When it comes to telling the truth, almost all people have very difficult moment of “moral awareness”- to lie or not to lie? But unfortunately there are people who base their whole lives around small and big lies and spread their web of lies far beyond their ability to control the consequences from it.
And these consequences at the end might be very painful for the one who has believed in them, and for the one lying. So for a peaceful way of living it is of utmost importance to learn how to tell when someone is lying to you.
Here are some advices that one should take into consideration if you don’t want to fall as a pray into that kind of web.
When you start to examine a person you suspect of lying, very useful tip is to know how that person acts in their normal, everyday life.
And then you should pay attention to these signals that sometimes can be very subtle:
1.Pause
When someone is lying and you do catch them off-guard immediately after they have done the deed, they tend to pause a lot. By doing this they buy themselves some time to think and make up a story that is fairly believable. So watch for pauses, if they haven’t had any time to make up something they’ll do this a lot.
2. Give less detail
This particularly happens when someone wants to take the fault for someone else’s doing. If they haven’t done it they will give less details, or the details they give will not be consistent with the deed. But this also goes for someone who is not very creative and imaginative, thus he cannot make up a convincing story in the amount of time they had to prepare themselves for the lie.
3. Give more details
This is also an important sign of someone lying, especially if they had enough time to think about it. Their story is so convincing that they can even back it up with facts that you cannot deny. But if you know that this person normally wouldn’t pay much attention to places, names and so much details, this might just trigger the “lie alarm”.
4. Trouble backtracking
This is very interesting way to catch a liar. Usually a liar cannot tell the story backwards. When someone is having the intention of lying to you and the time to figure out a convincing story, they usually concentrate on the exact event sequences and the time consistency of those events until the point when you meet and they come to you very prepared. But the catch here is that they cannot repeat the story if you ask them to start with the last thing they did and go backwards, all the way until say, leaving the office. Simple, they were so focused on “how” it all began that they forget that you cannot forge the “why” in a lie.
5. Inconsistence
This especially happens if the one you suspect of lying becomes very comfortable when you leave them they thinking they are safe and you’ve stopped questioning and it the moment when you repeat the question or ask them to repeat a specific detail mentioned once before, they will not answer it at all or they would tell another quick lie different from the previous one.
6. Eye contact
This one is tricky because a trained or pathological liar will lie to you while he watches you directly in the eyes. But usually when someone is lying they do not make eye contact, it is the first sign of shame. They cannot look up into your eyes, because as it is said, the eyes are doors to the Soul and a liar doesn’t want to be looked at their Soul. They are too much embarrassed, because they do know what they are doing.
7. They protest too much or change the subject
When someone doesn’t want you to know the truth they protest too much, they yell at you, say that you don’t believe them whatever they say, or most commonly they tend to put all the blame on you.
8. Ask the unexpected
Usually you can catch a liar very quickly if you play a mind games like asking different questions that has nothing to do with the story, but with the one who’s lying.
You see, when you ask where they were and they start talking like reading a script, just ask a simple question that pops into your mind, change the subject a little, talk a moment about you and suddenly ask them to continue, than ask them to repeat what they have previously said. Here is the moment they lose themselves in their own game.
9. Look for insincere emotions
With the words one can temper, but not with the emotions and feelings. If you pay attention to the body language and the eyes, you can very easily read all of their emotions. So trust what you see in the eyes, trust what is written upon the face when someone speaks to you.
10. Trust your gut-feeling
Putting aside all the event consistencies, all beautiful and convincing storytelling, you must always trust your gut-feeling or intuition. Your heart will never lie to you. Thus trust your Self what is telling you and give yourself some time to find out if your intuition was true.
There are times that we cannot bare the truth, so we go along with the lies we hear and pretend that all is well. But this fake calmness never lasts long, even on our last day we shall say to the one, that we knew all along.
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A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.