Well, there’s always the old punchline about their lips moving, but here are a few tips I picked up the other day to help you be a bit more discriminating in what you believe or disbelieve.

I attended a presentation about identifying deception by Dr. Anna Salter. Her site is pretty ugly and doesn’t give much thought to usability (not that we can complain about that around here, right Brian?), but it has lots of useful information if you dig around. I’ll try to keep this limited to what politicians are guilty of.

Some of the tips on recognizing deception:

• Looking away doesn’t necessarily indicate a lie, and looking somebody in the eye is a horrible criteria for determining truth, as people are aware of it as a test of truthfulness and can control where they’re looking.
• How long a face holds an expression: if its over 5 seconds, its likely phony. Bill Clinton did this a lot
• Couching statements with “I would say”, “I want to believe”, etc. If you know something to be true it tends to be stated very matter of factly.
• Having to be asked the same question again. The idea being that even liars don’t like to lie, preferring to avoid and evade. Imagine how the debates would change if the moderator actually asked a question until they got an answer.
• Overstating an opinion on a matter of value or morality. Dr. Salter’s examples were of sex offenders talking about how disgusting that behavior is to them.

I didn’t include body language, emblems, voice pitch, etc, as most politicians are too polished and coached on these matters. If you’re interested in seeing if I missed anything check out the slides section on Dr. Salter’s site. **Warning** I haven’t thoroughly gone through Dr. Salter’s site, and as her work deals with sex offenders specifically and deception in general, there may be some uncomfortable material.

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