How often do people lie? If someone asked you how many times a day you lie, what would you say? People most commonly say they lie two times a day, this is an understatement. In actuality people lie about seven to eight times a day. Men and women tell different kinds of lies. Men tell self oriented lies, which means they tell lies about themselves. Women tell un-oriented lies, which means they tell lies about other people, specifically lies about other women. Typically, women are better liars than men.
People who are good at lying are usually caretakers, teachers, people who deal ith children, people in the arts, high self monitors, people in control of their nonverbal behaviors, and people who want to learn about nonverbal behaviors. Women are most possessive of these qualities which supports the evidence that women are better liars than men. Good liars are typically those that are more experienced. An experiment was done where police officers, detectives, custom officials, college students, prison guards, and prisoners were given the PONS test. The PONS test is a profile of nonverbal sensitivity.
The test shows scenes of daily interaction presented in eleven different ways for only two econds each. Not every scene includes lying but they all show emotion. The scenes are shown eleven different ways; face only, body only, face and body, spliced speech where they take out pitch and speed, filtered speech where they remove the words and keep the tone. Filtered speech is also the best way to detect lying. They also use face and spliced, face and body and spliced, face and filtered, face and body and filtered, body and spliced, body and filtered.
In the experiment everyone who took the PONS test detected one out of four lies except for the prisoners who detected one out of three lies. Significant clue theory is an important part of deception detection. Significant clues are detected “tells” that you need to pay attention to to determine when someone might be lying. The significant clues are broken down into four different groups; facial, kinesthetic, linguistic, and paralinguistic. Facial clues include; lack of eye contact, focused/shifting eyes, and showing no emotion.
Kinesthetic clues include; fidgeting, self grooming, and sweaty palms. Linguistic clues include; denying information, and telling inconsistent stories. Paralinguistic clues include; inappropriate aughter, stuttering, dragging vowels, fillers, and varying pitch and speed. Linguistic is the only one of the four groups that does not use any nonverbal behaviors. And according to the leakage hierarchy we should never use kinesthetic as a way to tell if someone is lying or not. Kinesthetic, at its simplest form, is normal behavior for people so it is not used in the leakage hierarchy.
The leakage hierarchy is a way to use the four groups or channels and decide which channel to look at first when determining if someone is lying. The leakage hierarchy got its name because some channels are “leakier” than others. The leakage hierarchy begins with linguistic, if what the person is saying is sensible the person you are talking to is probably not lying. If what the person is saying is not sensible then it is possible this person may be lying and you need follow the leakage hierarchy.
The next step in the leakage hierarchy is paralinguistic, if the pitch is changing or if they are dragging vowels or anything else under the paralinguistic channel you need to continue with the leakage hierarchy. The next step would be to use kinesthetic, but because we never use kinesthetic when determining deception detection, it is not used n the leakage hierarchy. So we then move onto the facial channel, the facial channel is a tricky channel because you assume that you need to look at the face.
This assumption is incorrect, you should not look at the face but only look at the eyes and if they are looking left or right. Make sure the person you are talking to does not have time to come up with a story but if they do have time to come up with s story you need to follow the leakage hierarchy to decide if they are lying or not. The best channel to determine lie detection is the paralinguistic channel. Theories why the paralinguistic channel is the best are because of channels such as cognitive, control, emotional, and the others work together at their best and paralinguistic can work alone.
The cognitive theory is all about thinking and how you can be so wrapped up thinking about the story you made up that you forget to be natural. Control is mainly self monitoring which is observation and control of your own behaviors and the last thing you control is your voice. Emotional deals with guilt and how lying will cause you to feel guilty or worry about being caught. The more you lie the less you will eel guilty about lying and it will become easier and easier for you to tell lies. My first subject is my friend Gloria.
She is also a freshman musical theatre major and we were doing homework together when I asked her if she would help me with an experiment for this paper. She said yes and I then asked her to tell me two stories, both about real people and while both could be a lie at least one had to be a lie. Gloria then told me a story about her best friend Ky and Ky’s brother which I believe to be a lie. Her next story was one about her brother and I think it was also a lie. I filmed both of Gloria’s stories so that I can look back at them and listen to them.
When looking at the video of the first story I started by listening to what she was saying with my eyes closed. I focused mainly on the paralinguistic aspect of what she was saying because the story was a little out there and the leakage hierarchy says that if the story does not seem sensible they may be lying and you need to use to the paralinguistic channel. After listening to the video a few times I noticed that she was dragging a few of her words and taking long pauses and used “ands” and “umms”.
After listening to the ideo I then watched the video focusing on her eyes. The few times she dragged her words she also looked to the left. I also noticed a lack of movement when telling the first story so and according to deception detection theories cognitive thinking makes you forget to act natural. I then did the same thing with the second story I started by listening to the video with my eyes closed and did not notice any paralinguistic clues like dragging vowels and fillers.
Then I watched the video focusing on her eyes, didn’t look left once. And she was acting very normal while telling me her story. I believe I was right about the first story and that she lied but that the second story was true. I then asked Gloria which story was a lie and which one was true or if they were both lies and she told me that the first story about her friend was true and the second story about her brother was a lie. My next subject was my friend Jacob who is another freshman musical theatre major.
I asked him at the end of one of our classes if he would tell me two stories about real people and one had to be a lie or they could both be lies. He then told me a story about his sister which I filmed and it seemed to be true xcept for the fact that the story was a little on the strange side and I had a hard time believing that it happened and when he was telling me the story he didn’t move much which took as a cognitive theory that maybe he was trying so hard to think of a story that he forget to act natural.
When I watched the video over again I focused on his voice and if I heard any drag vowels or varying pitch and I didn’t hear anything. The next story he told me was one about his brother. When I looked back at the film I didn’t notice any drag vowels or varying pitch and he eemed to act naturally when he told me his story. I believe this story is true and the first story was a lie.
After writing this I asked Jacob which story was true and which was a lie or if they were both lies. He told me the first story was true and the second story was a lie. In conclusion, I believe that the theory, people in the arts are good liars, is supported from my ‘experiment. Both of my subjects are musical theatre majors and both times I believed a story to be true when in actuality they were lies. I have also realized that I am not very good at deception detecting.
