Voice Radically Changes

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As an investigator, I first try to assess how someone normally speaks. To do that, I begin an interview by asking questions that I know the answers to, like “What’s your

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full name?” or “Where do you live?” Some folks are naturally animated and talk fast; others are more subdued. Once I know which type of talker a person is, I start asking

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him questions that I don’t know the answer to. If his manner shifts abruptly—going from calm to agitated or lively to mellow—chances are he’s not telling the truth.

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(Gregg McCrary is a retired FBI criminal profiler and a crime analyst in Fredericksburg, Virginia.)

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A Person Avoids Saying “I”

In my research, I’ve discovered that when people fib about themselves, they tend

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to use I and me less often than people who are being truthful. Instead, they’ll speak about themselves in the third person (“This is a girl who loves to ski”) or even

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truncate their language (“Really into listening to jazz”)—anything to give themselves psychological distance from the lie. (Jeffrey Hancock is an associate professor of

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communication at Cornell University who studies online lying.)

A Person Has an Answer for Everything

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Ask most people what they were doing last week and they’ll have to pause and think about it. That’s even more true of teenagers, who generally don’t have the

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capacity to tell an elaborate story on the fly. So when I call a child into my office and he seems totally rehearsed—there’s zero hesitation before he answers a question—well,

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that’s a dead giveaway. (Julia Chung has been an educator for 16 years, first as a high school teacher in Los Angeles and now as an assistant principal in Westchester County,

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New York.)

A Person Fidgets and Fusses for No Reason

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If someone keeps performing a random physical action that seems unnecessary—cleaning her glasses excessively, retying her shoelaces, or dusting off the (clean) table

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in front of her—she may be lying. The guilt and anxiety make her restless. That can be particularly true if she is lying to somebody she loves. When a person fibs to a traffic

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cop, she won’t necessarily fidget a lot. But if she is deceiving her husband, she won’t be able to sit still. (Barbara Mitchell has been a relationship therapist in New York City

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for 34 years.)

A Person Proclaims His Honesty Repeatedly

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To sell us on the integrity of their answers, liars often use phrases emphasizing the validity of their statements, like “to tell the truth” and “to be perfectly honest.”

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These verbal tip-offs frequently invoke religion. Think of expressions like “I swear on a

stack of Bibles” and “as God is my witness.” Most truthful people don’t need to go

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that far. (Joseph Buckley is the president of John E. Reid and Associates, in Chicago, which trains law-enforcement investigators.)