What do you do if you think someone is not being truthful with you? Do you decide if someone is lying by your gut or intuition? Alternatively, are you someone who wants to investigate the facts because of what someone has said?

If you are a fact finder, you probably will try to go back to the source to confirm your suspicions. Another approach is if there is no direct source is to triangulate the information.

What do I mean by triangulate? It is a process where you verify your information from three distinct sources. The challenge is not to influence anyone’s answers as you confirm your data. If you sway their response, your conclusion is flawed.

In this approach, you are focusing on what someone has told you, not necessarily how they are behaving with you. Checking out someone’s story can be a time consuming process. Sometimes we have to make a quicker call on if someone is lying to us.

Let us explore how to tell if someone is lying based on his or her behavior.

What do you do when someone accuses someone of lying and it is because of a gut feeling about the situation? Initially, you think, why do they think that? How can I test their assumptions to see if their intuition is correct? It sounds like you are still on your fact-finding mission.

It is likely their gut feeling is from observable behaviors, yet they just are not able to express it to you in the form of facts.

It does not mean their conclusion is not valid. Their method of processing information is to tap into their intuition, using feelings to express their concern.

The question is how do you determine if their gut is accurate? After reading How to Detect Lies, I am convinced they are picking up some of the signs of deception from his tips on:

  • body language
  • emotional gestures and contradictions
  • interactions and reactions
  • verbal context and content

Blifaloo readers, heed a warning on two fronts by gaining more knowledge:

  1. You may find out more people are lying to you that you thought.
  2. You might read into a person’s behavior incorrectly.

It is important we take in account individual differences or quirks in people’s behavior before passing judgment.

Fundamentally, I believe our emotions are hard to hide. Stefan Anitei’s How to Detect a Liar highlights a study emphasizing the face is the most difficult part of the body for us to control. When we lie, we show it and everyone knows it.

Your walk (behavior) is the more important than your talk (what you say). Unfortunately, modifying your behavior is also harder to do.